More than 10 years ago, a biracial man was seriously injured during a police foot chase in Saratoga Springs. He died of injuries sustained during the chase months later. Since that time, Darryl Mount Jr.’s name has become a rallying cry for police reform in the Spa City. On Monday, a wrongful death suit brought by his mother is set to go to trial.
Darryl Mount Jr. ran from police in the early morning hours of August 31st, 2013.
Police chased Mount on foot after he was reportedly observed pushing his girlfriend into a wall.
During the chase, police lost sight of Mount. Minutes later, he was found seriously injured at the base of a construction scaffold.
Days later, with Mount in a coma, his father appeared before the Saratoga Springs City Council, among relatives and others accusing police brutality.
“We’re tired of this brutality. Uphold your oath. Take care of this. When does it stop? When somebody’s child dies” said Mount Sr.
During that meeting, then-Police Chief Greg Veitch defended the response and said there were no indications of police wrongdoing during the chase.
“Anyone who says that they saw an officer abusing Mr. Mount during this incident, I welcome them to come forward and I will personally take their statement. We don't believe the officers did anything wrong,” said Veitch.
Almost immediately, calls came for an independent investigation. Then-Public Safety Commissioner Chris Mathiesen asked residents for patience, saying “all the facts need to come out.”
“And I think that for now, there's really no reason not to give the department the benefit of the doubt,” said Mathiesen.
Mount died months later at age 22, in May 2014. That was a year before a New York Executive Order authorizing a special prosecutor for police-involved deaths — something that would eventually become state law.
Weeks later, Mathiesen and Veitch walked reporters through a presentation of images taken from security camera footage of the incident. At the time of the chase, city police were not equipped with body cameras.
“This is the area where they lost Mr. Mount, it’s the other side of that wood wall that you just saw, and this clearly indicates that officer would not go running blindly behind anyone they were pursuing after losing sight of the offender,” said Veitch.
Officials also made materials available online.
It also inspired an effort to establish a community review board to provide additional oversight of police. The CRB, created years later under a different city council, did not hold its first meeting until 2023.
As Mount’s family pursued its lawsuit, city officials remained tight-lipped on the case.
As Black Lives Matter protests became a regular occurrence in Saratoga Springs after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis Police in 2020, Mount’s name continued to reverberate.
Lexis Figuereo became a leader of racial justice protests in Saratoga Springs.
“Darryl Mount is our George Floyd.”
Organizers began holding demonstrations on the anniversary of Mount’s police encounter.
“Shine a Light! Darryl Mount!”
The renewed focus on Mount’s death on social media drew the attention of young Saratogians and college students. Then-Skidmore College senior Mira Kaufmann-Rosengarten rallied in 2021.
“It was like on social media, people were sharing posts about it,” said Kaufmann-Rosengarten
Mount’s death continues to influence city politics. Democrats elected to the city council in 2021 made investigating the death a central part of their campaign. The council requested a grand jury review of the case from Saratoga County District Attorney Karen Heggen, which the Republican ultimately denied.
Soon after, Public Safety Commissioner James Montagnino, now running for a second two-year-term, released his own analysis of publicly available data surrounding the Mount case. After reviewing eye-witness testimony, his report backed the police narrative that there was no violence at the hands of officers.
But the Democrat says the city’s handling of the Mount case influenced his approach to sharing information on other police encounters.
“For example, the incident last November here in the city, the shooting that occurred on Broadway, our response was prompted in large part as a development and a learning experience from the Darryl Mount situation,” said Montagnino.
A 2018 Times Union report by former Saratogian editor Barb Lombardo revealed that in testimony from 2017, Veitch admitted to intentionally misleading a Saratogian reporter. Lombardo spoke with WAMC:
“The wording in his email led us and others in the media to believe that they were in fact looking into allegations of misconduct. They might have been looking into the incident, but they did not ever look into it from the point-of-view of whether there had been misconduct,” said Lombardo.
Former Public Safety Commissioner Mathiesen is currently challenging Mayor Ron Kim in a three-way race, and maintains there was no wrongdoing by police.
Speaking with WAMC in June, Mathiesen was asked about Veitch’s courtroom testimony and email to the Saratogian reporter.
“He obviously was trying to explain to Caitlin Morris what the difference was between the investigation that was occurring and an internal investigation, which would be an investigation into verified wrongdoing on the part of the member of the of the police department. Well, there was nothing there, there, either. So that's why an internal investigation wasn’t conducted,” said Mathiesen.
Kim, a former public safety commissioner also seeking re-election, welcomes the start of the civil trial.
“It will essentially get a response and I think that that decision, that response is going to help our community,” said Kim.
