Vigil held for mentally ill Fil-Am shot dead by police
LOS ANGELES—Less than a week before Christmas, Khanly and Ana Saycon prayed and lit candles Saturday night (Sunday in Manila) in the parking lot of an arcade in Long Beach where their son was shot dead by the Long Beach police a few days earlier.
Mharloun Saycon, a 39-year-old Carson resident who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, was fatally shot while sitting inside Looff’s Casino Game of Skill in Long Beach Monday night.
Police said he was wielding a knife and threatening customers. He disregarded “verbal commands to drop the knife,” according to Long Beach Police Department (LBPD) Sgt. Brad Johnson.
The officers tried a “less-lethal electronic control device and baton, and neither less-lethal force was effective,” Johnson said.
One of the witnesses, Pat Donovan, told the Inquirer Saycon was sitting in a chair and fiddling with a knife “and not attacking anybody” when the police entered the arcade and ordered him to drop the knife.
“He was holding [the knife] on his lap. It was folded,” said Donovan, who added he was about 10 feet away from Saycon. “They didn’t have to shoot him.”
Donovan, a Long Beach resident, joined Saycon’s family and friends who braved the cold and rainy weather to hold a prayer vigil in the arcade’s parking lot Saturday night.
“Mharloun was a really kind person,” Polly Khiv, Saycon’s life coach for the past five years, told the Inquirer. “He wasn’t someone who would be defiant against authority. I never had any issues with him being confrontational.”
Saycon died at the scene, according to Los Angeles County Coroner’s Assistant Ed Winter.
Homicide detectives and the LA County District Attorney’s Office are reviewing the video that captured limited portions of the incident, said a release issued by the LBPD.
