Family: Man shot needed help

Dan Nienaber
Free Press Staff Writer

MANKATO January 02, 2008 10:21 am

— The press conference was almost over Monday when Julia Gilbertson quietly opened the door to the conference room at the Mankato Intergovernmen-tal Center and slipped inside.
She wanted to speak, but she couldn’t. There were too many cameras. Too many reporters. Too many police officers.
And there was nobody there, except for her, who knew the rest of the story about 26-year-old Richard Thomas Vosburgh, the man shot and killed during a confrontation with police just hours earlier, she said.
Vosburgh was her brother.
“I felt like I needed to show up there for him because he’s not a bad person — he has a heart of gold,” Gilbertson said. “I wanted to say something, but I just couldn’t do it because I didn’t want my face on the television cameras. I was upset. I was by myself. I felt like I needed to talk to people, but I just stood around and looked.”
If she could have built up the courage to say something, this is what she would have said:
“This is a tragedy. He’s mentally ill and he needed to be in a hospital, he didn’t need to be shot. I would like to see some change come about with the way law enforcement treats people who have mental illness.”
When Vosburgh is using his medication and not using illegal drugs, he is a pleasant person to be around, Gilbertson said. He enjoyed playing basketball, hanging out with his friends and playing with his niece and nephews. He loved to help around the house. He was thrilled to have his own apartment.
But Vosburgh’s family has been concerned about him since the summer months, which is when he first started showing signs of problems related to his bipolar disorder, Gilbertson said. There also were concerns he was using methamphetamine, a drug he had used in the past. He had recently completed an in-patient treatment program, she added.
Christmas was particularly bad.
“He was at my house all day on Christmas and he was manic,” she said. “It was non-stop chatter and he was driving us nuts. But he wouldn’t admit he was manic. He was trying to cover it up because he felt bad about it, but he knew that he was struggling.”
Vosburgh also found out Sunday morning that he had been fired from his job at A.H. Hermel Candy Co. in Mankato. Gilbertson said that was another sign he was using methamphetamine, which was keeping his bipolar medication from working properly.
Gilbertson’s 16-year-old daughter was the last family member to talk to Vosburgh. She brought a compact disc player, at his request, to his apartment at 120 Grove Street at about 10 p.m. Sunday. Before the girl left at 11 p.m., Vosburgh was talking about getting the women who lived in the apartment above him to move so his niece could move in.
After hearing what happened less than an hour later, it was clear he was delusional, Gilbertson said. At 11:55 p.m. the women upstairs returned home and found Vosburgh naked and breaking things. Three police officers arrived and were confronted with broken glass. The officers called for backup from other agencies at 12:08 a.m. Monday.
Jerry Huettl, Mankato Department of Public Safety director, said Monday that, as far as he knew, Vosburgh, a Mankato native, had left the area for a couple years and returned recently. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension is investigating the shooting, but Huettl said the information he received Monday showed his officers were in a life-threatening situation where the use of deadly force was justified.
“There is nothing to indicate this should have ended any differently,” Huettl said.