One officer asked a question. It saved my life.

Dear President Trump,

My name is Thoris Lamar Burt. I was born in Huntsville, Alabama, started working for the federal government at Redstone Arsenal at fourteen years old, and spent my career in sales, technology, and insurance. I am a taxpayer, a father, a churchman, and an author. And on November 26, 2023, I almost became a statistic in my own garage.

I live with schizoaffective disorder. In May 2025, in the middle of a hallucination episode, I did the hardest thing a man in crisis can do — I called 911 on myself. What happened next is on my doorbell camera, and it is now Chapter 22 of the book my mother and I wrote: deputies from the Orange County Sheriff's Office arrived with no handcuffs, no weapons drawn, and no escalation. They were CIT-trained — Crisis Intervention Team officers, schooled in at least forty hours of mental-health de-escalation. They saw a man, not a case. I am alive to write you this letter because of that training.

Mr. President, that outcome should not depend on which county a man breaks down in.

Roughly one in four fatal police shootings in this country involves someone in a mental-health crisis. Families are told to call for help, and then they bury their sons because the help that arrived was never trained for what it walked into. That is not a partisan problem. It is not a big-city problem or a small-town problem. It is an American problem — and America already owns the solution. We invented it in Memphis in 1988. We just never finished the job.

So I am asking you, respectfully and directly, to finish it:

• Make CIT training the national standard. Every American police department, regardless of size, should have 24/7 access to CIT-trained officers — with federal funding and incentives tied to getting it done, the same way we standardized body armor and radios.
• Fund the pipeline from 988 to the front door. Strengthen the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and expand co-responder models, so that a licensed clinician can ride alongside the badge when the emergency is in the mind and not in the street.
• Export the model to the world. Let American law enforcement lead a worldwide standard for mental-health crisis response — Memphis-born, American-proven, and shared with every allied nation that trains its police with our help.

I am not writing as an activist. I am writing as evidence. The deputies who came to my door proved that the right training turns a potential tragedy into a testimony. My mother, Carolyn Virginia Burt — thirty-five years a federal employee — raised me to believe that when something works, you say so, and you scale it.

It works, Mr. President. Scale it.

I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord — and the work of the officers who kept me here to do it.