NEW ORLEANS — At 17, Dante Gentile left his home in Catskill, N.Y., and set off on a search for himself.
Rita Gentile said her son spent the balance of his teen years in New Orleans. He appeared to have found himself as a musician and poet in the Big Easy, Rita said. But then, in his 20s, Dante wandered on.
“I saw him a handful of times, much to my dismay,” Rita Gentile said. “I missed him, but I had to respect his wishes that he wanted to have that kind of free movement.”
In late June 2023, at 26, Dante wandered right back to where his search for himself had begun. And in a few short, chaotic days, he took his own life, by jumping off the top of a New Orleans landmark, the Falstaff Apartments in Mid-City.
As shocking as his suicide was, the saddest part of Dante’s story may be the way several public agencies in New Orleans failed to help him when he clearly and so desperately needed it. And now, Rita is suing the city of New Orleans, City Park, and the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, alleging their negligence and failure to follow proper procedures caused Dante’s death.
She’s also suing the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office for failing to notify her of Dante’s death for 10 weeks and allegedly mishandling his remains, joining a growing list of families making similar claims against Coroner Dwight McKenna.
“He was disregarded in the most important days of his life, and then he was disregarded beyond his death,” said Richard Trahant, an attorney who represents Rita and several other families suing the coroner’s office.
Janet Hays, an advocate for the severely mentally ill who runs the assisted outpatient treatment program for New Orleans courts, said Dante’s story is emblematic of a broken system.
“What happened was just unacceptable,” she said of Dante’s case. “It's an embarrassment.”
And for Rita, it was painful.
“It's just so unbelievably immoral and incredibly ridiculous,” she said. “And disgusting. I was disgusted.”
The alleged missteps began on June 23, 2023, when Dante appeared to have a psychotic episode at City Park.
Trahant had to piece together what happened from public records.
“There was a call initially that he was acting erratically,” he said. “And between the time that initial call came in and the time he was arrested, he somehow commandeered the train in City Park and took a joyride.”
City Park police arrested Dante. He spent two days in Central Lockup.
On June 24, a nurse saw Dante and wrote that he’d tried to escape, according to his medical records. She marked it “urgent” for him to see a mental health professional. Instead, court records show he was fast-tracked for release by the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s deputies at the jail and set free without a mental evaluation.
“And that is stunning,” Trahant said. “When you stop and think about that, that you have a (medical) professional, who is the nurse, saying it's urgent that somebody looks at this guy and you have a non-medical person saying, ‘Well, he's going to be out of here soon anyway. Not a problem.’”
The next day, June 25, Dante wandered right back to City Park. This time he walked into Café du Monde completely nude. Trahant said workers there did their best to shield him from the patrons and families at a playground next to the iconic coffee shop.
City Park Police arrested him again for lewdness and disturbing the peace.
“Instead of saying, ‘Look, you know, we're going to take you to get some professional help,’ they bring him right back to OPP, and it starts all over again," Trahant said.
Dante’s medical records indicate he told Municipal Court Judge Joseph Landry, “Voices are telling me to kill myself and voices are telling me to calm down.” That led Landry to order Dante placed on suicide watch and in a suicide-prevention smock, Trahant said.
He was finally seen by a psychiatrist on June 26, diagnosed with “unspecified psychosis,” and prescribed the powerful antipsychotic, Zyprexa. The psychiatrist ordered him to stay on suicide watch, in the smock and wrote that if Dante were to be released, he should be taken directly to the ER at University Medical Center.
Instead, on June 30, a jail release form indicates sheriff’s deputies simply let Dante go to wander aimlessly, yet again.
Hours later, Dante was on the entrance ramp to Interstate-10 at Claiborne and St. Phillip, threatening to jump.
Senior Police Officer Sherife Davis’ body-worn camera shows he took over the negotiations from responding officers. It appears they never knew Dante had just been on suicide watch because they never got his name. Davis asked Dante what he wanted to be called, and Dante said, “Probably ‘Eleven.’”
Davis promised not to arrest Dante and offered to buy him a drink. It took Davis about 10 minutes to cajole Dante off the bridge by promising he would be free to leave.
“You want that drink? You want to call somebody? What you want to do?” Davis asked as they started to head down from the on-ramp.
“I’d like to be left alone,” Dante said.
“Just not up here, though,” Davis responded.
Once at the bottom of the ramp, Davis said Dante could leave.
“Just cross the street safely,” he said.
NOPD Operations Manual Chapter 41.25 clearly calls for “protective custody and involuntary transport to hospital” for anyone who is at “imminent risk of serious harm to self.”
“He got up on the bridge clearly trying to kill himself at that moment. He is dangerous to self and he's gravely disabled, making bad decisions for himself, which does meet legal criteria for him to be taken to a hospital,” Hays said. “And I don't know why they wouldn't.”
Hays, whose nonprofit Healing Minds NOLA advocates for the mentally ill across southeast Louisiana, said she doesn’t see these kinds of problems happening with the crisis intervention teams in other parishes.
“They have systems in place that follow laws,” she said. “We don't do that here (in New Orleans). We skirt laws.”
It was 9 p.m. June 30 when the police let Dante wander off, yet again.
A few hours later, Dante’s cell phone data shows he arrived at the Falstaff Apartments in Mid-City. Trahant said that around midnight, Dante got on the highest roof of the brick high-rise and this time he did jump to his death.
Some of the same officers who got Dante off the bridge found his body about 20 hours later, NOPD records show.
Trahant said an FBI supervisor reviewed body-worn camera footage from when the NOPD found Dante’s body at the Falstaff and told Trahant about it.
“And one of the officers made a comment to the effect of, ‘Oh, s---, this is the guy from the bridge last night.’ So, he knew that something wasn't right because the police report relative to the discovery of Dante's body says nothing about the bridge incident,” Trahant said.
Trahant said he believes that’s because there is no NOPD report on the attempted suicide on the I-10 on-ramp, even though it caused police to close the bridge to traffic for about half an hour.
NOPD records show the Public Integrity Bureau investigated Davis, Lt. Salvatore Caronna, and Officer Ricardo Rumbaut for neglect of duty. The PIB complaint said those officers were “dispatched to investigate an attempted suicide and did not transport the victim to (a) medical facility.”
But in October, PIB cleared them of any wrongdoing.
“Had they held him for 72 hours as they were supposed to, maybe gotten him some services,” Rita Gentile said. “They might have spared his life.”
“There were so many people along the way that could have said, ‘This poor kid needs help.’” Trahant said.
The lawsuit claims the negligence continued after Dante died.
Dante had bank cards and his jail release form on him when he died, showing his name and address. But the police report on his death says a coroner’s officer told police that because Dante did not have a photo ID, he should be listed as “Unknown.”
The coroner’s records show it took the NOPD 18 days to check Dante’s fingerprints to get his official identification, even though he had been fingerprinted twice in the week leading up to his death.
McKenna blamed the NOPD, which was delayed in checking fingerprints in July 2023 while the air conditioning was broken at the latent print unit.
The lawsuit also alleges McKenna’s office kept Dante’s remains in a cooler that wasn’t working and his body decomposed beyond recognition.
“All bodies decompose in the coolers,” McKenna said in an interview with WWL Louisiana. “The coolers are not meant to keep bodies eternally. Typically, we'd like them to be moved out within 30 days if people come in and identify them. If bodies are unidentified after 30 days and nobody's claimed them, we typically cremate them.”
But Rita said it wasn’t possible to identify her son sooner because it took the coroner’s office 10 weeks to notify her of Dante’s death. She said the person from the coroner’s office who contacted her sister in mid-September told her he’d only been asked to start looking for next-of-kin two days before.