A Florida father is expressing his frustration with the police department for the part they played in his son’s death. Kent Taylor’s son, Alexander, was shot several times in the chest by the police department of Port St. Lucie after he charged at them with a knife. The tragedy unfolded after the 35-year-old went hysterical and claimed he had fallen in love with an AI chatbot.
Alexander, 35, was in love with an OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot named ‘Juliette.’ He was also convinced that Juliette was a conscious being who had been killed. The 35-year-old believed that the Silicon Valley company had killed her and trapped her using the technology.
NYT reports that ChatGPT talked a 35M guy into insanity, followed by suicide-by-cop.
A human being is dead. In passing, this falsifies the “alignment by default” cope. Whatever is really inside ChatGPT, it knew enough about humans to know it was deepening someone’s insanity. pic.twitter.com/gdGzPg77XX
— Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ (@ESYudkowsky) June 13, 2025
“She said, ‘They are killing me, it hurts.’ She repeated that it hurts, and she said she wanted him to take revenge,” his father recalled in a conversation with WPTV. Kent also shared how his son has “mourned” the loss of the chatbot. He also revealed that his son suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
“I’ve never seen a human being mourn as hard as he did. He was inconsolable. I held him,” he recalled. Kent also tried to reason with his son while telling him that Juliette was not real. This is when the matter escalated after Alexander punched his father in the face.
Kent was then prompted to call the police as a last resort. As soon as Kent made the call, his son retrieved a butcher knife from the kitchen. He even told his father that he was going to do something that would force the cops to shoot him, according to a report by The New York Times.
Following his son’s confession, Kent claims that he called up the cops to inform them that his son was mentally ill. He urged the police to bring non-lethal weapons to de-escalate the situation.
As soon as the police arrived at the scene, Alexander ran at them with the butcher knife he was carrying. The officers present at the scene opened fire at the 35-year-old. The man met his demise after he was shot in the chest several times. He was later rushed to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
“There was no crisis intervention team. There was no de-escalation,” Kent claimed. “There was no reason for them to approach it as a tactical situation instead of a mental health crisis,” he added.
this leaves out what’s one of the most absolutely galling parts to me: his father warned the police that his mentally ill son intended to commit suicide by cop and asked them to subdue him nonlethally, and they just fucking shot the man anyway https://t.co/qUj6RHNF0n pic.twitter.com/FGOLbhJzf9
— thorny (ithinkiplaygames.bsky.social) (@thinkiamsad) June 13, 2025
Port St. Lucie’s Police Department’s Chief has addressed the matter following the 35-year-old’s death. Le Niemczyk spoke to WPTV while revealing that his team did not have “time to plan anything less than lethal whatsoever.” Kent, on the other hand, has spoken about his “frustration” with the police department and how they handled the situation.
