Cody Balmer’s family said they tried to get him help before and after he allegedly tried to kill Gov. Josh Shapiro. They received little response.

Cody Balmer was begging to go to jail.

Less than an hour after police say he set fire to Gov. Josh Shapiro’s mansion in the early morning of April 13, he called 911 to say he was ready to “confess to everything” he had done.

“He needs to leave my family alone, he needs to get his eyes off of my daughters, and he needs to stop having my friends killed,” Balmer told the emergency operator. “All he has is a banquet hall to clean up.”

The 38-year-old walked through the darkness back to his parents’ home in Penbrook Borough, where he waited through the morning, but no one from law enforcement showed up. That afternoon, he told the mother of his two sons, Rosetta Welsh, to call the police so he could face the consequences, she said.

Welsh said she called the Pennsylvania State Police tip line and said Balmer had confessed to the arson at the governor’s mansion. Dispatch told her law enforcement would be sent to the home Balmer shared with his parents, she said, but no one arrived.

Welsh said Balmer grew tired of waiting, and walked to the nearby Penbrook police station to try to turn himself in.

But according to Penbrook Police Chief Joseph Hogarth, as Balmer spoke with officers, the department received another call they had to respond to. The officers left Balmer sitting alone on a bench.

“We’re a small department,” Hogarth said. And his officers, he said, didn’t understand what Balmer was saying — he was rambling on about headphones, and they decided to prioritize the more emergent call.

He declined to discuss the interaction further.

Balmer then walked nearly an hour to Pennsylvania State Police headquarters nearly three miles away.

It was there, 12 hours after the crime and after three attempts to contact law enforcement, that Balmer was finally taken into custody and charged with attempting to kill Shapiro and his family by hopping an exterior fence, sneaking through the gardens, then bashing the home’s windows and exploding Molotov cocktails in the dining room.

The Pennsylvania State Police declined to comment, citing the ongoing investigation.

The details of Balmer’s arrest, shared this week in interviews with his family and local authorities, raise new questions about law enforcement’s response to the crime. That Balmer and his relatives had contacted police multiple times with information about the fire — and heard little in response — suggests a lapse in communication and lack of coordination after one of the most serious attacks on a Pennsylvania official in the state’s history, according to experts.

Ed Davis, who served as Boston’s chief of police for seven years and now runs a Massachusetts-based security company, said police should have taken every tip in the investigation seriously, and called the gap in time between Balmer’s first call and his arrest a “major failure on the part of local police.”

“You don’t get a much more serious case than the attempted assassination of the governor and his family,” Davis said. “You can’t be cavalier with any bit of information that you get. This has to be fully investigated.”

Balmer’s family also wants answers on why authorities did not act with more urgency. But family members said they were not necessarily surprised. As Balmer’s behavior grew more delusional in the week before the attack — he told his children he was eating batteries and had become convinced people “were after” his family — they called police and area mental health crisis responders but said they similarly received little help.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) has called on the Justice Department to investigate the attack on Shapiro, who is Jewish, as a possible hate crime since it occurred on the first night of Passover, and because Balmer told 911 he would not take part in Shapiro’s “plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

But Balmer’s relatives said they do not believe he was motivated by hate or politics. They described what happened as the actions of a mentally ill man whom the system had failed to help before it was too late.

“It wasn’t just some rampage, it wasn’t political, it wasn’t religion-based,” Welsh said. “He’s mentally ill. He needed the help and we didn’t know where to turn.”

Christie Balmer remembers a time when her son could be found playing video games with his children, taking them on beach trips, or acting as the mascot for his sons’ football team. She said he was affectionate and went to work every day as a mechanic.

She can’t recall exactly when his mental health took a turn. In 2015, Balmer attempted to cash a forged check, but his mother didn’t read into it, she said. And when his home was put up for a foreclosure sale in 2022, she shrugged it off and attributed it to the rising costs of home ownership.

Now, the family wonders if these moments were signs of his deteriorating state.

By 2023, he had spiraled into crisis, his family said.

Balmer, in an attempt to end his life, took a “bottle full of pills,” police said, and when his then-wife tried to intervene, he punched her in the face and bit her hand. He went on to punch his 13-year-old stepson and stepped on his 10-year-old stepson’s leg, which was already recovering from a break, according to a criminal complaint charging him with three counts of simple assault.

Balmer was involuntarily committed to the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute in Harrisburg, where he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, his mother said. His wife filed a protection-from-abuse order, citing emotional and physical abuse, and divorced him later that year, according to NorthCentralPa.com.

In the year that followed, Balmer’s family said, they tried to help him come to terms with his diagnosis and rebuild his life. He moved in with his parents. His mother leased a car so he could get to his new job as a welder.

But some time last year, Balmer stopped taking his medication, which his family said had helped stabilize his behavior. In recent weeks, they said, he became increasingly paranoid: He began to ramble on about demons, his self-proclaimed clairvoyance, and how people were “after him.”

“Conversations with him would start out normal, then they would spiral where it didn’t make sense,” Welsh said. “He would start talking about somebody’s after him, somebody’s after his family.”

Balmer quit his job in March, and left town.

When he returned, his teen sons said their father was talking about eating batteries. Balmer told Welsh that Manny, the “person living inside him,” had died. (He would later tell 911 “Manny” was one of his friends that Shapiro had “killed.”)

A week before the arson attempt, Christie Balmer called a local crisis intervention line, convinced that her son needed professional help. But she was told, she said, that her son didn’t meet the threshold to be involuntarily committed because he was not, at that point, a danger to himself or others.

Balmer overheard his mother on the phone and, fearing a return to the state hospital, ran away. Christie Balmer called Penbrook police three days before the arson, and Welsh tried crisis intervention again when Balmer had not returned home.

Welsh said her call to crisis staff never got a follow-up.

“If he was basically trying to eat batteries, or chewing on batteries, or saying he’s eating them, I don’t understand how that’s not a threat to yourself,” she said.

Dauphin County’s crisis intervention operation declined to comment for this story. The county’s crisis intervention staff is trained to de-escalate and support people in crisis, provide risk assessments, and, if an alternative to hospitalization is not possible, facilitate voluntary or involuntary hospitalizations, according to the county’s website. Without knowing how the calls with staff unfolded — or whether there was evidence that Balmer planned to hurt himself or others — experts say it is difficult to know if they could have done more.

Matthew Wintersteen, director of Jefferson Health’s David Farber ASPIRE Center and program evaluator for the 988 mental health crisis line in Pennsylvania, said determining whether people are a threat to themselves or others is subjective. He could not speak to Balmer’s case or how Dauphin County handles crisis calls, he said, but funding for crisis services is often challenging across the country. He said these services rely on state funding and philanthropy and are often staffed by people faced with “complex and emotionally challenging situations” who sometimes make slightly more than minimum wage.

“If we could predict when people were going to either make a suicide attempt or cause violence to someone else, we would be able to save a lot of lives,” Wintersteen said. “We can only do the best we can with the data we have before us.”

Balmer’s mother had better luck with Penbrook police, who traced her son to a Shippensburg hotel. But by then, he had already checked out, and eventually returned to his parents’ home.

He set fire to the governor’s mansion three days later.

The Pennsylvania State Police have since hired former State Police Commissioner Jeffrey B. Miller to conduct an independent security review, which is scheduled to be finished in the next few weeks. Miller’s review, which will be sent to state police and the governor’s office, will focus on state-level law enforcement responses and detail the cracks in security that allowed Balmer to breach the mansion grounds.

Several GOP House lawmakers sent a letter to Shapiro on Wednesday asking that top legislators receive an unredacted copy of the final report on the review, which is expected to cost more than $23,000.

Davis, the former head of Boston police, said it was not uncommon for people with psychiatric problems to go to police and confess to crimes they did not commit, or to report incidents that never happened.

“Unfortunately, this is another example of the role that police play in managing individuals with psychological problems that they’re not really equipped to handle,” he said. “It doesn’t relieve them of responsibility. It’s clearly a problem if you just randomly dismiss someone without drilling down a little bit.”

In the meantime, Balmer’s family said they have not spoken with him since his arrest. His public defenders have said they will file a petition with the courts asking that Balmer be evaluated to determine whether he is mentally competent to stand trial. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and his family, Balmer was transferred Thursday to SCI Waymart, which has a mental health unit and offers psychiatric care.

All the family can do now is trust the system that they said has let them down multiple times before.

“I tried to get him help and I couldn’t get him help,” Christie Balmer said. “That’s really upsetting to me because this wouldn’t have happened if he would have gotten help when we asked for it.”