Yesterday I had to work a few hours of mandatory overtime. My evening was pretty uneventful – drug by even. However, there was one call that dominated our screens and patrol unit’s the entire time. The call had started before I got there and was till going when I left a mere four hours later.
A woman, I’ll call her Billie, called in on the non-emergency lines to tell us that a friend of hers, lets call him Joe, had called her to tell her goodbye. He was locked in his bathroom with a handgun and planned on committing suicide.
Try as the calltaker could, Billie would not give her Joe’s address. Billie thought she could go to Joe and talk him into giving up the handgun without involving the police. She said he probably wasn’t serious about killing himself and she didn’t think he would go through with it. Maybe she wanted to be a hero, I don’t know. She hung up on the calltaker and there was nothing else the we could do but wait.
Forty minutes later Billie called back, frantic because she couldn’t get Joe to put down the gun. Joe had left the bathroom and taken up a position in the garage. Billie gave us the address this time and we zoomed there as fast as we could. By the time we got there, Joe had pulled the trigger and died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Billie was hysterical – for good reason. She had thought she could control the situation and only made it worse.
OK, I can’t let this call go without a comment or two. First of all, why call us to begin with if she was going to refuse to give us the address. That’s what I meant about wanting to be a hero – did she want us to know so that if she managed to disarm Joe, she could call us back to tell us what a good job she had done?
Didn’t she even stop to think what would happen if she was wrong? If she couldn’t get the gun away from him? What if he had decided to kill her too? She had no idea what kind of mental state he was in other then that he claimed to be suicidal. What qualifications did she think she had to deal with something like that?
Forty minutes were wasted. Some people may disagree but our officers are so much more capable of dealing with suicidal people then the average citizen. They are trained on this all the time and they have plenty of experience. If nothing else, they would have distracted him long enough for our swat team to get in there.
This woman took it upon herself to fix the situation and a man died. Yes, he may have died anyway but now this woman must live with the knowledge that her friend is dead and she might have been able to prevent it.
I don’t mean to sound heartless but I can’t help being a bit angry. We might have been able to save him but we weren’t given the chance to even try. Please people – no heroics – let the professionals handle it. Let us do what we are trained to do. If the person dies anyway then that is on us – if you don’t let us do our job then that person’s death is on you.
