Police Suicide: A Special Newsline Series - Part 3

Part 3: Picking up the pieces

Editor’s note: This special series ran previously in the Street Survival Newsline but the importance of the information contained in it remains extremely timely and relevant.

Read Part 1
Read Part 2

The Street Survival Newsline concludes its coverage of the conference, “Police Suicide: An Unnecessary Means to an End,” sponsored in Largo, MD, by the Center for Criminal Justice Studies:

The only thing Teresa Tidwell-Tate wanted back from her husband’s department after he shot himself to death was his suicide note. “It was the 1 thing that said he couldn’t take the pain.”

It took her 3 months to get it. “When the letter was finally returned to me,” she says, “it was totally ruined.” Fingerprint powder and “some kind of liquid” stained it so badly that “the words were completely gone.”

What did come back intact were the shotgun he used to end his life and the bottle of liquor from which he’d drunk before he pulled the trigger. “They arrived from the department in a brown bag, sealed. I didn’t know what was inside until I opened it.”

As the most moving presenter at the Conference, Teresa Tidwell-Tate, formerly with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, made memorably clear that survivors of officers who commit suicide commonly suffer 2 assaults. First is the devastating impact of the violent death itself. Then there is the callous treatment they often receive at the hands of the officer’s department.

To offer emotional comfort and practical assistance to survivors, who typically feel isolated and uncared about, Tidwell-Tate has founded Survivors of Law Enforcement Suicide, which publishes a quarterly newsletter and offers a support network for those who are left behind.

What she now brings to others, she has learned the hard way herself. Her husband, a municipal officer in Virginia, was 28 years old when he killed himself over 7 years ago (at the time of the conference). During about 6 years on the job, he developed 2 personalities, 1 for work and 1 for home.

“At work,” Tidwell-Tate recalls, “he was perceived as a hard worker, a practical joker, the kind of person who was there for his peers. But at home he became withdrawn, less motivated. He suffered a loss of appetite, headaches, joint pain.

“When he went for a physical, the doctor wanted to prescribe anti-depressants. My husband refused,” fearing that the medication would be revealed in random drug testing and he would be fired or given a desk job. Later he was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, which she now sees as a vague, catch-all diagnosis.

He became more and more withdrawn. She sensed a change taking place in him over time, but she couldn’t put her finger on it exactly. She called her husband’s mother and asked her to come visit, thinking she might be able to pinpoint what was happening. At that time, his mother wasn’t able to make the trip. Two months later, next to a favorite fishing spot, Tidwell-Tate’s husband shot himself.

It wasn’t long before her husband’s department added to her pain, she says. At a memorial service, she “didn’t think any police officers were present because no one was in uniform.” Later she learned that a captain, with no basis in fact, had spread word that officers should not wear uniforms to the service “because the widow doesn’t want it.”

Through her work with survivors, she has discovered that she is by no means alone in experiencing departmental insensitivity.

In Florida, where she now resides, Tidwell-Tate learned that a department wanted to have a full police funeral for 1 of its officers who had shot himself. She strongly advised those planning the service not to include a 21-gun salute. “They did it anyway. The officer’s widow became hysterical” when the guns went off. She had been in front of her husband when he shot himself. He was on their couch with his gun in his mouth. She was on the floor, begging him not to pull the trigger. His blood sprayed all over her when he did. “The department kept her that way for 2 hours afterwards because they wanted to test her hands for gunshot residue,” Tidwell-Tate says.

After a suicide, survivors often experience “many insensitive comments: ‘Boy, you must be mad as hell!’ or ‘What kind of gun did he use?’ or ‘What part of the body did he shoot himself in?’” And, of course, “Why did he do it?” Incredibly, “People feel they have a right to know,” Tidwell-Tate says. Yet why someone commits suicide “generally remains unanswered because the person with the answer is no longer around.” Even a suicide note is relatively rare, she says.

Feelings of isolation are often intensified for police-suicide survivors, she says, because “you were once part of the police family and now you no longer are.” She claims that her husband’s department discouraged officers from calling her, although some still did, surreptitiously. In her present work, she says she often contacts departments offering to talk to survivors and is refused cooperation in reaching them.

“The larger the PD, the less likely they are willing to admit a suicide has even occurred,” much less let an outsider in. “Smaller ones are much more receptive. They are glad to have someone take the survivor off their hands.”

Another Conference speaker, Cheryl Tyiska, also works with survivors through the National Organization for Victim Assistance (NOVA), for which she is director of victim services.

She believes it’s a good idea to “get some outsiders involved” when a department experiences a suicide. “Insiders may themselves be affected by the death. Outsiders can take a more impartial view of what needs to be done and how to do it.”

When an officer is killed in the line of duty, his or her department typically attaches great honor and recognition to the death. “But suicides are pushed aside and not recognized,” Tyiska says. “The department often wants to move past this as quickly as possible because it is a stigma.”

Yet the pain suffered by survivors is often much the same. “There’s the same sense of shock, disbelief, denial. That’s universal, regardless of what the tragedy is. Trauma is trauma is trauma is trauma.”

Caring administrators and fellow officers can extend help to survivors in several ways, Tyiska says:

1. Give support. Emotional support, of course, but also help with practical things. “Often survivors have immediate, practical needs, here and now. Other people may not be helping in that way.”

2. Give information. “Surviving family, friends and fellow officers need accurate and honest information about what happened. Clear, concise information is the beginning of a rumor-control mechanism. Information is power to victims. It helps them make informed decisions about how they are going to rebuild their lives.

Sometimes the facts are withheld in a well-meaning way. The circumstances seem too heinous, too gory, and there’s concern about hurting the survivors. “But down the road, they will somehow find out the truth,” Tyiska says. “Then they will be angry” at those who withheld it. “You have to respect people’s ability to handle the truth.”

3. Give them a time and setting to talk, “an opportunity to ventilate. Just the process of ventilating and getting some of the pressure and pain out of their system is very helpful.”

4. Let them know where they can get on-going assistance. “Most people have developed some skills for dealing with horrible events,” Tyiska says. “They can build on these” after a suicide, but they may need some help in “looking at their coping skills and strategizing in a very practical way” how to rebuild their life. “They need to work on things 1 step at a time--little pieces rather than 1 big ‘cure.’”

(Dr. Nancy Davis, the trauma therapist who was quoted in Part 1 of our report, adds: “Don’t say, ‘Can I help you,’ they say, ‘Yes,’ then you disappear. Make a commitment. Grief doesn’t go away quickly. Two years is a normal amount of time for people to start getting over something like this.” As time passes, “let them know you are still aware of their loss. They’ll appreciate it.”)

In coming to grips with what has happened, Tyiska suggests looking at a suicide as a homicide in which “the victim and the perpetrator are the same person. Survivors can be shocked and bereaved, like they would for a homicide victim. But they also can feel anger toward the perpetrator.

“It helps survivors to put suicide into this context” because they realize then that it is natural to have very mixed feelings.

As for an officer who is contemplating suicide but feels he can’t turn to his department for help because of possible job repercussions, Tyiska has a suggestion that may be life-saving. Call a suicide or crisis hot line, she urges. Law enforcement personnel who call the hot line operated by her organization “have more confidence of confidentiality than they have with departmental resources,” she says.

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