Lindsay Gebhart
Police1
When the fire call came, Hastings Boroughs (PA) Police Chief Ron Sharkey couldn’t find the house, so he followed the screaming.
It led him to two teenage girls hanging out the second story window of a white house gushing thick, black smoke.
Sharkey raced up a ladder being hoisted up to the window by two men. As the ladder hit the house he shouted for one of the girls to stand behind the other so he could pull them out. One took a step back, and he grabbed the first by the neck, throwing her face-first onto the ground.
The ladder buckled from the heat. Inches lower, Sharkey struggled to reach inside the window. He screamed for her, but all he heard was a thump.
Alisha McConnell, 15, had hit the floor. She was dead.
Coming to terms
A critical response team sent to talk to Sharkey arrived within three hours.
“I didn’t feel like a hero,” he said.
He was haunted by the girl he couldn’t save and the two others who also perished in the house. He didn’t even know they were in there.
“We’re looked upon as if we’re tough,” he said. “But we’re not.”
The critical response team that assisted Sharkey was just one of the roughly 630 around the nation trained by the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. Executive director and former fire chief Donald Howell said first responders often see the worst of the world, and they need an outlet to deal with those situations. Without help the responders can’t have normal emotions and the stress of the job builds, often leading to poor performance and even early retirement.
Constable Leslie Maley with the Ottawa, Canada, PD knows how grave the consequences can be if those emotions go untreated. She still suffers from the post traumatic stress disorder that began eleven years ago when she and her partner were shot while chasing two bank robbers.
“My partner was on the ground, dying,” she said. “I stayed down because it was a hot scene and crawled behind (my patrol) car. I held him in my lap.”
After backup arrived on the scene and captured the culprits, she was to the hospital to bandage a gunshot wound in her leg. Her partner was in critical condition, bleeding internally from a bullet that had ricochet through several of his major organs.
In a separate room she watched as seas of blue filed past her room on the way to her partners. For two hours no one asked her how she was or told her what was going on with her partner. The first person to talk to her was her boyfriend when he came to pick her up.
When it came to coping with the incident, she said “the bullet was easy.”
Ignored, she realized she was “just” her partner’s rookie and felt completely abandoned by her fellow officers.
An invisible second class
Maley spent a lot of time being angry with everyone: especially the officers who wouldn’t even say ‘hi’ to her and those who said she shot herself (at times, her partner as well) behind her back.
She said she felt like an imaginary second class of officers, those who shoot or get shot and get blamed for the profession’s danger.
"(Police) don’t like the reality of something that can happen to them.”
Other officers still refuse to work with her.
“It’s like an apple,” she said. “One blemish and it’s no good anymore.
Recently Maley when through another traumatic event that set off her stress disorder. Once again she didn’t meet with a critical response unit, and when she asked her supervisor for time off she didn’t get it.
“I didn’t feel safe on the road,” she said.
She decided to take several months off to get back her warrior mentality. In stressful situations she knew it had to be there, or she was going to get hurt.
Advice for others
Even with counseling, Sharkey admits the experience has changed the way he views life.
“Listen more, to everyone,” he said crying softly.
Sharkey said his advice for dealing with a traumatic situation is simple: Keep talking.
Maley said she has been to hell in back, but she said counseling, taking time off and continuing to fight is key.
“You can’t control life,” she said.
Howell said he uses peer counseling so officers can talk to someone who can identify with them and teach them to open up in a profession where “at the end of the day, you’re still human.”
For more information about the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation
Lindsay Gebhart is the news editor for Police1. You can contact her at editor@policeone.com
