By Baylie Davis
The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle
CHEYENNE — Thirteen years ago, federal officer Paul Broxterman was killed in the bombing of Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
Broxterman’s friend and partner, Douglas C. Reitenga III, currently an agent with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, said he feels like he still hasn’t properly dealt with the death.
This week, Reitenga attended the “Traumas of Law Enforcement” training here, and said the event was very helpful in learning about the effects of trauma and coping with it.
At the training, more than a decade after his friend’s death, Reitenga said he learned about a concept called survivor guilt.
It’s a concept that might have cost another of Reitenga’s and Broxterman’s co-workers his career.
That co-worker narrowly avoided his own death that April in 1995 because he was running late, said Reitenga.
Survivor guilt is a thought process that survivors often go through where they blame themselves for the event that killed their co-workers, family or friends, explained Suzie Sawyer, a training organizer.
It can cause stress and anger and can result in job loss, divorce and alcoholism, among other things.
The co-worker ultimately left the agency, and, looking back, Reitenga said he thinks survivor guilt might have been to blame.
That makes Reitenga angry — angry that the agency allowed that to happen; angry enough that emotions push their way through his easygoing demeanor 13 years later.
Today, Reitenga is grateful to his agency for taking steps toward creating a mental health program and allowing him and some of his colleagues to attend the training.
Thirteen years ago, he said, he didn’t know about the avenues available to him for counseling and support.
The old mentality of “suck it up and move on” is fading, said Reitenga.
The “old dinosaur,” as Reitenga described the high-ranking officer who dismissed mental health as “sissy stuff,” is no longer the norm among law enforcement. “The agency is taking this seriously now.”
Sawyer, the founder and executive director of Concerns of Police Survivors - the sponsor of the training — said she is a police wife of 22 years. Over those 22 years, she and her husband got more and more involved in the funerals of the 16 officers who were killed.
While she and her husband were at those funerals, her three children would get together and cry, she said, thinking it might be their dad who was next. Her children never told her about their emotions until after they were grown.
It’s a memory that still makes Sawyer’s eyes glisten a little.
“We preach ‘grieve together,’” she said. COPS encourages family members to tell each other when they’re having a rough day and to support each other through them.
It also sponsors summer camps, National Police Week, retreats and nationwide trauma training.
The three-day training here covered topics like alcoholism, family issues, line-of-duty death and law enforcement victimization.
There were about 80 participants from agencies across the region: Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Montana; even Oregon and Connecticut.
But the Cheyenne Police Department was conspicuously absent at the event in their own town. Sawyer said no one from the CPD signed up.
Training Sgt. Chad Seidell said Cheyenne police have been “overwhelmed with training.”
He explained that the department’s normal training day was Wednesday, and to train on a Tuesday would mean overtime or having to leave normal duty.
The training includes some stress management and mental health, he said.
The opportunity to attend the “Traumas of Law Enforcement” training was put out there, he added. If no one went, it was because no one took advantage of the opportunity, probably because the officers have been busy with the rest of the training.
They just can’t make them all, he said.
Copyright 2008 The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle