Reprinted with permission from the York Daily Record
By Jamie Noerpel
YORK COUNTY, Pa. — Andrew Miller can easily recall the moment he held a dying woman’s hand. The crushed car trapped her after running head-first into a tree. He tried to free her but couldn’t. All he could do was offer her human touch and comfort as she transitioned from this life to the next.
As a Northern York County Regional cop, Miller sees death far too often.
“Before I became a law enforcement officer, the only dead person I saw was in a casket,” Miller tells me. Then at 8 weeks on the job, at 22, he watched a young man slam his car into a building, a fatal crash. “This is how easy death is,” he laments.
The average person withstands two to four traumatic events in his or her life. Police officers encounter close to 200, according to an article in Journal of Traumatic Stress.
Miller shares this with zero intent to guilt-trip. He knows the psychological risks of becoming an officer, but that doesn’t mean he’s absolved from suffering. To help his mental health, Miller uses EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, under the direction of his therapist.
Officer Ed Curtis, a therapist at Grief Relief, LLC and a Cumberland County police officer, explains to me that EMDR treats psychological conditions that stem from traumatic memories. While we sleep, our REM cycles help our brain process our day, filing away the memories.
“When we experience a traumatic incident our brain doesn’t know where to put it,” Curtis says. EMDR uses visual distraction techniques to free the subconscious mind so it can process the trauma by re-associating the feelings with positive thoughts. Traumas like the recent hospital shooting here in York County.
Trauma from the UPMC shooting still lingers
Drew Shaffer now takes a different route home from his job at Northern York County Regional Police Department. The sight of UPMC on the hill floods his brain with memories. Memories he’d rather forget.
When he used to drive past, he would hear the sounds of the gunfire as he made his way to the hospital’s second floor. He’d feel Andrew Duarte’s uniform against his palms as he supported his fellow officer performing CPR. And he’d see the faces of officers once the threat was eliminated.
“I’ve never seen so many grown men look so defeated,” Shaffer said in our interview. Shaffer is 34 years old with a family. He wasn’t even on duty when the “shots fired” call erupted on his phone. He kissed his wife, then his daughter and son. “I’m going,” he remembers thinking.
News about community efforts to improve York City.Delivery: Tue Your EmailAs much as we prepare through training, nothing can completely inoculate our natural, human responses to high-stress situations. Life-or-death moments test the intuition and gut-responses of our first responders. “I’m going,” Shaffer remembers thinking. “It wasn’t even a conscious decision. I knew my guys were there.”
While that decision came easily to Shaffer, knowing what to do after it all ended was a different matter.
“Now I had to go home and see my wife and kids.”
He could see the color fade from his wife’s face as he relayed the tragedy to her. “I never wake my kids up from naps, ever,” he says. “But I woke up both my kids, brought them downstairs, and sat with them on the sofa.” They fell asleep in the comfort of each other’s arms.
“Guilt ate me alive for weeks,” Shaffer says. “Because I left my own family knowing there’s a chance I wouldn’t come home.”
But that is their job - right? Police officers sign up to run toward danger as the rest of us run away or shelter in place. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the pain.
Neither Miller, who also responded to the UPMC call, nor Shaffer want a reward for their actions - officers know their job carries risks when they put on the badge each shift. In fact, they were hesitant to speak with me because they didn’t want to seem like what they did was any more special than the officers who stood right next to them that day or any other day.
Physiological response during a high-stress situation
Like Shaffer, Miller thought of his wife as he activated the sirens on his car to head to UPMC, sending an “I love you” text. Just in case.
After throwing his cruiser in park, he ran toward the emergency room entrance. But the door was locked. Tunnel vision blocked his cognition as he thought to himself, “Where do I go?”
Ed Paskey, an FOP attorney who represented all of the officers involved in the incident during an investigation by state police, explained that auditory/visual distortion and the inability to process information happens to all of us during high stress incidents. At the same time, cortisol production increases blood sugar, blood pressure, and heart rate that can affect decision making, sometimes helping to reduce errors.
Miller ran around to the front entrance and took the stairs. “breathe, breathe,” he told himself as he scaled to the second floor. “I didn’t want to get to the top and be out of breath.”
Miller could see bullet holes on that second floor. He heard yelling inside closed doors. He watched them, waiting for something, anything, to happen. “I couldn’t tell you if I was standing outside of that door for a minute or an hour,” he remarks on the disorientation.
As the doors burst open, he watched as a nurse jolted past to safety. They waited until they heard shots fired, then entered the ICU and quickly scanned the room.
Paskey says the Perception-Reaction Process takes 0.7 to 1.5 seconds to perceive the threat, assess it, decide on a response, and finally act. To put that in perspective, it takes 0.45 seconds for a pro-baseball player to send the ball at 90 mph from the mound across home plate. “Think of an officer in a high-stress incident as the batter. She/he has to perceive, process and react to significantly more than deciding if, when or how to swing a bat … and with far greater implications,” Paskey analogizes.
And they did save lives.
Miller found the closet where the nurses hid. “I’m not leaving this door,” he told them. “I’m not leaving you.” He and other officers guarded them until the scene was cleared. Later he documented their names, phone numbers, and short summaries while they sat in the cafeteria.
Don’t eat the ham and cheese
Miller learned from his experience that meals can become associated with trauma. So instead of turning to his favorites for lunch, he chose a turkey sandwich. “I think it’s too dry,” he says. “But now I don’t have to think of the shooting every time I eat my favorite sandwich.”
Over the next few weeks, Miller didn’t want to watch normal TV for fear that a show depicting hospitals or police would unleash the torrent of traumatic memories. “All I felt like doing was go home and watch the whales on the National Geographic Channel,” he says.
But he didn’t go home immediately after the incident. Miller, with many other officers, escorted fallen Officer Andrew Duarte’s body to the Coroner’s Office. There, officers hugged. They cried, grieving in all different states of mental anguish.
The next day, a parade of students and faculty stopped by Shaffer’s office to make sure he was OK. He’s a School Resource officer for Dover Area High School. “It’s a grim time,” Shaffer says. “I learned how many people were actually thinking about me and my wellbeing.”
Miller’s therapist helped him make sense of the flashbacks that flood his mind like a tsunami, as he describes it. She suggested visiting UPMC again. Miller thought she was crazy at first. He soon found himself sitting voluntarily in the hospital parking lot, playing on his phone as he took it all in again.
When Miller undergoes EMDR, his therapist helps him address the overwhelming sense of fear and helplessness when the UPMC doors opened. She does this by repeating phrases during sessions such as “we’ll get through it. We’ll survive. And I’ll be OK.”
When Miller first started, he didn’t see a positive in the process.“But I did get through it and I will be OK,” Miller explains to me.
These powerfully simple mantras create layers on top of the traumatic memory so when he relives it, it’s not in first person mode anymore. “I can put myself there almost like I’m watching a video game,” he says. It dulls that fear of the unknown.
Police officers need more support for their mental wellbeing. Thankfully, an Officer Wellness Committee composed of law enforcement, county employees, a nonprofit, and a therapist has been meeting for a year and a half. It’s working on bringing more initiatives like therapy and wellness checks for stronger support.
Because police officers’ brains are the most important tool they possess, their mental health should be taken as seriously as firearms training or any other life-saving measures.
Despite the darkness they’ve faced, both Miller and Shaffer embody a powerful kind of strength. One grounded not in stoicism, but in vulnerability, compassion, and their willingness to seek healing. Their courage doesn’t end at the scene. It continues in therapy rooms, school hallways, and quiet hospital parking lots. In choosing to confront their pain rather than bury it, they model a new kind of heroism that prioritizes mental resilience and opens the door for others to do the same.
