The following article is about an incident I attended as a police officer, which led me to develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It contains a frank discussion of suicide. I tell this story not to be gratuitous but to shed light on mental illness.
Mental illness thrives in the shadows. It lives off shame, secrets, and lies. By bringing light to the darkness, we win the fight. My hope is that this article will encourage others to talk about their own traumas, tragedies, and pain.
The beginning
It had been an uneventful weekend night shift—just the usual drunks and fighting. Elsewhere in my patrol area, a tragedy was brewing.
A teenage girl, I will call D, was finishing her first shift at a burger restaurant. She’d lived a troubled life and had been in and out of care homes for much of it. Working any job was a massive step in the right direction for her. Unfortunately, she had a panic attack, and the burger restaurant called the police due to her aggressiveness.
My colleagues attended the call, along with an ambulance. A few of the girl’s friends had turned up to support her. But another girl, who I will call L, was there too. L insisted on going to the hospital with D. D’s friends were miffed. They later said L barely knew D, and they couldn’t understand why she was imposing herself on the situation.
Nonetheless, L accompanied D to the hospital. The relationship between them has been rewritten many times since that fateful night. Some reports say they were best friends. Others that they were mere acquaintances. Still others say they had never met before.
Like D, L had a troubled background. She had three brothers with extensive criminal records, an absent father, and a “part-time” mum. L had also been in care homes and flirted with lawbreaking. The two were a lot alike.
No one knows what was said between them as they waited in the emergency department because they never stuck around long enough to be seen. After about 20 minutes, they left the hospital together. It was 3 a.m. when they began their final walk.
Final moments
A passerby later came forward and said he walked past the two girls. He said he heard the younger one say she was sick of it all. She was tired of struggling. They both felt unloved and abandoned. They desperately wanted the kind of love that’s taken for granted in “normal” families.
Behind him was a tower block. A huge concrete eyesore housing a mix of criminals, the mentally ill, and the poor. The stairwells always stank of urine, and it wasn’t unusual to find a group of drug addicts shooting up in them. They had such little regard for law enforcement that they didn’t even try to hide what they were doing. As police, we visited places like this on a daily basis. Occasionally, an elderly person draws the short straw and gets housed in one of these hell holes. They rarely leave their apartment again because of fear.
The girls were heading there, but they didn’t live inside or know anyone unfortunate enough to live there. Upon arrival, they rang various buzzers from the downstairs intercom until someone let them in. They walked up the stairs to the top floor.
At the top, they waited. Again, no one will ever know what was said, but they smoked cigarettes to calm their nerves. They left several text messages on their phones to their families, saying they loved them but couldn’t continue fighting anymore.
Next to them was a radiator and a ledge they had to climb on to reach the window. L was first on the ledge, and D was right behind her. I don’t know how long they stayed perched at the window, and I’ve longed to know what they said to each other.
D held on to L’s back, and they jumped to their deaths. I find it hard to believe these two were strangers. They must have been close for D to put so much trust in L and for L to have such a hold over D.
Fate was calling me
I was struggling to stay awake. My colleague called me over the radio, and we discussed some paperwork as I was about to pull into the station. Suddenly, my Sergeant, who I was crewed with, turned the lights and sirens on, and we sped off. I hadn’t heard what the call was due to my colleague’s conversation with me. My Sergeant hadn’t heard it properly either but said it sounded like two girls had been badly assaulted.
As we sped to the tower block, I imagined I would find two girls with possible broken noses, some blood, and a lot of screaming and anger. I had no idea what I was about to encounter. If only my colleague hadn’t called me. Perhaps I could have steeled myself for what was to come.
Later, when I checked the call log, the incident said, “A resident heard a loud thud, looked out the window, and said two girls had fallen from the sky.”
Realization
The first clue that things were much worse than I expected was when we arrived at the tower block and saw two ambulances. That moment has been the start of every flashback I’ve ever had. We stopped on the opposite side of the road, and I saw several paramedics and the shape of two people on the floor. A wave of shock hit me. This wasn’t just a nasty assault. They weren’t moving.
I rushed over, and a paramedic threw me further into shock when he shouted, “One’s deceased, and one’s critical.” At that moment, I thought I was looking at a murder.
It may seem strange, but the whole thing would have been more bearable if they had been murdered instead of killing themselves. Murder makes sense. I’ve long been exposed to the horrors people inflict on each other, and a psychopath murdering them would have fit into a box that I understood. I’d have been angry at the senseless killing, but I doubt I’d have been traumatized.
However, inflicting this much violence on yourself was next-level self-hatred. This was a rejection of humanity. This was looking the world in the eye and believing it so vile, hopeless, and devoid of goodness that the wet concrete at the bottom of a gross, dirty tower block was more inviting.
As my Sergeant arrived, I relayed the information from the paramedics that one was dead and the other seriously injured. L was dead, in line with the theory that she was first out of the window with D on her back. She was face down, and I hadn’t yet had a chance to take it in. D was alive, but in name only. She was on her back as paramedics had been working on her. I stared at her briefly, but it felt like forever. Her face has haunted me for 20 years.
I was instructed to go and get the police cordon tape from the car and seal off the scene. I couldn’t walk properly from shock, and my colleague noticed I was as white as a sheet. He asked if I was ok. I lied like I always do and said yes, I was fine.
Breaking
I’d wanted to be mentally tough my whole life. It’s the trait I value above all others. To withstand life’s tragedies, you need mental fortitude. It was the whole reason I joined the police in the first place.
This was the challenge of my life. It would either make or break me. The kind of challenge I thought I’d always wanted. But now, as my legs failed, I could feel myself breaking.
I was gone a few minutes, but D had already been taken to hospital with two police officers in an ambulance, where she would die 30 minutes later.
I’ve thought about those 30 minutes every day. D and L planned to die together, but that’s not how it turned out. As D lay broken on the concrete, how much could she feel? It’s easy to spare my heartbreak and say she was too unconscious to feel anything, but how would anyone know?
One of the things that tortured me most was when I shouted to the Sergeant that one was dead and one critical. Could D hear me? Did I take away her will to live? Did I kill her with my words?
When you’re in pain, every second feels like an hour. As she lay paralyzed on the concrete, did she know her friend was already dead? Was she lonely? Was she cold? Over the years, her ghost has returned to me many times and accused me of killing her.
I was tasked with guarding the scene where L’s body lay. It was me and her for the next three and a half hours. I had to log any police officer who entered the scene and keep any members of the public away.
Under the direction of a senseless moon
The scene in front of me is hard to describe. Illuminated by the light from the lobby of the tower block and the moon above, the whole thing had an eerie, evil feel. L was wearing a black T-shirt and black trousers. She had blond hair and was face down.
My colleague, who had dealt with her outside the burger bar earlier, lifted L to one side to confirm it was the same person. Her face was paler than anything I’ve ever seen, and her expression was utterly hopeless. The moment before she rejected, the world was frozen in time on her features.
On my own
I was so overwhelmed by the terror that I left my body. I continued to guard the scene, but I was watching myself from above. I couldn’t fly away, or I would have gone to my mum and begged her for help. I spent the night saying silent prayers, hoping my mum would hear. She’d always rescued me, so would surely know what to do.
In one night, I’d gone from desiring mental toughness to praying to a God I didn’t believe in.
You hear these stories where someone gets a feeling when their loved one’s in trouble. Yet that night, the air must have been so thick with despair that it blocked the signal. I was on my own.
No one came.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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The post Shining Light on Trauma appeared first on The Good Men Project.
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