Disclaimer: The following blog details my experience doing a ride-along with the City of Phoenix Crisis Response Team. Names have been changed and certain details have been omitted at the request of the Phoenix Fire Department.The greatest tragedies in life are born from silence.
Every night, in every greater metropolitan area in America, hundreds of crises are happening. Domestic abuse. Cardiac arrest. Car crashes. Stabbings. Shootings. Murders.
Every night. More than you know. More than you want to know. These crises are commonplace, and they are not going away. Accidents happen. Always have. Always will. And it’s scary. But it’s not the scary part.
The scary part is the silence that lies in wait after the crisis. That insidious seed of doubt that plants itself at the forefront of a victim’s mind.
Did I do enough to stop it?Why is this happening to me?Where do I go from here?No matter how often we think about it, no matter how diligently we guard against it, we all have an expiration date. One day, your time will come. Your mother’s time will come. Your best friend’s time will come. Your child’s time will come.
We are flawed and frail beings, and from the moment we take our first breath to the moment we take our last, there are an infinite number of obstacles out there that can derail our paths.
One night in Phoenix, I was invited to witness the aftermath of those obstacles: the thought of a future even more dismal than the overwhelming present; the unspoken fear that the life of a loved one will never be the same; the misshapen metal of a crash site glowing in the light of flashing sirens as shocked spectators look on; the loving wife left to wait and wonder what went wrong.
The silence.
*
My cousin Tabitha knows the silence all too well. She volunteers for the crisis response unit in Phoenix, Arizona. Equipped with a background in psychology and social work, she spends the majority of her precious and rare free time working twelve hour shifts at one of three nearby fire stations.
Tabitha’s role, along with a part-time paid staff member, is to respond to city-wide crises where grief support, program referrals, and emotional assistance are needed. She is new to the program, but has already found it to be a rewarding and challenging addition to her life. Eager to share this amazing experience, she invites me to observe the process on a one night ride-along.
The shift starts at six in the evening and ends at six the next morning. When Tabitha and I arrive to the firehouse, the firefighters are gathered around a large table eating dinner. A college football game plays on a big screen television in front of rows of empty black recliners. My cousin leads me into a small room with three makeshift beds and hands me a ride-along release statement. The line for the date reads ______, _______19_____, so I sign the paper without reading it.
The part-time paid staff member for this shift is Christina, a streetwise yet friendly young woman. Christina, Tabitha, and the previous shift discuss a recent call to a late night party stabbing. Apparently, stabbings are par for the course, because the conversation quickly steers to a discussion on the scant attire adorned by the underage girls at the party.
Christina tells me that Saturday night shifts are unpredictable. Sometimes, the calls are non-stop, while other nights are spent sleeping at the fire station without a single call.
*
Our first call comes during dinner.
The crisis response van is equipped with a great deal of pamphlets and information on resources to help victims of every imaginable crisis. It also has car seats. This call is about the car seats.
All I know as we are driving to the scene is that we are transporting children in the van. It strikes me as awkward that my sole job on this trip is to take up space in a van where space is needed, but who am I to argue?
As we follow the GPS, Tabitha shows me the various codes for various crises and how to read the system to understand what is going on around the city. At any given time, there are dozens of accidents ranging from gunshot wounds to traffic accidents to nosebleeds. A surprising number of Phoenicians call 911 because of nosebleeds.
We soon pull into a gas station to find a cop car surrounded by children. Apparently, the children’s father was pulled over for a traffic violation and was then arrested, and the mother has been detained by an officer because she has more underage children than she has car seats.
There are five children in all, every one of them under seven years of age. Their mother, who looks like she can’t be a day over twenty-five, is in the late stages of pregnancy. If she’s worried about raising six youngsters without any help, she isn’t showing it. Inside she must be terrified, but outside she is a rock.
Thanks to their mother’s calm, the kids are surprisingly chipper, and when we hand them police badge stickers and crisis response teddy bears (they’re the Tickle-me Elmo Dolls of 2008), they seem genuinely excited. I am less excited when I realize that In order to accommodate all of the car seats, I will be riding in the back of a cop car.
After a largely uncomfortable ride spent telling three cops selectively tame stories from my adventures on the road, I help the overwhelmed mother unload her various strollers. The oldest boy, still on a teddy bear high, looks up at me with a big grin.
“Hey, you wanna hear a joke?”
“Sure. Whatcha got, little man?”
“There’s a guy up in a tree…with long black pants.”
He pauses, then looks up at me expectantly.
“Good one, kid.”
Once back in the car, I relay the “joke” to Christina.
“Awww,” she chuckles.
Christina has kept her sense of humor in tact throughout this job, but it’s hard to imagine how. When I ask her about her most memorable call, she tells me about an aging schizophrenic who burned his house down to ward off spirits.
The man was barely over five feet tall and weighed less than one hundred pounds, which was half of his normal weight. The father to twelve grown offspring, he came out of the building with his pants falling down, ranting about evil spirits.
“If you were on his left side, he was convinced you were possessed by the devil,” Christina explains, “but on his right side, you were just fine.”
After the house burned down and the crisis response team was called, Christina was able to offer some support services to the man’s children, who had never realized that things could be done to help their father. The situation brought them great relief, knowing that their father could one day be okay.
“That,” she says, followed by a contemplative pause, “was a really rewarding call.”
*
After we finish safely transporting the children, we decide to visit another team member at a nearby fire station. Cindy is a supervisor, and she has access to free cookies, so we are more than happy to stop by and chat.
Though the conversation is fun and lighthearted, the mood quickly changes when we receive our next call. A teenage girl was sexually assaulted. A boy from school molested her while she was trying to walk home and she is now being taken to the family advocacy center to do some evidence testing. Christina and Tabitha are asked to come along to provide support.
As we wait outside the building for the police to arrive, we survey the list of the night’s incidents. One call stands out to both Tabitha and Christina. There appears to have been an accident involving a semi-truck and a police car. Details are limited, but the code for an officer being involved shows on the screen.
Whenever an officer is down, no resources are spared. Tabitha and Christina try to use their contacts to learn more about the situation, but nobody seems to know much. Soon the police arrive to the center, followed shortly by the abused girl and her family.
We squeeze into an elevator with two police officers, the teenage victim, her friend, her younger sister and older brother, and her mother. An unspoken tension is masked by polite conversation.
When we get to the room, Christina informs the victim of the upcoming process as Tabitha and I grab snacks and drinks for her family. Because she is to be undertaking medical tests, the victim is unable to have a snack. She expresses disappointment over this and worries that her favorite jeans will be kept as evidence. All other concerns and fears remain internal.
The girl’s mother is visibly distraught. It becomes clear that this woman is no stranger to the silence, but right now it must be unbearable. She is unable to communicate easily with those around her, but her son does an excellent job helping her out. He also works to maintain a calm over the family. He is especially effective with his youngest sister, making jokes with her and keeping her spirits up. The girl is full of life, and is eager to watch one of the movies set up in a nearby waiting room.
“Do you wanna watch this one?” her brother asks, holding up a DVD.
“Um…Yeah,” the little girl responds.
“Alright. Fist pound.”
The brother extends his hand out in a celebratory fist. She looks at it, looks back at her brother, and shakes her head.
“Maybe later.”
The little girl smiles and turns to the television screen, unaware of the struggles her sister is facing in the room down the hall.
*
There is little time to digest the night’s events because just minutes after leaving the family advocacy center, we are called to the scene of a traffic accident. The van’s GPS instructs us where to go, but the location is not hard to find. Just follow the sirens.
Tabitha has discovered that the accident involving a police car was a false alarm. Someone entered the information into the system incorrectly and no officer was ever involved in the crash. Instead, the wealth of the city’s resources have made their way to this location.
The crash site shines in the distance long before we arrive. An endless string of flashing sirens, red white and blue merge into one big, bright, gruesome spectacle. In the darkness, the scene stands out like a bizarre, macabre carnival.
Flares adorn the entrance and giant fire trucks mark the path to the center ring, where an empty pick-up lies upside down amidst a cornucopia of debris. Nearly a hundred yards and a half dozen police cars away, a mangled car rests near a light post. Another fifty feet leads to a relatively unscathed sports car. The entire perimeter is marked by pajamaed spectators, a willing audience at once horrified and fascinated by the surreal scene before their eyes.
Dozens of police officers, fire fighters, and medics navigate their way throughout the landscape. There must be order to the chaos, order that hides itself from my untrained eye, but most of the professionals strike me as spectators themselves.
Standing out in the sea of onlookers are three young men, all dressed in a style betraying their ideals. They are fashionable without being conventional, with trendy hats and hairstyles specially designed to make them feel unique. The misshapen cars they stand near had so recently been points of pride, and the racing stickers and symbols decorating the steel frames indicate the recklessness of youth, the feeling of invincibility that comes with being young.
Waiting on the side of the road, wrapped in blankets and embracing each other with hugs, the boys look anything but invincible. And still, I soon discover that they are waiting only to be released from the scene without having to go to the hospital. The law requires permission from their parents before they can go.
A police officer asks Tabitha and Christina to stay with the boys while they wait for their parents, but family friends soon show and we are instructed to move on. Before we leave, we pause to watch as heavy machinery is brought in to flip the pick-up truck over.
Christina instructs me that they are only cleaning things up so fast because there weren’t any fatalities, referring to our inside information that even the passengers of the overturned pick-up truck are expected to survive. If there had been a death, the accident scene would likely still be here the next day.
As the pick-up truck flips back over, it makes a horrific sound. A sound only twisted steel and shattered glass can make. A sound which serves as a reminder to how eerily calm and quiet the scene had been just moments before. An awful sound.
And then silence.
*
The computer system in the van requires the crisis response team to indicate their availability at all times. Somehow, by the time we get back to the van, we have gone from “AOR,” which means “Available on Radio” to “C2,” which indicates we are already responding to our next call.
We rush to the scene, this time a hospital, to respond to a man who is “coding.” A “code” is a slang term used in the business that generally indicates that someone has gone into cardiopulmonary arrest.
When we get to the hospital, the doctors are already hard at work on the man, an aging Filipino. A lone firefighter, a big man with a serious look on his face, is consoling a petrified woman. It becomes clear that this is the “coding” man’s wife.
“She’s a brave woman,” he tells anyone who will listen. “She did a great job.”
Christina secures an open room to talk with the woman and we are led there by a nurse. When we get there, the shocked wife, a Cambodian woman in an expensive black dress, takes a seat. Christina and Tabitha stand opposite her while I grab a stool in the corner so as not to get in the way.
“I told him not to smoke,” the woman tells us, shaking her head. “I told him I’d divorce him if he didn’t quit, but he never listened.”
Christina says nothing
“We came from a wedding,” she continues, motioning to her dress. “Everyone wore black. Like a funeral. Not a wedding.”
After the wedding, her husband of thirty years stopped breathing. She called 911 and immediately started trying CPR on her husband. She had no idea how to do CPR, but the firefighter insists that her swift action is the only reason her husband is in critical care and not the morgue.
Now, she sits in this room, surrounded by complete strangers, while her husband fights to breathe in another room, surrounded by doctors. The pain that she must be going through…the shock…the agony. And yet, her manners never abandon her.
She and Christina exchange niceties. They begin to have a conversation.
They speak of everything and yet nothing.
But as the conversation develops, the woman starts to calm down.
While talking, even about the most trivial things, she seems at peace, as if finding herself in the eye of an overwhelming storm. It is only in the silence, that dreaded, crushing silence when the reality of the situation is allowed to sink in, that the pain in her eyes comes through.
It is at this point, sitting in a cold hospital room with my cousin Tabitha, Christina, and a woman in unimaginable pain, that I am finally able to appreciate the role of the crisis response team. Firemen fight fires. Police officers fight crime. And the crisis response counselors fight the silence.
The firefighter stops by one more time to reassure the woman that her husband is going to make it. Soon after, the woman’s son and daughter-in-law arrive and our time is done.
There is nothing more we can do.
*
We get back to the fire station just after four in the morning. With any luck, I’m told, the last hour and a half of the shift will be spent sleeping. But half an hour after I nod off in one of the recliners, I am woken up.
An elderly woman has had a medical emergency and we are dispatched to provide support and resources for her loved ones. The car ride to the house is a quiet one, as all three of us are tired from the night’s activities and lack of sleep. Despite nearing the end of a twelve hour overnight shift, we are all keenly aware that our morning will likely be a long one.
It is not unusual for 5:30 calls to extend a shift well beyond twelve hours. Christina indicates that these types of calls can often last four hours. I silently dread the extra time; not because I am tired, not because I don’t want to work, but because after four heart-wrenching situations in one night, I’m not sure how well I can cope with another.
The screen on the van’s computer says “901H,” indicating that a body is involved. Tabitha tells me that the woman likely just passed away. Before I can process this information, we get a phone call from dispatch. There has been a change of plan and we are no longer needed on scene.
The shift ends on time at six in the morning. Exhausted both physically and mentally, I thank Christina for the experience.
“No problem,” she deadpans. “Sorry it wasn’t a more eventful shift.”
"If you live to see the morning," I told myself in a melodramatic tone that would make the cheesiest soap opera star jealous, "Swear to me that you'll write a blog to the millions of children you inspired to travel around the country in vans. If you survive, you must share your wisdom on how you lived to see another day. Do it for the children goddamnit!"
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