|
Published on Sunday, May 20, 2007
in the Florida Times-Union
The hardest part is just to say it, troopers say of death notices
What is it like to tell a mother her daughter died in a car wreck? State trooper Michael Elder knows.
Carolyn Williams was sleeping when the black and tan patrol car pulled onto her block.
It was 1:05 a.m. and the 46-year-old Jacksonville woman had no reason to be expecting a knock at her front door.
Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Michael Elder was working the midnight shift when dispatch called him with the assignment: Go tell Williams her 22-year-old daughter, a University of Florida senior, died in a wreck on the Florida Turnpike on her way to spring break.
As he sat in his car on Corby Street, Elder tried to get the facts of the case, given to him by a dispatcher, straight in his head. Then he took an 8-by-10 copy of a driver's license photo with him and started down Williams' path and up five porch steps to her door.
The doorbell wasn't working, so he kept knocking until he woke Williams. He identified himself and asked to come in. With her daughter's photo in his hand, the trooper asked the woman standing before him if she was the mother of Ashley Renee Mills. He asked if she had someone who could be with her so she wasn't alone. And then, Elder said what he was there to say: Ashley wasn't coming home. There had been an accident. She was dead.
For Elder, 41, the assignment was one of about 30 next-of-kin death notifications he's done in his seven-year career with the Highway Patrol. The month Mills died, her family was one of five to whom he delivered such messages.
"I remember when you came in that was the singular worst moment in my life," Williams told Elder when they met again several weeks after her daughter's death in March.
"I know," he told her.
Many troopers who see death on the highways on a regular basis said the most difficult thing is not to witness the ways people can be mangled in wrecks but to have to tell their loved ones they're dead.
When Elder went to Williams' home, he spent more than two hours there making sure she understood what was going on. He helped her call family, friends and the traffic homicide investigator in charge of her daughter's case several counties away.
"The only thing that continues to play in my mind was you saying, 'Are you here alone? Can someone be here with you?' " Williams recalled.
"Then the hardest part," Elder told her, "is just to say it."
Delivering death messages is a task troopers get limited training for, and one that several said in recent Times-Union interviews can tax their emotions and spill stress into their personal lives. Protocol tells them to be direct, professional and humble but stay emotionally detached. The reality is that it isn't always possible to do their duty and keep a safe distance.
"I remember one thing you kept on saying that night was 'Kids are supposed to bury their parents,' " Elder told Williams. "That was when it hit me right there. Because my mother says that all the time."
The worst part of the job
Highway Patrol veterans said they try to come in pairs whenever possible when they make next-of-kin notifications because it's impossible to predict how family members will react to news of their loved one's death.
Some cry and others faint. Some go into a rage and lash out physically. Still others refuse to open their doors.
Some family members with arrest warrants have tried to flee when the FHP arrived, thinking the troopers were there to take them to jail. Every once in a while, the news actually thrills the person who gets it, said Cpl. Trish England, a 50-year-old traffic homicide investigator in the Starke area.
"I want to go make sure he's dead," she's heard once or twice while making more than 100 next-of-kin notifications during her 25 years on the job.
Veterans said the cases that affect them the most usually involve children or the holiday season.
Cpl. Jimmy Starling, a 47-year-old FHP veteran with 25 years on the job who also works in Starke, said he once went to the home of a family whose table was set for Thanksgiving dinner. They were waiting to start their feast until one more relative arrived. They thought he was late. Starling had to tell them he was dead.
In another case, Starling arrived at the scene of a fatal crash on Interstate 10. A mother was driving home from a midnight madness Christmas sale with her 8-year-old son when a drunken driver rear-ended their vehicle, causing it to flip several times.
When Starling got there, he found the boy sitting cross-legged in the highway median, Christmas gifts scattered around him. His mother was dead. And the trooper had to tell him.
Coping behind the badge
Twenty-two years ago, FHP rookie Mike Daniels had to visit the home of a retired Jacksonville sheriff's officer to tell the man's family he had died in a crash. It was Daniels' first week of work as a trooper. Before five days passed, the rookie had to make similar visits to two other families.
Now a corporal, Daniels, 47, said in a recent interview that he learned early that he'd have to find some way to cope with the task. In April, he was at the scene of a deadly crash on Heckscher Drive where a Jacksonville father tried to pull his 17-year-old son from a burning car but wasn't able to.
Daniels couldn't sleep later. But he knew where to find help: among colleagues who had witnessed the same kind of trauma.
"You have to talk to someone," the corporal said. "Every once in a while, I speak my piece, and then I'm able to go about my business."
The Highway Patrol has specially trained personnel to whom troopers can talk after they witness traumatic incidents, Lt. Bill Leeper said. But while the counseling is confidential, he said not everyone in law enforcement reaches out for it.
For Elder, visits like the one the trooper made to Williams' home are something he never forgets. Like other troopers, Elder said he uses those memories to keep him going during a long day of ticket-writing. By pulling unsafe motorists over, he likes to believe he saved someone's life down the road.
And when it comes to dealing with the weight of what follows his knock at a family's door, Elder, who also is a Navy veteran, said he finds relief when he leans on the people who love him.
"Sometimes after that I call my wife, and I call my mom," the trooper said. "Because we take life for granted, every day, the simplest thing."
Death takes its toll
The Florida Highway Patrol notifies the next of kin for victims of fatal crashes they investigate. Troopers also make house calls to speak with local families of people who die in crashes on state roads in other jurisdictions and states. The Highway Patrol doesn't keep statistics on how many notifications its troopers make, but here is a list of all the fatal wrecks the agency investigated in 2006 and up to May 10 this year.
| 2006 |
16 |
8 |
28 |
91 |
25 |
20 |
25 |
22 |
9 |
| 2007 |
0 |
3 |
7 |
44 |
8 |
11 |
13 |
16 |
1 |
| 
