Calif. PDs Still Coping with Deaths of 2 Officers over 5 Months

It had been only a few hours after his officer's sudden death in an early morning traffic collision, and Elk Grove's police chief summarized the shock and loss in three words:

"We are broken," Timothy Albright told mourners who gathered for a candlelight vigil outside his department that night for motor officer Tyler Lenehan. "We're broken as a profession, as an organization and as a community....the way you help Elk Grove police heal is this — the support. We yearn for it."

Mourners clutched candles at the vigil that night. They lined Elk Grove's streets for a procession to pay their respects days later and filled a church's sanctuary to celebrate Lenehan's life and grieve his loss.

"It's huge for our folks," said Sgt. Jason Jimenez, an Elk Grove police spokesman, outside Bayside Church Adventure Campus in Roseville prior to Lenehan's memorial. "We've had people come to the station every single day with notes of encouragement. We're getting hugs from community members to let our folks know they're valued, they're appreciated."

But after the candles are extinguished and the church pews cleared, the officers and first responders who knew the man, rode alongside him and rushed to his aid are left to continue their work even as they process their loss.

Even though the training and education that police officers and other first responders receive help them deal with the loss of a fellow officer, firefighter or paramedic, losing a comrade exacts a heavy toll, experts in psychology and resilience told The Bee.

Susan Farren is a former paramedic and the founder and executive director of First Responders Resiliency, Inc., a Santa Rosa-based firm that helps first responders address trauma from their jobs.

"It gives us a lot of compassion in these areas," Farren said. "In relationship to our work, it's the work that we do in advance of these kinds of things that allow people to more adequately process that grief because they're more in touch with their emotions and the physical impacts of grief."

Angela I. Drake is a psychiatrist at UC Davis Health who has also worked with military members experiencing stress disorders and post-traumatic stress. She said tragedies like Lenehan's loss ripple through the organizations and the communities they serve.

"It does impact the entire community of first responders, and, again, it affects the communities themselves because we depend on our first responders," Drake said. "We, in the back of our minds, always count on them to be there for us when we're in need or there's an emergency, so when one of them is tragically lost, it really affects everybody in the community in a significant way."

Sacramento County agencies lost officers

In smaller agencies like the south Sacramento County police departments of Galt and Elk Grove where Lenehan spent the last decade of his career; and Cosumnes Services District's fire department, which serves both cities, the pain was especially acute.

Cosumnes Fire and Galt Police were still struggling with an officer's loss just months earlier.

In late August, five months before Lenehan's death, Galt officers Harminder Grewal and Kapri Herrera were on Highway 99 in the early morning hours headed to lend support for the massive Caldor Fire burning in El Dorado County.

Their police cruiser was struck head-on when the driver of a pickup truck lost control, plowed through a highway median and into the officers' path.

A Cosumnes fire crew was first to the scene, cutting Grewal and Herrera free of the wreckage.

Grewal, Galt's officer of the year in 2020, would die days later from his injuries at a Sacramento hospital. Herrera, a young officer just starting her career, survived. She endured several surgeries and continues her recovery.

The horrific wreck was compounded by the bond between the agencies.

Mere miles separate Elk Grove from Galt but the bonds are even closer, so close that Galt officers and Cosumnes firefighters share meals together at their station houses.

"We're very close with their department. We know them very well," Cosumnes Fire Capt. Kevin Leveroni told The Bee in August, as he waited for the police procession that carried the fallen Grewal. "It's more than just proximity. We know them. It was our fire department that cut them out. It's very difficult to do a rescue like that with someone you know. It's horrible."

Farren said in many ways for the smaller communities of first responders, it's like losing a family member.

"We know that proximity and the intimacy of a relationship — how close you are and how much you know about each other — can make that pain very, very deep and very, very hard to deal with that grief," Farren said.

She added those feelings can manifest themselves in numerous and varied ways, such as anger, anxiety and for many first responders, a loss of control.

"For a lot of folks who suffer from these kinds of traumatic losses, they can't figure out why they are so anxious," Farren added. "Crying? People expect that. Sometimes it's anger. It can be outbursts. They're shocked sometimes at how their body will try to process that grief. That loss of control can be very profound for people like us who work in this industry."

Police family grieving

Much of the work to help public safety professionals process that grief is done within their community.

"One of the things I watched the police chief talk about was that the police family is grieving," Drake said. "We recognize the power of what we call peer support now, where again, it's police officers helping each other."

Drake said that is different from past practice where a mental health professional would be brought in from outside the organization.

"One of the new paradigms is to really have peer support set up and really identify and train people within police forces to be support for grief processes," she said.

That means spotting the signs — obvious changes in behavior such as irritability, trouble sleeping or eating; anxiety episodes where the person has difficulty performing routine daily tasks — and seeking help.

"If they are feeling an overwhelming sense of grief, I really encourage people to reach out to a professional because sometimes peer support or just the community itself is not equipped," Drake said. "We really need to make sure that while we really emphasize the importance of the community and the support for each other, we want to also make sure that people feel OK about reaching out if they have those red flag symptoms."

Drake said the sense of loss is a powerful one, but with help, there is hope.

"We can really treat grief, we can treat these early stress disorders that we see, and we can resolve them so that people can go on and not develop chronic long-term issues," Drake said. "People really can move forward and continue to do their job and continue to be part of the community, even with the tragic loss. There's no way to minimize it. But we also want to give people hope for some resolution of that immediate and acute stress that goes along with the tragic loss of a colleague."

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