Even after responding to three shooting tragedies in less than a decade, Arvada Sgt. A.J. DeAndrea and his colleagues are still learning how to mentally recover from such traumatic events.
DeAndrea, who was part of the SWAT team that responded to the Columbine High shooting in 1999, told an audience of hundreds Friday that he learned in the months and years that followed how unprepared he was to handle the aftermath of a massacre.
First of all, the resources to help cops suffering mentally simply weren’t as developed as they are today, he said. Nor is there an inclination by officers to seek help in the first place.
“We were left to go into the wilderness and figure it out,” DeAndrea told a gathering at the National Alliance on Mental Illness conference at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel. “We’re rough and tough guys. We’re told to suck it up. And it didn’t work out well.”
The 23-year veteran cop sat on a panel dubbed “The Mental Health Impact of Violent Tragedies.” He was accompanied by retired chief Michael Kehoe, who helmed the police force in Newtown, Conn., during the Sandy Hook mass shooting 3 1/2 years ago, and Sara Garrido, a safety consultant with Lakewood-based Nicoletti-Flater Associates, who provided psychological aid to Aurora officers after the 2012 theater shooting.
The talk came less than a month after and a day after a , killing five of them.
DeAndrea found himself on the one-year anniversary of Columbine at home alone with a drink in his hand. He suspected many of his SWAT team members were doing the same. He vowed after the in 2006 that he would do something different.
“I did not want the members of the team sitting on their decks with a glass of whiskey by themselves,” he said.
So in 2007 on the anniversary of the shooting, DeAndrea organized a 38-mile run from Golden to Bailey with only the officers who worked the scene that day allowed to participate. He said the run was “cathartic” and allowed him and his colleagues to lean on each other and be emotionally open.
The following year, when he was marking the one-year anniversary of, he and his SWAT team members did another commemorative run, but this time opened it to anyone.
That was a mistake, DeAndrea said.
“It became more of a show than a sincere effort to be together and take care of each other,” he said.
The two steps forward, one step back approach to dealing with the mental health of police officers and first responders shows just how difficult it is to comprehend and blunt the impact of a devastating crime, said Garrido.
“Just like you can be physically contaminated, you can become mentally contaminated as well,” she said. “But that’s harder to pick up on.”
After the July 2012 theater shooting, Garrido’s firm got a list of every Aurora police officer who responded to the massacre that night and called them to offer help.
“You can’t leave it up to officers to come in,” she told the crowd. “You do really have to do it more proactively.”
What Garrido and her colleagues found was that certain mundane sounds and smells — like a ring tone or the scent of buttered popcorn — could act as damaging psychological triggers for officers who had stood in the Century 16 cinema, listening to friends and family calling their loved ones on abandoned cell phones hours after a gunman stormed the theater.
“A ring tone they had probably heard a million times before became a trigger for them — and it was stuck in a loop,” she said. “We had to help decontaminate that piece.”
Kehoe said intense media coverage in a 24-hour news cycle can further inflame the demons officers wrestle with after an event like the murder of 20 school children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was particularly hard on a small force like the Newtown Police Department, which was inundated not only by local reporters but national and international media outlets based in nearby New York City.
The coverage, he said, was relentless. Satellite trucks and news crews showed up for every press conference, funeral and anniversary — repeatedly rehashing what everyone was trying to put behind them.
“That will have a dramatic impact not only on your community but on your officers,” Kehoe said.
