IRVINE : They Heed the Call for Compassion

When her pager jolts her out of sleep during the night, Pat Bell of Huntington Beach, grandmother of 11, feels “a little tingle of excitement.”

Within minutes, Bell, a volunteer for the Crisis Response Team in Irvine, is out of bed and traveling to the scene of a violent crime, steeled only by her sincerity and compassion.

On the way, she mentally rehearses what she needs to say to traumatized victims and prepares herself for the emotional toll she takes as the liaison between victims and law enforcement.

“You have to be able to function without getting shocked and upset, otherwise you are useless,” said Bell, 53, who works as a telephone technician for the ABC Unified School District in Cerritos during the daylight hours. “I at least want to leave (the victims) with the feeling that somebody cared.” Frequently, Bell must provide the emotional support for victims long after the police are gone.

“Sometimes I feel like what I do is insufficient to the needs of people,” she said. “And then I’ll get a letter, or someone will call the office telling me I was such a big help to them.”

She and 44 members of the law enforcement assistance program--the Victim/Witness Assistance Program and the Sexual Assault Victims Services/Prevention Program--were recognized last week by President Bush as model volunteers for their role in crisis intervention in Orange County.

Volunteers in those programs carry a pager at least two days a month so they can respond to calls. They also work two exhausting shifts answering crisis calls on a 24-hour hot line and dispatching volunteers to emergencies. The calls to the hot line come from police officers, hospital staff and the grieving families themselves.

Each of the programs is coordinated out of the Irvine offices of Community Service Programs Inc., a nonprofit corporation that receives funding from the state Office of Criminal Justice Planning. The programs also have offices at every courthouse in the county where volunteers and some paid staff explain court procedures to confused victims and witnesses.

The volunteer staff “work at their own paid job,” said Barbara West, assistant director at CSP, “but in the middle of the night or on weekends they touch people at the most critical time of their lives.”

Glenda Pribus, like her fellow volunteers, has a secret life that seems to be lifted from the reality of a police station or a hospital emergency room.

Pribus, a production planner from San Clemente, was “scared to death” the first time she went out on a call. Her first assignment was to find the right words to ease the pain of a 15-year-old victim of sexual assault.

“I was afraid I would say the wrong thing,” Pribus said. But after three years of responding to sex crimes involving victims ages 8 to 76, she has learned her comforting “can make a difference.”

Nevertheless, Pribus said the volunteers are far from superhuman, and they frequently must find a way to vent the trauma they experience. Sometimes they pull to the side of the street after leaving a crime scene and have a good cry.

“We are all very conscious of the toll it could take,” she said, “and we are very supportive of one another and proud of what we do.”