Trauma Volunteers Will Offer Helping Hand During Crisis

They show up any time of day at a moment’s notice, prepared to face the most gruesome murders, suicides and car crashes in Los Angeles.

It’s the kind of job you couldn’t pay most people to do. So they’re doing it for free.

That’s the pledge made by volunteers recruited for a new citywide Crisis Response Team that will help police and firefighters at accident and crime scenes.

The trained trauma specialists will assist witnesses, survivors and families of victims. About 400 of the volunteers will eventually be spread throughout Los Angeles.

The idea is for them to offer a shoulder to cry on, along with a helping hand to those suddenly faced with the coroner’s office or mortuary.

Endorsed by both the police and fire departments, crisis volunteers will temporarily assist those left behind after investigators and firefighters leave crime and accident scenes.

“You will certainly make our job easier,” Police Chief Bernard C. Parks recently told volunteers graduating from the program’s first training session.

The counseling service is an outgrowth of pioneering crisis response programs organized by police officials in the city’s harbor and west San Fernando Valley areas.

Members of the harbor district’s team have helped at 250 emergencies over the past six years, according to officials.

By next June, all police divisions and fire battalions will have volunteers to dispatch to emergency scenes, said Jeff Zimerman, a manager of the city’s Volunteer Bureau who will oversee crisis team operations.

Allstate Insurance Co. is spending about $1.3 million to recruit and train volunteers over the next year.

The inaugural class of 25 trainees graduated last week. They will be assigned to the three police divisions that serve Echo Park, Silver Lake, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Pico-Union, MacArthur Park, Westlake and East Los Angeles.

Among the new volunteers--who will work in teams of two--are retirees, firefighters, counselors, teachers and police officer candidates.

Volunteer Mitch McKnight, a Los Angeles city firefighter for 12 years, said he has experienced the frustration of completing his physical rescue work at accident scenes without being able to further help survivors.

“There have been cases where I’ve gone back to the fire station and thought, ‘I hope that family’s OK,’ ” said McKnight, 33, of Pasadena.

One such case involved an infant that McKnight tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate. “I can only imagine what the parents were going through,” he said.

Another volunteer, Pauline Bewernick, 65, a retired telephone operator from El Sereno, said she knows what it’s like to be in a crisis situation.

She and her family were involved in a serious car accident years ago that left her husband pinned in the vehicle and her three children injured and sent to different hospitals. Bewernick was left to sort through the trauma and confusion by herself.

“The city of L.A. seems to be cold sometimes,” Bewernick said. “We need someone to be warm. We’ll be there for that.”

The 22 hours of training the volunteers will receive include instruction in police, fire and coroner’s procedures, in what is called “active listening” and in how to cope with death and grieving. There is also instruction in cultural sensitivity, community resources and street awareness.

The harbor-area crisis team was launched in early 1992 after a car accident that left two people dead, one seriously injured and a fourth person unhurt. While emergency teams tended to the dead and injured and police began their investigation, the man who had just witnessed his wife and two friends hit by a car had to wait by himself.

That prompted Harbor Division Police Capt. Timothy King to order the formation of a crisis team, which began with a group of local clergy.

Police Officer Randy Childs, who still coordinates the crisis response team at Harbor Division, said officers were slow to warm to civilian volunteers at crime scenes. He had to reassure them that the volunteers “aren’t there to be cops” but to help survivors.

The Fire Department has made attempts in the past to use volunteer crisis counselors. But funding problems forced it to cancel a limited program in mid-1997 just as it was becoming popular with firefighters.

“From that, we know this program is going to be a positive asset,” said Fire Chief William Bamattre.

“The word was out there that these people work hand-in-hand with us.”