When All Seemed Lost, Officer Gave Her Hope

Who would you want if you felt so alone that a four-story dive onto pavement seemed an attractive alternative to tomorrow? Would you want your mother? Your therapist? Your minister? Your most recent one-true-love?

A woman teetering one night last week on the highest ledge of a parking structure in downtown Ventura asked for a police officer named Russ Robinson.

Only Robinson would do, she said.

And he did.

*

It’s not all that unusual for police to talk down would-be suicides. But they’re almost always summoned by others. People in anguish tend not to seek solace in the back of a squad car. When the cops show up, they come not as friends, but as anonymous saviors, well-meaning technicians patching together a highly temporary fix on blown emotional circuits.

That’s not how it was with Robinson.

In one of those revolutionary moves that’s little more than common sense, Ventura embraced “community policing” a few years ago. That means officers in a few neighborhoods get to know people on the street by walking around and talking to them instead of peering at them from behind windshields.

For two years, Robinson has worked downtown Ventura’s police storefront, the one that funding problems almost shut down recently. From time to time, the woman would drop in. Like so many others, she had her sad stories: Bad childhood, bad luck with men, bad times with drugs and booze, bad problems with a teenage daughter. She was profoundly depressed. She drifted around the downtown hotels. Recently there was a man, but that relationship ended as horribly as all the others.

“She let us into a lot of her life,” Robinson said. “We were easy access. She’d come in and try to get a kind of mental cleansing by letting us tell her she was worth something, that there was hope for her.”

*

On Thursday evening, an officer named Chris Davis was cruising through the parking structure when he saw her perched on the ledge, rocking back and forth. She was drunk. Hope had run out. All she wanted was to die--or a chance to talk with her friend the cop.

Remarkably, the woman’s social worker happened to be walking to the post office and spotted her about the same time Davis did. But the woman didn’t want any social workers, just Robinson.

Police blocked off the street. Robinson rushed over from his home. As all this was going on, an off-duty police detective named Terri Vujea was headed for a nearby sushi place. Vujea, who had worked downtown, knew the woman and had helped her out. In fact, Vujea had tried to find her just the night before because her street contacts had told him that she had been “acting crazy.”

Even after Robinson and Vujea climbed up to the roof, it was touch-and-go. The woman was dangling her legs over the side and moaning about the pain of just going on.

“I had no profound words of wisdom,” Robinson said. “I just said there’s a lot of people who care about you. We love you, and there are other people who love you. There’s hope. There’s all kinds of help available. There’s no need to do this. . . . “

Robinson knew her well enough to know how deeply she’d been hurt when someone close to her had committed suicide.

“ ‘You know the pain we’ll feel tomorrow if you decide to jump,’ I told her. ‘You know that.’ ”

The turning point came when Robinson reminded her of the time he and his partner had found her celebrating her birthday on Main Street with a big bottle of tequila. Instead of arresting her, they took her back to her room.

The woman’s smile was barely perceptible, but it was there.

“Things got a little light-hearted,” Robinson said. “The blood started rushing back to her head, the neurons started firing right, and she finally came around.”

After 70 minutes, she relented. Officers drove her to the county mental health clinic for the standard 72-hour hold.

*

In his 15 years as a street cop, this was the first time Robinson had talked anyone down. It doesn’t mean he’ll succeed the next time or that the woman has been miraculously made happy, or that all the mental health workers in Ventura County will put her together again. Life isn’t that tidy.

But at least this was one time the system--call it “community policing” or just compassion--actually worked. The message of hope prevailed and a life was saved.

That’s not bad for a night’s work.

*