Who’s There for Families of Suicides?

It’s a scene that unfolds somewhere in Los Angeles County two or three times every day. Someone’s mother, son, brother, wife overdoses on pills, puts a bullet in his or her head, lies down across the railroad tracks. . . .

Suicides that not only set families to unraveling, but also unleash a procession of official encounters that can compound a grieving family’s pain.

In her 48 years, Jeanette Gastelum never had occasion to call 911, had never been inside a police car, had never set foot inside a police station.

That changed last month when a suicide in her family left her wrestling not just with survivor guilt (What should we have done? How could we not have seen?) but with the loss of her naive notion that, if tragedy ever struck, “the police would be there to help me.”

Her story is sad but not uncommon. There is no police misconduct to report. No protest marches will be held. No lawsuits need be filed.

The drama arises from the painful clash of conflicting needs.

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He was young and vibrant. He’d been married for four years to Gastelum’s only child. And he shot himself in the middle of the night.

By the time Gastelum arrived at the home, paramedics and patrol cars were at the scene and LAPD investigators were on their way.

She and her weeping daughter were ushered into the back seat of a patrol car for the short trip to Pacific Division.

“They said we’d have to go down to the station, and, logically, I understood,” Gastelum recalls.

“They took us into the room where the detectives were and pulled out two chairs. And we sit there, alone, at this desk for what seems like forever. And on this gentleman’s desk, we’re staring at this display of pictures of his happy family . . . and my daughter has just lost her husband.”

Whereupon logic failed, and emotion took over.

“My daughter, she’s cold, shivering--she’s still in her pajamas. And she’s kind of in shock. She felt like she was going to be sick. So I asked an officer if we could use the restroom.

“She handed us a trash can instead. . . . And at that moment, sitting in that room, it hit me what had happened.”

Not just the horror of the suicide, but the inevitable degradation that remained.

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Look at it from the family’s perspective and you shiver at the indignities . . . the hours at the police station, frightened and dazed by grief and confusion, having to mourn in public view.

“You just sit there with everybody walking by, looking at you, wondering, ‘What did they do?’ ” Gastelum recalls. “There’s no comfort, no privacy, just shame and humiliation.”

But look at it from the vantage point of the police and you get a different view.

There’s the middle-of-the-night call from the hysterical wife, her story of struggling for her husband’s gun, the dead body sprawled across the bedroom floor. . . .

Suicide or homicide?

“The family might know it’s a suicide, but we don’t,” explains LAPD Officer Jason Lee. “We have to treat it like a homicide until we can prove otherwise.”

Those grieving family members? “Potential suspects/witnesses.” That request for a bathroom visit? “Could be a chance to wash evidence away.”

Gastelum’s daughter is lucky, in a way; she could have been held for questioning in jail.

It’s unfortunate, Lee concedes, “but we can’t take any chances. I understand it’s hard on the families. . . . If I was in their position, I’d feel the same way.

“We want to be as human as possible. But first we have a job to do.”

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It is, at best, a case of competing priorities, of too many questions and not enough answers, of anguish unacknowledged and innocence shattered by a tough--but essential--investigative creed.

In suicide cases, “the police need answers at a time when [the families are] still struggling to understand what happened . . . how Joe could go out to dinner, have a jolly old time, then go home and end his life,” explains Los Angeles County Coroner spokesman Scott Carrier.

Like police, the coroner’s investigators regularly encounter grieving families who, Carrier realizes, “need comfort that no one’s really prepared to give.”

Carrier’s office deals with almost 1,000 suicides every year. Jeanette Gastelum has faced only one.

But that one encounter has convinced her that the system needs to change.

“I understand procedure, and I’m not angry at the police. They were polite . . . when they questioned my daughter, they were not unkind. But the system treats us like criminals, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

“There should be a room set aside in every station--even a tiny cubicle--that’s clean, comfortable, with a box of Kleenex, where we can wait. There should be an officer or a chaplain to talk to us about our loss. . . .

“I know the police have their job to do, but we should be able to grieve, to cry and not have to feel embarrassed or ashamed.”

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Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.