But Banuelos had used his department-issued handgun, a 9mm semiautomatic,
to kill himself. Douglas could understand Sylvia's pain, and he
also understood the demons that dogged Ernesto, because before
he began his crusade against suicide, Douglas had considered killing
himself.
It has been 15 years since the former Baltimore police officer
sat alone in his study, ready to fire the gun. He stopped himself
only because his wife opened the door and asked what was wrong.
He later became a police chaplain.
Over time, it became apparent that he was not the only officer
who contemplated taking his own life. And when he preached at
the funeral of a Baltimore police officer who committed suicide
in 1987, he finally posed a question.
''I remember asking, 'Do we have a problem?' '' Douglas says.
He was told that the officer's death was an aberration. But ''I
did a little investigating and found out that those unfortunate
situations were occurring at a rate of about three a year.''
Now Banuelos is a member of Douglas' staff, one of seven counselors
who talk to grieving spouses and despondent officers around the
USA. She tells them that she has been where they are.
''I was very angry,'' says Banuelos, who was married for nearly
13 years. ''If he was thinking of me and the boys, he wouldn't
have done it. I think he was sitting there thinking of nobody
but himself.''
It was shortly before 9 a.m., in March 1997, that Ernesto told
Sylvia that he loved her and drove to a quiet field a few blocks
away.
A neighbor who noticed Ernesto's car saw his body inside and called
police. A short time later, a chaplain arrived at her door. And
Banuelos learned that, at 32, she was a widow.
She believes that her husband's frustrations at work contributed
greatly to his despair. Ernesto had spent more than seven years
working at the Orange County Jail Intake Center, photographing,
fingerprinting and classifying inmates. But he wanted desperately
to patrol the streets.
Despite excellent job evaluations, he was constantly passed up
for promotion, hindered by the fact that he did not have a college
degree, she says. And even when he finally made the waiting list
for promotion to street patrol shortly before he died, Banuelos
still faced a wait of at least two years.
Since her husband's death, Banuelos has written to legislators
and police officials, asking them to consider paying college tuition
and some benefits to the families of officers who die off duty.
She received only the money her husband paid into his retirement
fund and continued dental insurance after Ernesto's death. But
so far, her proposal has gotten little response.
It is the other part of her mission that has borne fruit. She
helped persuade one widow to fight to get her husband's badge.
She comforted another on Mother's Day. She helped pull a suicidal
officer from the brink in January. He keeps in touch. ''In the
beginning, they wouldn't give me their name or what department
they were from,'' she says, remembering a long-ago conversation
with one despondent officer. ''I could hear him cracking. I just
explained that suicide wasn't a way out.''
When a suicide does occur, Douglas tries to teach departments
to not shut out the families that are left behind.
He speaks with a missionary's passion, peppering each audience
with questions. ''Do any of your agencies have police suicide-awareness
programs? Does your agency have a police suicide funeral protocol?''
The answers are often no, he says, because ''nobody is dealing
with the issue.''
To prevent suicides, Douglas says officers must be taught what
signs to look for and encouraged to talk to co-workers who might
need help.
In his book, Death with No Valor, & Hope Beyond The Badge, Douglas recounts the
story of an officer who took an unloaded gun, put it in his mouth
and pulled the trigger to see if he could. Then the officer loaded
the weapon and was about to shoot himself when his cat walked
into the room.
''He stroked that cat and said 'who will take care of this stinking
cat if I kill myself,' '' Douglas wrote. ''And that was enough
to stop him. How hard is it to save an officer if his cat could
do it?''
Common signs, factors
Common factors in suicide by law enforcement officers:
- Alcohol. Coupled with an always-present firearm, drinking
and depression are major causes of police officer suicides.
- Breakup of a relationship or marriage. Often, the only people
outside law enforcement an officer trusts are his or her family.
When a relationship ends, an officer loses his or her emotional
support base.
- Stagnated career.
- An officer under investigation.
SAN DIEGO -- More than 300 federal, state and local law enforcement
officers were added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial
in Washington, D.C., last month. San Diego police Capt. Lesli
Lord and Detective Anthony Castellini were not among them.
The two officers -- she was among the highest ranking women in
the department, and he a winner of the department's medal of valor
-- killed themselves within 48 hours of each other last year,
becoming the fourth and fifth San Diego officers to commit suicide
since 1992. During that same period, not a single San Diego officer
was killed in the line of duty.
It is the pomp and ceremony of an official law enforcement funeral
that the public remembers -- the 21-gun salute, the officers lining
the streets in dress blues mourning a colleague killed while protecting
the public.
Yet research by USA TODAY and the findings of several studies
show that most departments lose more officers to suicide than
they do to violence in the course of their jobs.
''We're losing about 300 officers a year to suicides,'' says Robert
Douglas, executive director of the National P.O.L.I.C.E. Suicide
Foundation and a retired Baltimore police officer.
''If a jumbo jet with 300 people went down every year, do you
think the FAA would ground the jumbo jets and find out what was
going on? You bet they would.''
There are no national reports on police suicide and no memorials
for those officers who take their own lives. The code of silence
and shame that prevents many officers from seeking professional
help when they are angry or depressed also prevents them from
discussing the specter of suicide. But the statistics that do
exist are troubling.
Disturbing statistics
The nation's largest police organization, the Fraternal Order
of Police, studied suicides among 38,800 of its 270,000 members
in 1995 by looking at insurance records in 92 local chapters in
24 states. They found a suicide rate of 22 deaths per 100,000
officers. The national rate is 12 per 100,000 people, according
to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That study focused on small- and medium-size departments ranging
from 16 to 3,000 officers. Although no such study has been done
for the nation's largest departments, a USA TODAY survey of the
nation's largest law enforcement agencies found equally disturbing
statistics.
- In New York, 36 officers have been killed in violent confrontations
with suspects while on the job since 1985. During the same period,
87 officers have taken their own lives, a suicide rate of 15.5
per 100,000.
- In Los Angeles, 11 officers have been slain on duty since
1989. Twenty have killed themselves. The suicide rate is 20.7
per 100,000.
- In Chicago, 12 officers have been slain while on duty since
1990. Twenty-two officers have killed themselves, a rate of 18.1
suicides per 100,000 officers.
And it is not just a local law enforcement problem. The FBI, which
would be the third largest police agency in the country if it
were a department, has lost four special agents in the line of
duty since 1993. Eighteen special agents have killed themselves
during that period, a rate of 26.1 per 100,000. The U.S. Customs
Service lost seven agents to suicide in 1998, alone. That translates
to a rate of 45.1 per 100,000. None were slain that year in the
line of duty.
Indeed, suicide has been a chronic problem among law enforcement
officers for years, a silent killer largely hidden from public
view by a police culture that jealously guards its image of strength.
Its causes are wide-ranging, from the stresses of a job that requires
split-second decisions with life and death consequences, to the
normal human struggles with family, career, alcoholism and depression
that can be exasperated by the isolation many law enforcement
officers feel from society.
''The majority of police officers do not kill themselves,'' says
Andre Ivanoff, professor of social work at Columbia University,
who specializes in suicidal behaviors.
For example, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas and Phoenix have reported
no police suicides in the last five years. But the fact that police
are public servants whose suicide rates rank fourth behind dentists,
doctors and entrepreneurs, Ivanoff says, ''should make everyone
uncomfortable.''
A review of the nation's 10 largest police departments, various
studies and dozens of interviews indicate that suicide is among
the most serious problems facing law enforcement today. The issue
is of such concern that the FBI is planning a seminar on suicide
for officers at its academy in Quantico, Va., this September.
Departments from Miami to Los Angeles have launched programs to
address the problem, sending police psychologists from precinct
to precinct and requiring everyone from cadets to commanders to
take classes about suicide.
Never prepared
The sheriff's department in Orange County, Calif., had warned
Sylvia Banuelos about a different kind of death when her husband,
Ernesto first entered the sheriff's academy. She was required
to take a class from a captain who tried to prepare deputies'
families for an uncertain future.
''He said, 'If I tell you your officer will not be killed, I'd
be lying,' '' she remembered. '' 'Every officer has a bullet with
his name on it.' Line-of-duty death, it's something I think wives
accept. But suicide is never an option. You never think it's going
to be suicide.''
But Ernesto Banuelos did not die on the street. He shot himself
to death one morning in 1997. Despite a growing acknowledgement
of the problem, the topic of suicide remains taboo among much
of law enforcement's rank and file. To some extent, psychologists
say, that is merely a reflection of society as a whole -- uncomfortable
with the idea of people taking their own lives. But experts say
that those who make their living projecting strength and control
are especially reluctant to admit that they need psychological
help. They fear they will be perceived as weak.
''Cops don't talk about that kind of stuff,'' says Jerry Sanders,
former San Diego police chief. ''They either do it. Or they don't.''
In many departments, ''if it's known you've thought about suicide,
or you're depressed, it's next to impossible for you to progress
through the ranks,'' says Ivanoff, who worked on a 1994 project
that evaluated New York City police officers' attitudes about
suicide. ''Because of the negative effect it can have on your
career, officers are extremely reluctant to identify each other
as needing help and will go to great lengths to 'protect' somebody
who needs help rather than helping them get it.''
The stress that often leads an officer to commit suicide is at
least partially the result of unrealistically high expectations
of being a successful cop. ''If you're a carpenter and you drop
your hammer, you bend over and pick it up,'' says Don Sheehan,
director of the stress management program at the FBI's Behavioral
Sciences Unit. ''What happens to a police officer who drops his
gun during a bank robbery or misspeaks during a trial? They have
to always be in control. Officers learn very early on that they
have to always be right.''
Many departments are reticent about the subject of suicide, afraid
of being held liable if the death is linked to stress on the job,
and fearful that all cops will be tarnished if the public learns
an officer took his or her own life. As a result, those who have
studied the issue say it is very difficult to get an accurate
tally of suicides because many departments do not keep official
statistics. And some say questionable incidents, such as reports
of officers accidentally killing themselves while cleaning their
guns, may actually be efforts to mask suicides.
Douglas recalls a Boston officer whose death was listed as accidental
by the department but ruled a suicide by the medical examiner.
''How do you accidentally discharge your firearm into your mouth?''
he asks. ''She was sitting on her bed and shot herself in the
mouth and they said she was cleaning her gun?''
'It could be me'
Because those who commit suicide are not killed in the line of
duty, they are seldom given an official department funeral. Their
families also are not entitled to various benefits, such as the
$143,943 that each family of an officer slain in the line of duty
receives from the Justice Department.
Many relatives also lament that they are suddenly ignored by their
loved one's colleagues, unceremoniously banished from the law
enforcement fraternity.
''I have lost friends in law enforcement and that's really hurt
me,'' says Banuelos, whose husband, Ernesto, shot himself to death
in March 1997. ''They won't come around. They don't want to be
seen with me.''
She believes that some of the deputies who worked alongside her
husband simply do not know what to say. And, she says, that sometimes
they are silenced by their own fear.
''Maybe they've contemplated suicide before,'' says Banuelos,
a mother of four who now counsels despondent officers. ''Maybe
they've been where Ernie was and it scares them to get that close.
Maybe they know it's happened more often and they worry that 'it
could be me.' ''
A department's pain
The pain of police suicide often reaches beyond the family to
tear at the department as a whole.
In San Diego last year, when two of the department's most promising
officers killed themselves in unrelated suicides in as many days.
The sadness was palpable in the silence, visible in the morning
roll calls. In a press conference with the media, the chief broke
down and cried. ''Police departments aren't normally quiet and
this was a quiet place,'' says Sanders, the current president
and CEO of United Way in San Diego who was the city's police chief
at the time. ''And we were going to lineups for about a week talking
to people and you could see the signs of this in the quietness,
and the questions, and in people kind of staying close to each
other for support.''
Both officers were undergoing counseling for emotional problems
at the time of their deaths, Sanders says. Captain Lesli Lord,
45, a married mother of three children, was one of the five highest-ranking
women in the department, officials say. She had been on the police
force just shy of 20 years when she shot herself to death at her
home.
The next evening, the body of Detective Anthony Castellini was
discovered by his girlfriend, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot
wound to the head. He was a 12-year department veteran who had
been separated from his wife and children for 18 months. In 1989,
he had been awarded the department's medal of valor for pulling
a suspect from a vehicle moments before it burst into flames.
After the suicides, the department sent counselors to the city's
police stations. Sanders says the department's psychological services
were ''booked solid for weeks.'' And he spoke to the media about
the deaths, as he had been willing to do with each of the five
suicides that occurred during his six-year tenure.
Sanders says that he wanted to ''let people know that we respected
them as members of the department and weren't going to hide the
fact they had been in our department.''
Tough to diagnose
There is no particular profile of the officer who will attempt
suicide. He or she may be a few years out of the academy or at
the end of their career, and their personal crises run the gamut.
Divorce and the break-up of relationships are common problems.
But those who kill themselves may also be suffering from stagnated
careers, under investigation for alleged misconduct or drinking
heavily. Throw the ever-present firearm into the cauldron and
the mix is deadly.
''Having the means is extremely important,'' says Ivanoff, who
notes that the suicide rate among British police officers who
don't carry guns is much lower than in the United States. ''And
it's not just having the means. It's intimate familiarity and
comfort with it This is not something that happens by mistake.''
Experts say an officer who may be contemplating suicide often
lacks energy or motivation, becomes withdrawn and may actually
talk about suicide. Troubled officers also sometimes become accident-prone
or targets of numerous citizen complaints.
Communication can break the cycle. But officers are often isolated,
distrustful of anyone outside law enforcement. And the hostility
they sometimes bring home after a day of dealing with antagonistic
situations can erode the one solid safety net the officers have
-- their family.
''It's difficult to go from an almost combat situation to home
life,'' says John Violanti, author of Police Suicide: Epidemic
in Blue. ''It tears on one's psychological ability to adjust.''
Many officers doubt they can receive confidential help. Michael
Markman, chief of personnel for the New York City Police Department,
says that despite a wide array of services available for everything
from marriage counseling to alcohol abuse and depression, only
about 1% of the officers who need help seek counseling. Still,
many departments are trying to shed light on the problem.
In Los Angeles, police psychologist Debbie Glasser says her department
plans to hire 12 psychologists in the next six months to join
the 10 already on staff. They will work alongside officers in
stations around the city.
''We're hoping that by having all the psychologists out and about
it'll demystify psychology and just make it seem like it's part
of everyday police work,'' she says. ''I tell people it takes
more courage to go get help It's just like calling for back-up.''
traveled to 36 states in four years teaching departments about
the solitude, tearfulness and lethargy that often foretell suicide.
In many ways, it was easier for Sylvia to talk to a stranger about
her emotions than it was the officers who had known her husband
for years.