By Ryan Flynn
New Haven Register
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Ready to jump off a bridge and end his life Thursday morning, a man dialed 911.
“I’m looking over the railing,” the man told a New Haven dispatcher. “I’m gonna let myself go.”
On the other end of the line was Angela Watley, a New Haven 911 operator and dispatcher. In her 20 years working in dispatch, Watley said she’s had about two potential suicide calls. But neither had been to this extent, she said, where someone was this close to harming themselves.
This time, it was the last hour of Watley’s shift. The call came in at 5:48 a.m. She was one of six or seven people in the dispatch nerve center that night. The caller was calm, speaking in a somber voice and slightly slurring his words. Early in the call, he asked her to pass on a message for him.
“Can you just tell my brother that I love him?” he said.
The caller, who is not being named, was on a bridge near New Haven’s fire training academy, on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. He told Watley he’d been up all night thinking of ways he could kill himself.
Watley relied on her training, which over the years has become like muscle memory. Dispatchers have cheat sheets at their disposal, listing a step-by-step guide for any emergency, from domestic disturbances to vehicle fires, burglaries to an active shooter. To hear Watley describe it, handling a situation like this was more art than science. She hit all the steps in the guide, albeit in a different order.
Early on, Watley probed for a connection to latch onto, some sort of commonality that would build rapport between herself and the caller.
“You’ve got to kind of feel the person out. You can’t use the same thinking all the time,” Watley said.
She spoke in a calm voice, doing her best to be as empathetic toward the man as she could. The man’s 51st birthday was in a few days, and Watley, too, had a birthday coming up. She asked about his siblings, but never conceded that she’d carry the message he requested for his brother.
“I’m trying to put something in his mind to keep him alive, keep him going,” she said.
Michael Briscoe, director of public safety communications for the city, estimated that his dispatchers receive 10 or fewer of these type of calls from potentially suicidal people in a given year. However, when in that situation, a dispatcher must seize the moment and make a connection with the caller, to control the flow of the conversation and help dictate what happens, he said.
“It has to be authentic. The person really has to feel like you really care about them,” Briscoe said.
Watley appeared to do just that. When the caller referred to her as Angela, she corrected him. Angie, she said. That’s what my friends call me, she said.
Speaking into a headset, Watley remained on the phone with the caller when the police arrived. She kept him engaged, sometimes repeating commands she heard the police give. She remained with him when firefighters responded with a ladder to help him down.
“You’ve got to help them help you,” she said.
Watley had told the caller they could celebrate their birthdays together. When the caller said he was going to fall and break his leg while being helped by firefighters, Watley said “if you break your leg we can’t dance.” Watley said she could picture the smile on his face when she said that.
She didn’t hang up until the man was actually in the fireman’s arms. He was helped down and taken from the scene by ambulance. With her shift over, Watley headed to the scene. She’d been calm throughout, but she finally let out her emotions when she saw where it all went down. Watley said she cried to a police officer on scene.
“He just held me like a little baby on his shoulder,” she said.
On the way home, she stopped by the hospital, but was denied a chance to meet the man, since he was already in the ICU.
“I’ll get to meet him someday. Or maybe I won’t,” she said.
Briscoe said that a dispatcher has to have “it” to handle this sort of situation, an ability to rise to the occasion and use the training they were given.
“You hear that with police and firemen all the time: ‘we just relied on our training.’ And that’s what she did here. She relied on that,” Briscoe said.
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