It is a safe bet there are millions of families across the United States that can vividly recall the time law enforcement officers showed up on their doorstep to deliver them the most painful words of their lives: Someone they love is dead.
It happened to a mother in 2008 when Wilmington police detectives knocked on her door to break the news that her 19-year-old son, Daryon Walker, had been murdered.
Something similar happened a few months later, when the city's chief of police rang the door bell at the home of Officer Richard Matthews, 28, informing his wife that her husband was killed when his patrol car swerved off the road and crashed into a tree.
And more recently, a state trooper joined a chaplain to tell a family that their husband and father, Georg Anderl, died when a vehicle lost control and hit the 53-year-old while he jogged through the city.
Ask any law enforcement officer, and they will probably say that advising people of a death in the family, a process known as death notification, is the hardest part of their job.
"I hate it. I honestly despise that part of my position -- with a passion," said Sgt. Shannon Whaley, a trooper with the N.C. Highway Patrol.
Victims support advocates increasingly have focused attention on instructing officers to handle such emotionally trying moments in a way that will help the bereaved cope with their loss and avoid adding to their grief.
Part of the difficulty rests in the fact that officers are keenly aware of the usually unexpected blow they are about to deliver.
"You might not remember the first kiss you ever got or the first date you ever went on ... But I can guarantee you that my image, and I'm pretty ugly, is forever burned and etched in people's memories because I was the vehicle that brought them this news," said Joseph Morgan, an assistant professor at North Georgia College and State University who worked more than two decades as a medical examiner.
By his count, he has brought more than 1,000 families that heart-wrenching message.
While there is still a dearth of training opportunities, programs offered by nonprofit groups and colleges where officers can work on their victims support skills have sprung up around the country.
Departments across North Carolina are increasingly instituting some version of a victim services unit, with staff knowledgeable in assisting the bereaved, said George Erwin Jr., director of the N.C. Association of Chiefs of Police. Budget constraints, however, have slowed that trend, he added.
Where officers have traditionally learned how to dispense unwelcome news to families by watching their superiors do it, more law enforcement academies are now reserving time to address the issue of death notification.
Interviews with experts and police officers across the state and country show that the practice of informing families of a loss is an art subject to an array of unforeseeable and unpredictable circumstances. The officer's personality plays a big role. And training them how to handle the fallout does not always ensure the process will unfold smoothly.
For one thing, officers never know how the recipient is going to react.
In Morgan's career as a medical examiner, for example, he has been bitten, punched and called a murderer by families lashing out in grief. On the other hand, he once told a wife that her husband had died from a heart attack while with a prostitute. She was so happy about her husband's passing, she planned a party and sent Morgan an invitation.
But most of the time, families' reactions are far more painful.
"There's no set response," said Wilmington Police Chief Ralph Evangelous. "I've seen them totally collapse. I saw one person go into convulsions."
In one recently publicized case that underscored how even a proper notification can go awry, a mother in New York only found out that her 16-year-old son had died when she saw a post on Facebook. The son was a football player and fatally injured after colliding with another player during a Friday night game.
The police notified the father, who had been estranged from Barden, and never passed along the information, Cortland County Coroner Kevin Sharp, who handled the case, said in a phone interview.
In the case of homicides, another issue sometimes arises over the fact that investigators must rule out family members as suspects and extract information from them.
"Trying to do that when someone is not of right-mind is very difficult," said Detective K.J. Tully, a violent crimes investigator in Wilmington. "But in an investigative sense, it's also a good time, because they want revenge so ... they're quick to give information."
The Wilmington Police Department stands out among law enforcement agencies for having a written policy stressing empathy when relaying death information to the family. Officers are also instructed to, when possible, bring a clergy, chaplain, relative or close friend of the family when delivering the news.
Like other metropolitan departments, however, Wilmington's does not have a dedicated victim services unit.
The emphasis on training comes after several instances of authorities in different parts of the country exhibited indifference to the surviving family.
Emil Moldovan, an adjunct professor at Radford University, noted some of those examples in a guide to death notification entitled "The Bad News Bearers." He referred to one officer who taped a yellow sticky note to the front door telling the family to phone the morgue because their daughter was dead.
In another, a medical examiner's employee called a father and said his son had died in a vehicle fire. The news gave the father a fatal heart attack.
That kind of behavior reflects negatively on the messenger and the department they represent, experts said.
"When they're informed poorly, not only do they continue with the agony that their loved one has died, but they just get totally stuck on how they were notified," said Jan Withers, the national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which holds notification training seminars around the county. "They're not moving forward in their grief journey."
Withers said the officer who told her that her daughter was killed by someone driving under the influence in 1992 was courteous. She said that helped her cope in a "very traumatic time."
The officer, she said, answered all her questions and kept her informed.
"I consider him a hero. He was kind of like my angel," she added.
Proper death notifications are usually conducted by two people, which sometimes includes a chaplain, experts say. They are done in person. And the message should be direct, though delivered with compassion.
"Use the word died. Don't beat around the bush," said Patti Anewalt, a thanatology fellow at the Association for Death Education and Counseling. "It sounds cruel, but it's very clear." e_SClBExperts also suggest that officers hang around to answer questions, call other family members or friends so they might come over to offer support, and put them in touch in community service providers.
Still, officers know, nothing will make the task easy.
"No one has ever thanked me for telling them their kid's dead," Tully said.
Copyright 2011 - Star-News, Wilmington, N.C.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
