TAKE THE TOUR...G'WAN...DO IT

Here's that story my buddy promised...i x-ed out the kids name, but that's it.
read it and...?

----- Original Message -----
From: Cris
To: Rob@depthmarker.com
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 7:45 PM
Subject: tour of duty


Here it is bro. The kid's name was XXX, I remembered it as I was writing.

Some things you remember for the rest of your life. The days and the people on my “tour of duty” still help me learn, continue to influence me, and still haunt me to this day. Before we go into this tale, I have to say that the folks that were on this team during this time are some of the best people I’ve ever known. We placed our lives in each other’s hands, sometime more than once a day. I’ve never felt closer or safer with another team since then.

On this particular day, I was working the day shift, 7-11 during the week. Usually this is not particularly a difficult shift. Mainly it goes pretty smooth. There might be a few problems with kids while they are in school but for the most part the teachers and the dorm staff handled most of the crisis and CSO was only called when needed. Not on this particular day. There were three locked units. By locked, I mean that you had to have a key to get in and out of the unit and they had the capability to lock kids in their own security rooms. They also have your standard burglar bars on the outside plexi-glass windows. This unit permanently housed a particularly nasty group of kids but the staff was very adept at handling this nastiness. The staff on this unit tended to be quite large and had large muscles, especially useful for restraining these nasty kids.

A little background on this young man. We got some preliminary information before he arrived. He had evidently beat the snot out of a night staff with the butt end of a pool cue that fractured the staff’s skull and put them in the hospital. There was definite pre-meditation to this episode and that made this kid even more dangerous. In the course of his stay at our friendly establishment he also broke the nose of one of my team members. Remember, I said they were nasty. Anyway, on the day he was admitted, he was flown in by air ambulance strapped to stretcher and doped up on enough drugs to make Keith Richards wish he was in his place instead. So, anyway, on this day our young man decides to barricade himself in his room. After several failed attempts to negotiate him out of his room, he begins to threaten to kill himself. He did not have, at this point, any access to something to carry out his threat but these kids were often very resourceful. He was able to break out the plexi-glass thus giving him the means to carry out his plan and so negotiation resumed via the window where he also broke the frame to the window. He held us at bay with this metal rod from the window frame and continue to pump himself up into a frenzy. The term in the biz is get ”kronked”. Well, he continued to escalate and finally took the metal rod and cut himself on the crease where his arm bends. You know the place where they take blood to get at a vein? As soon as he did this two things happened. First, he spewed blood like the fountains at the Bellagio, second the staff and I tore the burglar bars off the hinges so we could jump through the window. He went in first with me behind him. He got a hold of the kid so he wouldn’t do any more damage and I applied direct pressure to his arm. At this point there is blood spray from the floor all the way to the ceiling and on me and the staff. 911 is called and the ambulance hauls the kid off to the ER. We had thought at the time the kid had hit a vein, come to find out, his BP was cranked up so high at the time he cut himself it was like slicing open a tick the size of a quarter. Meanwhile, I begin the documentation process to protect myself and the agency’s ass. Later that day I did get to laugh about the ordeal when I showed up to teach a bunch of newbies the class on how to de-escalate these types of situations and how to safely restrain a kid. I walked through the door still with blood splatter covering my jeans and shirt. Most of the class had second thoughts about me and working there at least until class was over...but that’s another story.

Thanks for letting me share a bit of my “tour”.

No Cris...Thank you for sharing.