Behind the Badge
Officers Trae Cierzan and Justin Henry from the Fort Worth Police Department in Texas are being praised for how they handled an anonymous woman’s suicide attempt.
As soon as the officers arrived on scene after receiving a call about a possible suicidal person on a highway bridge, a woman got out of her car and climbed onto a ledge.
In a dashcam video released on the department’s Facebook page you can hear Henry say, “Don’t do it!” while slowly approaching the woman and asking for her name.
“We tried to get her to talk to us,” Cierzan said during a news conference. Henry added, “We let our training take over.”
In the video you can hear the woman cry out, “It doesn’t matter!” to which Henry quickly responded, “It does matter!”
While both officers slowly moved toward the woman from different directions, Henry is repeatedly heard asking the woman to get down from the ledge.
Then, within seconds, the two officers were able to grab the woman by her arm and pull her safely off the ledge.
“We’re going to get you some help,” Henry tells the woman as he gently puts her in the back of their patrol car.
When reflecting on the event later, Henry said. “We were scared because (a) storm was coming, it was windy and we didn’t know what was going to happen.”
“I took a deep breath,” Cierzan said afterward. “This is way we are supposed to do [things].”
“We both are happy on how it ended…We were at the right place at the right time,” Henry said.
