The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of SIU at Carbondale. Except during vacations and exam weeks, The Daily Egyptian is published Monday through Friday during the fall and spring semesters and TWThF during the summer semester."

Carbondale Police chaplain helps people cope

When Carbondale City Manager Jeff Doherty was interviewing police officers for the position of Chief, he asked them to name the most significant event of their career. The man who was eventually selected, Steve Odum, easily recalled his response to that question.

"The Pyramid fire," he said, referring to a suspected arson in 1992 that claimed the lives of five SIUC students at an apartment building on Oak Street. Odum said he was one of first officers on the scene, and when he arrived, he saw people leaping headfirst from third floor windows to escape the flames.

"I'll always remember the sound those people made when they hit the pavement," he said.

For most of the veteran officers being interviewed, the most significant event in their career was an incidence of trauma or tragedy.

When tragedy strikes in Carbondale, Rev. Bob Gray usually arrives soon afterward to help people cope. As chaplain for the Carbondale and University police departments, he serves as a counselor for police officers, students and citizens.

He helped police officers, firefighters and other first responders deal with the aftermath of the Pyramid apartment building fire and assists in organizing debriefings, which are closed and confidential meetings where police officers, firefighters and any other emergency service personnel can openly discuss the incident and how it affected them.

SIUC Director of Public Safety Todd Sigler said he can't say exactly what Gray does during the debriefings, but knows the meetings are effective.

"What's said there stays there, but people come out saying 'I'm glad I went,'" Sigler said.

In March 1995, Carbondale police officers, serving a search warrant at a house on Hester Street, fatally shot a man who pointed a sawed-off shotgun at them. Gray went to talk to the officers who fired their weapons.

"After firing their weapons, the officers can't talk to anybody until the state investigators arrive, not even their families," Gray said. "But they can talk to me."

Gray said he called the officers' families to tell them there had been an incident with shots fired, but the officers were all right.

During the search for Brent Johnson, the former SIUC student who drowned during a camping trip with the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, Gray spent four days at Cedar Lake. He tended to Johnson's family, and accompanied them to the hospital after Johnson's body was found.

In the early1990s, when Carbondale's notorious Halloween celebrations were still drawing about 3,000 people, Gray began helping with crowd control. He used what he calls the "Virginia Beach" model, a system developed to help with large beach parties.

Gray and a group of about 10 other pastors put on caps identifying them as chaplains and circulated through the crowd confiscating beer bottles before they could be thrown, or before their owners were arrested.

"They were more than happy to give them up to avoid spending the night in jail," Gray said. "Sometimes I would collect more than 100 beer bottles."

Sigler said this is an important aspect of law enforcement that usually goes unnoticed by the media. The number of arrests made during an event is usually reported, Sigler said, but arrests avoided through the work of chaplains "don't get measured and don't get reported on."

When Gray was six years old, his father committed suicide. He said he never received any counseling.

Living through that pain made him a better pastor and a better counselor, he said.

"It made me more caring," he said. "I think God is in the business of taking disasters and turning them into something positive."

One of Gray's duties is to serve as a professional bearer of bad news. If a member of an SIUC student's family dies, Gray is the one who notifies the student. He had made two such notifications this week.

Even though he performs this duty frequently, he said it never gets any easier.

"I don't think it's supposed to," he said. "I stop outside the door, say a prayer and remember that Paul said 'When I come to you, I come with fear and trembling on my lips.' It's okay for me to feel hurt. I will shed a tear sometimes."

 

 

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