Leaning forward at a 45-degree angle, a teenage boy took rapid breaths as his eyes honed in on the asphalt below. Only his heels and two fingers holding a cyclone fence kept him on the pedestrian bridge over state Highway 500.
“It was, like, really close to him letting go,” Vancouver Police Cpl. Duane Boynton said. “It was very evident that this person was intending to jump.”
Boynton is a team leader on the regional crisis negotiation team that responded to the bridge near Northeast 42nd Avenue and Falk Road on March 11. After nearly four hours of negotiations with the boy, the team would eventually convince him to come down safely.
But like others with whom the team has worked, including a man less than a week before that, the boy could have easily followed through with his tragic intentions.
After climbing over the fence earlier, the boy was situated near the middle of the bridge on the westbound side and facing east. After ensuring the boy was not carrying a weapon, Boynton approached him from the other side of the fence and began speaking with him from a couple of feet away.
“If you can get though that and actually have a conversation, get them to realize, like, this person that I’m talking to, he’s a normal guy just like my mom or my dad or my friend,” Boynton said. “He just simply wears a uniform and represents the police.”
The crisis negotiation team consists of four officers from the Vancouver Police Department, three from the Clark County Sheriff’s Office and one from the Battle Ground Police Department.
Boynton has spent 30 years with the department and nearly 20 years as a crisis negotiator. As a team leader, he directs other members who serve differing roles in monthly trainings and active scenes. Boynton, who works out of the department’s administrative office, is called to a scene about once per week.
Primary negotiators speak with the subject while a secondary negotiator aids the primary and takes over if the conversation takes a bad turn. Meanwhile, intelligence officers research information that would help the negotiators, and scribes take detailed notes of the negotiations and document items found during research. Those roles are not rigid, even in the middle of an active scene.
During the bridge incident, Boynton was the primary negotiator. His job that day: establish trust, offer empathy and convince the boy to spare himself.
“Rapport comes a lot of different ways,” Boynton said. “So it’s just trying to be engaging. I think people see through what you typically stereotype as a police officer and how you perceive them to talk to people.”
Part of that rapport building comes from identifying what crisis negotiators call hooks — topics that would most likely lead the person to trust police — and triggers — taboo subjects.
Boynton was called to a scene one time, for instance, on a Sunday as he was watching a football game. While speaking to the subject on the phone, Boynton heard the same game playing in the background, prompting a discussion of their mutual interest in football.
“When you truly see what the focus of somebody is and truly build that rapport, you can see it and you can feel it,” Boynton said.
The teen on the bridge had recently done something he was ashamed of and was subjected to threats and taunting.
But the action was not illegal. After explaining that to the boy, the conversation shifted from speaking about his fear of going to jail to his internal guilt.
“He said, ‘Well, that’s my conscience. That’s my own morals and values,'” Boynton said. “I told him, ‘Knowing that you have those morals and values, even if it’s not against the law, should mean something to you.'”
Demonstrating that people cared about the boy was also a focus point, and on that day, Boynton received some unexpected help. At one point during the negotiation, when he went to retrieve something from his car, a woman approached him, sobbing.
The woman didn’t know the specifics of the situation, but she handed him a bracelet with a phone number to a suicide hotline and asked him to tell the boy that someone cared. Boynton returned to the teen to tell him the story, promising to give him the bracelet when he came down.
The boy began to cry.
“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Boynton told the boy several times. “If you jump, I want you to know that at the end of the day, I go home and put on jeans and a T-shirt just like your mom and dad, and I’m not human if that doesn’t bother me. So you’re leaving me with something I have to see and deal with and maybe take time off from work to deal with.”
That statement, like every statement Boynton has made during crisis situations, was true, he said. Once, for example, a man holding a gun to his head during a standoff asked to be placed in a specific place in jail if he were to surrender. Boynton called jail officials, who agreed to grant the request.
“Sometimes it involves extra work, but it definitely builds credibility,” Boynton said. “If you lie to them, what’s to say that they’re not going to be in that same situation six months from now and they’re going to remember the cop that lied to them?”
Despite traffic being closed in both directions of the highway for several hours, police were prepared to speak with the boy until he was willing to safely descend.
“You’re in control of what the end result is in this situation,” Boynton said he told the boy. “You know what, if you feel this way in a week, what prevents you from coming right back up here on this bridge? But my guess is you’re going to have some ups and downs over the next week, and you’re going to start be able to compartmentalize this a little and deal with this. And we can help you do that, but we need to get you down off the bridge in order to give you some of those resources.”
That control can also end in tragedy.
On March 5, six days before the bridge negotiation, sheriff’s deputies responded to a disturbance on the 15300 block of Northeast 10th Avenue in Salmon Creek. Elizabeth Volker had called 911 to report a disturbance involving her boyfriend, Lee Mackey, inside their fifth-wheel trailer.
When two sheriff’s deputies arrived, they found Volker standing down the street before approaching the trailer. As they came within 10 feet, they heard a shot ring out, followed by another one a few seconds later, Volker said.
“I kept telling them, ‘I think he’s gone. I think he’s gone,” Volker said. “I just know.”
Southwest Washington Regional SWAT arrived after that. As is the case with any SWAT callout, the regional crisis team arrived, as well.
“We kind of have that in the back of our minds, that, ‘Hey, we may be talking to someone who is deceased,’ but will still need to complete the process,” Boynton said.
As Boynton worked from a command center down the street, other negotiators were attempting to contact the man from inside an armored vehicle near the trailer.
“Hey, it’s the police. We’re here to help you,” a negotiator repeatedly said over a public address system.
But speaking from an armored car makes conversation impractical, Boynton said. As another officer spoke to Volker to gather intelligence, she was asked how to best contact Mackey on the phone.
“If we can get them on the phone, most of the time, we can get them out,” Boynton said.
But that never happened.
Volker, 36, was also asked about Mackey’s personality, what happened that day and prior criminal history.
Volker, who dated Mackey for several years before moving in together in May 2017, said Mackey, 57, was charismatic. He enjoyed making people feel at ease and had a sensitive, caring side.
Mackey had been to jail previously for a domestic violence incident and did not want to return, Volker said. The physical disturbance, after a lengthy verbal fight that culminated with a scuffle over car keys, was the first of its kind between them, she said.
Mackey also had been dealing with health problems recently, Volker said. He often could only eat one meal per day, which reminded him of the difficulty of caring for his ill father, Volker said.
Mackey had previously discussed killing himself if his health diminished to a certain point, so Volker was not expecting much of a negotiation with police, she said.
“He didn’t want to put anyone through that with him,” Volker said. “I think he always had in his mind how far he would go in certain circumstances.”
Still, the negotiation team attempted to contact him for a couple of hours.
“They did everything under the sun to get in there, treating it as a barricaded process,” Volker said.
Boynton said the team’s ultimate goal is to avoid use of force. He differentiated, however, between the typical calls the team responds to and ones that involve use of force before they arrive.
“A guy with a gun out in public is a lot different than a person that’s committed a crime with a gun that’s in their house alone,” Boynton said. “In one, you can have pretty easy containment. In the other, you have to protect the general public.”
The March 5 standoff was a more typical call for the team. But after words failed, the team needed to consider various factors, including the lack of a response from Mackey and officer fatigue, Boynton said.
A decision was made to have police forcefully enter the trailer. The various tactics used to entice the man to potentially leave the house combined with the damage from the entry caused more than $25,000 in damage, Volker said. She said the trailer was “totaled.”
“It just feels like it was a little more invasive than it needed to be,” Volker said.
Volker believed she would be covered by insurance, but Mackey had failed to renew it when it expired despite telling her otherwise, she said. Over the past few weeks, Volker has had a lot to ponder, question and doubt.
“It was a pretty traumatic event for me. I lost him and I lost my home,” Volker said. “In some ways, it wasn’t a surprise that he would go this way. The surprise is that it would be now.”
Six days later, negotiators were attempting to prevent another tragedy, but Boynton was becoming worried. Other people in the boy’s situation have accidentally fallen after becoming tired or cold.
About an hour after police arrived, the teen agreed to let firefighters raise a ladder from an engine to the bridge but still a few feet away from him. The boy agreed to move closer to the ladder and, eventually, sat on a top rung.
“Then I’m like, ‘Okay, now I feel better,’ because at least he has a little more stable platform,” Boynton said.
The teen was still in control of the situation, and Boynton had already promised not to pull any tricks such as lowering the ladder. He also assured the teen he would not be tackled, handcuffed or subjected to a stun gun, some common fears for people who decide not to jump, Boynton said.
About a half hour after sitting down, the boy asked for someone close to him to come and speak to him. Boynton agreed after the boy promised not to jump while that person was present.
When the person arrived, negotiators coached her on how to speak to him in a way that wouldn’t trigger harmful emotions. As she prepared to speak, the boy climbed halfway down the ladder.
Then, looking up at him, she spoke for a couple of minutes to reassure him that she cared for him and wanted him to come down.
When that was over, the boy put his head down, began to cry and descended the rest of the way down the ladder. He then was taken by police to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.
The feeling Boynton and negotiators experienced when the boy’s feet touched the ground, and when the corporal handed him the bracelet, is the most fulfilling aspect of his job, Boynton said.
“They chose to live because I was there and I was able to talk to them and build a rapport,” Boynton said. “I think I will leave police work at some point knowing that was the most rewarding aspect I had in my career.”
