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Group marks 25 years of victim advocacy

News Photo by Julie Riddle Diane Sims, left, and Tasha Lockhart look at a memory album in Sims’ Alpena home on Wednesday as standard poodle Jojo looks on.

ALPENA — As newspaper clippings slipped out of photo albums in Diane Sims’ living room, stories poured from two members of the Alpena County Sheriff’s Office Victim Services Unit.

The clippings’ tragic headlines — crashes, drownings, fires, infant deaths — trace the history of the group that this year marks 25 years of helping people in their darkest moments in Alpena County and the surrounding area.

Victim advocates appear when someone needs help coping with the shocking heartbreak of unexpected loss or violence, helping victims and families through the numbness and disorientation that comes with unimaginable hurt.

Sims and fellow Victim Services Unit member Tasha Lockhart on Wednesday flipped through albums depicting the group’s work over the past 25 years, recalling why they do what they do.

They sit by the bereaved, explain what to do next, and stay strong in the middle of horror because the people they are helping don’t have that option, Sims said.

“They’re like, ‘Somebody, please take control of this, because I can’t,'” Sims said. “So, you’re that person.”

‘IT COULD BE ANYTHING’

When victim services members get a call from police or a 911 dispatcher, whether in the middle of the night or the middle of the grocery store, the advocates drop everything and go.

On scene, they may find a crumpled vehicle, a suicide, a child about to be taken off a ventilator.

They may steer away stunned family members left standing around a body, overlooked by officers intent on their job.

Advocates act as middlemen between survivors and police or the medical examiner, walking survivors through the myriad what-next steps — who to tell, who to call, what to do.

Over Easter weekend this year, Sims and Lockhart were called to four back-to-back deaths — a suicide by shooting, a suicide by hanging, a fatal crash, another hanging.

Lately, they have responded to too many self-inflicted deaths of young people — distressed and unable to look beyond the present — and of elderly people tired of their loneliness and worried about being a burden to their caretakers, Sims said.

Victim advocacy could mean running to a restaurant to pick up a pile of pizzas for exhausted firefighters at a structure fire or serving as traffic control to keep curious residents away from a crime scene.

Or, it could mean sitting with a speechless, bereaved spouse or parent as firefighters or police search for a body.

“It could be anything,” Lockhart said. “I don’t think there’s anything we haven’t seen.”

‘YOU DON’T GO TO SLEEP’

Fatal crashes and other unexpected deaths traumatize not just victims but everyone on scene.

Victim advocates organize debriefings after the toughest calls, encouraging police officers, firefighters, and medical responders to talk to one another, giving voice to the heartache and horrific details their families don’t want to hear.

You can’t go home and tell your spouse and kids about the body mangled in a crash, Sims said.

You can’t describe walking into a room to see a teenager — maybe someone you know — dead by hanging.

You can’t talk about the effects of death by shotgun, or the cleanup that comes afterward so the family doesn’t have to see it.

Your family doesn’t want to hear how you sat with a woman for hours, waiting for the funeral home workers to arrive, as her husband lay under a sheet on the floor in front of you.

They don’t want to know what it’s like to help place a child in a body bag because the medical worker is devastated and can’t do it alone, or how it feels to remove the child’s hair ribbons or clothes to give the parents something to hang on to.

Adrenaline and the desperate eyes looking to them for help keep victim advocates calm, no matter what they see or how much pain they encounter.

“On the way home, it hits you what you just did,” Sims said. “You get home, you scream, you holler. You certainly don’t go to sleep.”

‘NEVER AGAIN’

Some calls they think about late at night, years later.

The 4-year-old wandering outside the vehicle from which he had been thrown, unable to understand that his parents, grandmother, and siblings had just been killed by a drunk driver.

The call to an out-of-state mother, telling her to buy a plane ticket home because her son had ended his life.

The sweltering trailer where a man lay, dead of an overdose, on the floor, a pot of meth still warm on the stove.

The young wife’s scream as she dropped to the floor in front of the police officer on her doorstep.

“That’s the cry I never want to hear again,” Lockhart said, eyes lingering on a faded news headline.

‘I WANT SOMEBODY TO BE THERE’

Thank-you cards are tacked among the clippings in Sims’ albums, reminders of the people the advocates will never forget.

Sometimes, perhaps in the grocery store, they see people with whom they sat for hours beside a hospital bed or near a crushed vehicle or at a kitchen table.

Those encounters resurrect a twinge of heartache on both sides, the women said.

The work hurts, but advocates can’t let that hurt turn them away, because they know how much people need them, Lockhart said.

If her husband, her children, ever faced a devastating loss, “I want somebody to be there to help them,” she said, chin trembling.

Anyone can call 911, any time, and request the help of a victim advocate, Sims said.

“All they have to do is call us,” she said. “And we will be there.”

Julie Riddle can be reached at 989-358-5693 or jriddle@thealpenanews.com. Follow her on Twitter @jriddleX.

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