Newtown's Police Officers Are Already Showing Signs of PTSD

Newtown's Police Officers Are Already Showing Signs of PTSD
Slate.com
By Josh Voorhees
Jan. 29, 2013

The New York Times has a rather haunting piece in today's paper based on interviews with seven Newtown police officers who were among the first responders to last month's massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. The account they provide, as the Times rightly puts it, is "filled with ghastly moments and details, and a few faint instances of hope."

The report also highlights a secondary issue at play, one that is easy to lose sight of during the heated debate over gun control and safety that is now going on across the nation: Namely, the absolute hell that Newtown's police officers, many of them parents themselves, went through, and very well may continue to go through for the rest of their lives after seeing what they did on Dec. 14.

"One look, and your life was absolutely changed," Michael McGowan, one of the first officers to arrive at the school, told the paper. Another recounted how, two weeks later, he began to sob uncontrollably after driving by a roadside memorial. "I just lost it right there, I couldn't even drive," Jason Frank said. "Words can’t describe how horrible it was," said a third officer, Joe Joudy, one of the detectives who was tasked with the unenviable job of spending nearly a week collecting and inventorying every piece of evidence from the crime scene.
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