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SALT LAKE CITY — The family of a man shot and killed by Salt Lake City Police 13 years ago says they have made their peace and have forgiven. They know the officers who used deadly force are forever changed.
Before reaching out to them, Lilian Newey told herself that she needed a new mindset, free of anger.
“For years, I prayed that I wanted to know exactly what had happened,” she said.
But when she found the police officers involved in her brother’s fatal shooting, Newey said she didn’t need all of the answers. They wouldn’t bring Edgar Hernandez back.
The Salt Lake City Police Department won’t let those officers talk on-record while investigating another officer involved shooting. But Newey found the first officer patrolling the streets.
“His face looked like it had aged 20 years. His hair had gone grey,” she said. “I walked up to him and said, ‘I’m Edgar Hernandez’s sister.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I know.’”
That officer apologized for that fateful 2001 evening. She found the second officer in a school.
“He says, ‘I am now working with the youth because I cannot see one more person die the way your brother did.’”
Newey says the third works in impound, too grief-stricken for any other duty after a split-second, life-altering decision.
That’s a feeling Mark Zelig, Ph.D., understands all too well.
“It’s going to take them a-third of a second, on average, for their brain to make the decision to pull the trigger,” he said.
Zelig has a practice in Cottonwood Heights. He retired as a lieutenant from Salt Lake City 13 years ago. He specializes in counselling police, whom he calls “reactors” in dangerous situations.
“They focus on the central events, to the exclusion of the peripheral events that may turn out to be important,” Zelig said.
Zelig even sees officers’ families, and urges access to them.
“They actually receive more flak, or are more frightened or traumatized than the officer involved in the event,” he said. After all, they almost lost a spouse, a parent, a sibling.
And Zelig counsels on the concept of “suicide by cop”, where the distraught seek to have police end their lives.
“It’s just unfortunate that they can’t find a more appropriate and more effective therapeutic modality,” he said.
In counselling, Zelig tells his police clients that their experiences are normal, and that their sessions won’t be used against them.
Newey believes Hernandez chose that ending and the family accepts that this would have been inevitable.
