A Great Falls cop's harrowing account of PTSD

Great Falls Police Sgt. Rich LaBard thought he was having a heart attack, but he didn't call for an ambulance. The next two hours were scrubbed from his memory; he "came to" at his kitchen table. He was holding a duty roster from the Great Falls Police Department and a phone.

LaBard said there were two paths he could have taken. "I was going to take my own life, or I was going to get help."

The officer was "armed to the teeth" and in "complete despair," having suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder for years. The condition led to paranoid nightmares. He obsessed about intruders breaking into his home, so he stashed weapons and ammunition in every room. He "carried religiously" when he left the house.

"There's a difference between thinking of suicide and making a plan," he said.

Perhaps not making a plan prevented him from reaching for a gun during the missing hours that December morning. Instead, he took the path toward help.

LaBard's journey on that path started eight years prior. He was in the right place at the right time. Or the wrong place at the right time, depending on how you look at the situation.

On Aug. 16, 2004, LaBard was on patrol, driving near Wal-Mart just before 5 p.m., when the call came over the radio that a man was in the area of 224 Smelter Ave. N.W. According to Tribune archives, officers found a 21-year-old shooting victim screaming and somewhat coherent on the front lawn of the duplex at that address.

LaBard was the first officer on the scene.

"I was absolutely certain I would get shot crossing the street," he told participants of the GFPD's Citizens' Academy at a recent presentation.

But the fear of being shot wasn't the most traumatic and haunting element of the call.

LaBard and the other officers had to enter the home and locate the shooter. The victim had been shot in the chest at close range. According to witness statements made to police, children were playing in the front yard when the shooter, Donald Marsh, drove up, got out of his car and began loading his gun. LaBard heard the children in the duplex and knew he needed to find the shooter.

He was forced to make a decision that would follow him for years to come. He walked past the victim and into the home. Two other officers arrived in time to make entry with him.

The victim, Marsh's brother-in-law, lived. Marsh had shot himself.

According to later accounts, Marsh was looking for his estranged wife's new boyfriend, and when Marsh learned the boyfriend fled the scene to call for help, he shot himself in the head in the family's kitchen in front of his wife and her roommate. There were four children hidden in the basement of the duplex during the incident.

It took years for LaBard to realize that he carried around tremendous guilt for walking away from the victim and "having nothing to show for it."

There was no critical incident debriefing. It slipped through the cracks. It was a time when PTSD was not on the radar of law enforcement agencies the way it is today.

"What if someone had said, 'You made the right call. It was tough, but you made the right call?'" LaBard posed to the class. "Would it have kept my train on the tracks?"

The officer's derailing was far from immediate.

LaBard was married just days after the shooting. That distraction likely prevented him from processing the incident, from asking for a debriefing or even remembering the details of the call. He had no memory of it.

He described his first PTSD symptom, losing his temper while winterizing a horse trough in 2008, as a "fit of rage."

"This dripping water trough set me ablaze."

From there the physical symptoms compounded. LaBard said his heart was always racing. He masked his temper from his wife and fellow officers at work.

That worked for a couple of years, until watching a TV show triggered a flashback.

LaBard told the class the hardest part about giving his PTSD presentation to fellow officers is admitting he watched "Grey's Anatomy" with his wife. But despite that humorous aside, an episode about an active shooter in a hospital triggered his first flashback.

"If there's anything Hollywood has gotten right, it's a flashback," LaBard said.

He described having tunnel vision at the onset of the flashback, and for the first time since that attempted murder-suicide, he remembered the call. LaBard told the group he had never mentioned the shooting incident to his wife because he didn't remember it. He shared the new memories with her, and she asked him if it really happened. LaBard said he wasn't sure himself.

"Then I did exactly what I shouldn't have done," he said. "I put on my uniform and went to work."

His doubts surrounding his memory prompted the officer to look up the case report about the incident. He read his own account of the shooting. Then the nightmares started.

LaBard later explained that sleep is one of the benchmarks he uses to track his own well-being and the status of fellow officers.

"'How are you sleeping?' is what I ask when I want to have a real talk," he told the group.

Sleep was elusive for LaBard as he lay awake, running scenarios of home invasions and how he would combat this imaginary threat.

The nightmares persisted. So did the physical symptoms. He described tremors fueled by adrenaline. LaBard told the class of his alcohol use. That a beer would calm his shaking limbs and racing heart. He never drank before a shift, but if he wasn't working, he was drinking. And the longer he used alcohol as medication, the more alcohol he needed to mask the effects on his body and mind. Sometimes it helped him sleep.

The next event to trigger more PTSD symptoms came during the early morning hours of March 28, 2010. On the way home from work, LaBard came across a single-vehicle rollover. He painted the picture of a grisly scene: a teenage victim ejected from an unrecognizable car. LaBard was once again alone on a terrible call.

He couldn't provide effective medical treatment and made the decision to look for other victims, fearing there were more teenagers who needed help. There was none.

"I have to walk away from someone else," he recalled telling himself, though that victim also survived.

That incident prompted a new set of paranoid scenarios for the officer to obsess over. He imagined his wife as the victim of a serious crash. LaBard would take an alternate route into work, but even that couldn't prevent the panic attacks, the crying spells.

"Now I'm hiding things at work," he explained. "I always had an excuse."

But despite the raging storm LaBard carried inside, he received the highest performance evaluation of his career in 2011.

"Work was the only place I felt normal," he told the group. "It was easy to hide, but the reality was I was self-destructing."

LaBard stopped participating in recreational activities. He had no sense of security in his life. An identity outside of work is essential to coping, LaBard added later.

He noted that he was always armed, obsessively so, no matter what he was doing.

Then his wife suffered her own traumatic event, threatened in 2011 by a man whose court case is still pending.

"It poured gasoline on the budding fire of paranoia in my head," LaBard said. "Everyone was a threat."

He later learned he was suffering from adrenal fatigue. As soon as his glands produced the adrenaline, they released it, leaving him in a near-constant heightened state. He retreated into his own paranoia. His marriage was suffering.

LaBard had a stress-induced flashback in December 2012, right before he finally called for help. He reached out to the department, and GFPD authorities didn't know how to handle such a serious case. LaBard was placed on leave and an officer sat with him until the appropriate help was found several days later. In was a necessary precaution, given his state of despair and complete loss of security.

Initially, they thought it would take a month to get the officer a counseling appointment. But LaBard saw a therapist within days. He was given medication to help him sleep and function until a more permanent treatment solution was found.

LaBard began outpatient treatment, but it wasn't working. He asked to be hospitalized.

An out-of-state facility offered a two-week inpatient treatment program exclusively for uniformed PTSD patients. There, LaBard met a firefighter from New York who lost the rest of his company in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

The firefighter's case was so similar to LaBard's situation, despite their different backgrounds. Both men were dealing with the aftermath of trauma that occurred years prior to their treatment. Both suffered through the physical and mental symptoms until they finally hit a breaking point. They both completed the treatment program and stay in touch.

"When I got back, the first thing I wanted to do was tell my story," LaBard explained. "Being silent on the subject wasn't working. I wasn't going to be silent one more minute and risk someone taking their own life if I could have given them the information."

Now sharing his story and that vital referral information with fellow officers is LaBard's mission. He returned to duty, eventually taking on the role as PTSD training leader for the GFPD.

"I'm not alone in this," he said. "It's always been happening, we just didn't talk about it."

LaBard's goal is to change police culture and attitude about PTSD and dealing with post-traumatic stress in general. Despite major progress at the GFPD through the implementation of a wellness program that includes a mental health arm, the emphasis on peer-to-peer support and the availability of referral information, the movement will require more than the efforts of one police department.

He noted that some officers are still defensive or resistant, but LaBard seemed pleased with the progress made. So much so that he plans on making presenting and providing referral information his full-time career after he retires.

LaBard regularly shares his toolbox of coping mechanisms and warning signs with new officers, with other law enforcement agencies, military personnel and the family members of officers.

The time LaBard dedicates to training, coaching and researching PTSD inspired Law-Related Education Officer Scott Bambenek to approach him about giving his presentation to the Citizens' Academy group, LaBard's first "all-civilian" audience.

The community outreach program never included a unit about PTSD. Bambenek and LaBard agreed it would go a long way to foster true understanding of officers' work and lives.

"It's the side of law enforcement that people don't generally see," Bambenek said. "They think that we put on the uniform and that we're trained to do this, but there are the emotional toils ... the emotional baggage. That weighs on us."

LaBard tells new officers to expect that emotional weight from time to time.

"You're going to experience post-traumatic stress," LaBard explained. "They have to expect symptoms after trauma."

The difference is now the GFPD is filled with watchful eyes and understanding peers.

The officer has restored much of his life — his marriage, his hobbies — but the ghosts of the past still haunt him from time to time.

"Things are much better than they were a year ago, but I don't know if it will ever be the same."

Reach Tribune Staff Writer Andrea Fisher-Nitschke at 791-6527 or anitschke@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter @GFTrib_Andrea or like Andrea Fisher-Nitschke Great Falls Tribune on Facebook.