Retired NYPD detective Lou Yero was so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed on the job that he started drinking, eventually holding a loaded gun to his head.
“And then I looked in the mirror and saw my son’s room,” Yero recalled last week at the first seminar of a group dedicated to helping traumatized police officers. “I said, ‘I can’t let my son find me.’ I even unloaded my gun, but then I reloaded it.”
He never pulled the trigger, Yero said at the Staten Island meeting.
Instead, he turned to the Police Peer Assistance Organization, a nonprofit organization focused on helping police officers cope with their harrowing experiences.
“They saved my life,” Yero said at POPPA’s two-day seminar.
More than 50 police officers, detectives, sergeants and lieutenants attended the seminar, which came after the suicides of at least three police officers last year, including a veteran detective who committed suicide inside his Queens home.
In April 2021, two other policemen also took their own lives, one inside his Manhattan apartment and the other, a NYPD precinct commander, in your department vehicle.
In 2019, 10 city police officers committed suicide.
POPPA said it plans to hold more seminars for those in need.
For Yero, his trauma stemmed from the horrific cases he worked on.
Just one day before Thanksgiving 2009, the veteran police officer worked a case in which a 2-month-old boy was found buried in a concrete container.
In 2011, he investigated the case of a missing 8-year-old boy whose body was found in a suitcase and the boy’s feet inside a freezer, he told the POPPA audience.
“I started drinking more every day, as soon as I got home from work,” he said. “I got to the point where I gained weight. My suits didn’t fit. I had high blood pressure, cholesterol and became diabetic. Things were bad at home.”
Founded in 1996, POPPA puts traumatized police officers like Yero in contact with mental health professionals, literally saving their lives. He also relies on specially trained volunteer officers and ex-cops to help his Finest comrades.
“Police officers are exposed to horrific incidents every day,” Dr. Jennifer Taylor, a clinical psychologist, told the seminar. “It can be overwhelming. We try to help them cope with the situation. We look for red flags.
“We look for signs of PTSD, we ask if there have been any changes in their eating and sleeping habits,” Taylor said. “You have to get over the stigma of seeking help.”
POPPA Director John Petrullo, a retired NYPD officer, said the group gets 600 to 700 calls each year from active cops, and hundreds more from retired cops.
The department averages four or five suicides each year, he said.
“We hope to teach participants how to take better care of themselves, deal with stress, learn to separate their work from their outside life,” Petrullo said.
“We are dealing with a mental health resistant population,” he said. “We have to try to make them understand that it is okay to seek and get help.”
Brooke DiPalma said she still remembers the last time she saw her father, then a police officer, one of hundreds of department officers who battled trauma.
Then, at just 14 years old, DiPalma said, her dad dropped her off at school on April 23, 2010, saying, ‘I love you.’ She told him, “I love you back.”
He ran into school and never saw his father alive again. She was taken out of class at 11 am and told that her father had committed suicide.
I was in shock,” DiPalma, who spoke at the seminar, told The Post. “The whole family, his friends were in shock. How could this happen? My father loved having a party. He was the life of the party, wherever he did, he did what he did. I was totally distraught for months.”
Seven months later, DiPalma, remembering her father’s last words, joined with her classmates to create “PS I Love You Day,” which is celebrated on the second Friday in February to combat bullying, depression, and, ultimately suicide.
A young police officer recalled at the seminar receiving a call from a fellow officer who wanted to talk, but she didn’t have time to talk as she was boarding a plane out of town.
“When I came back a week later, I found out he killed himself,” he said. “I feel terrible. Maybe if I had talked to him I could have helped him. POPPA helped me with that.
“I have met policemen who thought about committing suicide and POPPA helped them,” he added. “I know firsthand how they have helped me and others. We have a stressful job and sometimes you need outside help.”
Retired NYPD Lt. Rich Mack, a POPPA peer support officer, said he joined the group after a police officer friend involved in a shooting became distraught.
“I’ve also met police officers who needed help and never got it — their problems escalated and they got into more trouble, and some were fired,” Mack said. “Things could have turned out differently if they had had help.
“I’ve met people with drinking problems,” he said. “I have talked to close to 200 people and during 9/11 I helped close to 1,000 police officers.”
Police officers seeking help can contact POPPA at 1-800-COPSCOP.
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