Special training helps Rockville Centre officers prevent suicides
A Rockville Centre officer used special training to help talk a suicidal man off the ledge of a building.
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Sgt. Joe Burnside, of the Rockville Centre Police Department, was called to a building with a suicidal man on a rooftop over the summer.
Burnside was four stories up and standing about 25 feet away from the man in distress when he used training he had undergone to try to talk the man off the ledge.
After about 40 minutes, the man stepped back, which Burnside said was “a huge sigh of relief.”
The training that Burnside had completed due to to the Ryan Patrick O’Shea Foundation.
O’Shea was a Rockville Centre teen who killed himself. In his honor, his parents started a foundation in his name, with the goal of preventing others from committing suicide.
The foundation facilitated Burnside's training at the Rockville Centre Police Department.
The training is LivingWorks “ASIST,” which stands for Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training.
Burnside said the training “absolutely helped” him in the tense situation.
Ryan O’Shea’s father, John, described Ryan as “an amazing young man,” who helped many people.
He said he wishes his son had had the tools to understand and help himself “out of the place he was in on that day.”
