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 Contact information for Dr. Metz:Sara Metz, PsyDPublic Safety PsychologistCode-4 CounselingFacebook (@code4counselingllc)Code-4 Counseling YouTube channel videosEpisode 30: Emotional Responsibility for Each OtherAn important discussion on emotional responsibility for your fellow first responders.Bill Godfrey:Welcome back to our next podcast. Thanks for joining us. You're back with the Active Shooter Incident Management podcast series. Now a few weeks ago, we recorded a podcast on what we called an Emotionally Responsible Room Entry. And that subject came up specifically from one incident where responders made... Well Robert, how would you put that?Robert McMahan:There was a lot of dynamics during some of those entries that were causing problems for people that were in those rooms. And we got some negative feedback from some of the students and teachers following that incident.Bill Godfrey:So essentially that podcast, which if you haven't heard it, please go back and give it a listen, was about how to make some adjustments to the way we handle these calls so that we're not scaring the hell out of kids, not to put too fine a point on it. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. At the tail end of that podcast, we drifted a little into talking about the emotional responsibility for each other as responders. And if you've heard that podcast, you know Harry and Robert were on that with me and I've asked them to join us again. Harry, thanks for being back again today.Harry Jimenez:Thank you, Bill, happy to be here.Bill Godfrey:And Robert, thank you for coming in again. I know you've already said hello to the group. But we have also asked a special guest to join us by phone today. So on the phone, we've got Dr. Sara Metz. Now Dr. Metz is a Public Safety Psychologist. She's also the owner and founder of Code 4 Counseling in lone tree, Colorado. And Dr. Metz has quite a bit of experience. Dr. Metz, thank you for taking the time out of your schedule to join us.Dr. Sara Metz:You bet, thanks for having me.Bill Godfrey:Fantastic. Dr. Metz, just to kind of get you oriented, so Harry was talking about his experience at the Sutherland Springs church shooting, which is I'm sure you recall, involved a lot of kids, and Robert was talking about his experience at the STEM school shooting that they had in Douglas County just before he retired. And it got a little emotional and reminded me of some events that we've had that hit a little close to home. So as a place to start out, I know that you've handled counseling for a lot of these types of events. What are the things that we need to be watching for and paying attention to both short-term, immediately, in the medium term and in the longterm?Dr. Sara Metz:So with our responders, responders are very well-trained tactically to go into an environment like a church shooting, like unfortunately a school shooting and handle that tactically. Unfortunately, oftentimes the training doesn't really address... one of the things that we see causing the most distress to them is the feeling of helplessness. They at their core want to help people, it's why they go into this, they have a heart for service. And when they go into an active shooter scenario and they see the fear and the distress they, unfortunately at times, may have to walk past victims who are asking for help because they're clearing the scene, still looking for the active shooter. There's a lot of complexities to these incidents and the emotional toll that takes on them, isn't necessarily well addressed in the training.And again, it's the sense of helplessness that they don't always have language for what that is doing to them. They believe that the quote unquote trauma of the event that gets to them and oftentimes they think, "No, I did okay with that, but something's still stuck with me." And often when we really peel it back, it's feeling helpless, not having been able to necessarily help in the way they wanted to, dealing with kid victim is always its own beast. So there's definitely certain parts of these tactical events that aren't really addressed in training and really take a pretty big toll emotionally, on these folks.Bill Godfrey:Dr. Metz, when you're dealing with responders, and I mean both male and female, is there a bit of the typical responder, tough guy persona that gets in the way?Dr. Sara Metz:Absolutely. And what's interesting when you say gets in the way in terms of, there're well when they're doing their job, but then they have a hard time putting that down. That armor is great for them. Civilians, we benefit from them having that very tough exterior, but as I've learned in 15 years of working with responders, a lot of them have a soft mushy center and they're big, giant hearted people. And again, that big hearted-ness about them, they aren't trained how to use that. They aren't trained how to show self-compassion as they notice psychological injury in themselves. They don't really even know how to help each other, they want to and they definitely give each other hugs or a slap on the back saying, "Hey, are you good?" But then they don't really know what else to do. So again, it comes back to that tough exterior, is well-trained into them, it's the deeper, more complex layer that they get a little stuck.Harry Jimenez:Doctor, this is Harry. I echo what you said but also, comes to mind the fact that even if we somehow understand that we may need some help, we fall back on the persona of toughness. We don't want to look weak, we don't want to be that guy in the squad that people will talk behind you and say, "Well, I'm not going to roll out with this person, or I'm not going to call out this person to back me up because I'm afraid that this person might snap." And there's a stigma in law enforcement and in my case, law enforcement and military service. We leave with this stigma that we have to be tougher and we have to be strong, and that gets in the way of understanding what's really happening on... What else? Robert, what do you think?Robert McMahan:Yeah, it does. And I personally battled that for a while before I got help because I needed to get help. And I've seen a number of things that put a bunch of stuff in my bucket, as we say. But Dr. Metz, you and I worked together in Colorado when I was still there and we worked through a number of these things. Why don't you tell us about what are the first steps to start taking care of these responders after an incident?Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah. I think Harry brought up a big point. I know Robert, it's something that you and I have both really seen your agency in Colorado tackle over the last couple of years. That stigma is something that's been there for generations, it's certainly been there for a very long time and I do think that the stigma itself is really that first step. If we're going to get responders to seek help, we have to normalize that and we have to celebrate it. That has to become something that is part of the culture, it's part of the common language people say, "Hey, you've gone to talk to the doc, good for you. You haven't made an appointment yet, definitely do it. I got mine on Tuesday." That sort of language is something that has never been a part of the culture, I get that. I've been, like I said, doing this for 15 years.I would say in the last one to two years, we've had some really amazing responders step forward, military personnel as well, to really start to lead from the front and show what that would look like to bulldoze past the stigma. And that takes folks who are really willing to be vulnerable, who are willing to say, "I know there's been a stigma, but screw it. I'm doing it anyway." And that has really done wonders for the culture. And we've seen fairly quick change. Responders are not, one who change quickly, they don't like change. But seeing folks really step forward that they respect, that the agency's respect, the culture respects, and those folks saying, "I'll share my story, I'll start. Here's what I went through. Here's what worked for me and I will advocate for and respect anyone who follows the path of recognizing when they're struggling and they will seek help." And that is step one. Once you from the top down, really start to see that be advocated for, folks are much more willing to say, "All right. Well, I guess I'll give it a try." So step one is beating that stigma piece.Robert McMahan:Dr. Metz, when we were working together in Colorado, when we had critical incidents, including just officer involved shootings or whatever it was, we always called you out and your staff to do a debrief, and to talk to those responders after the incident. Is that enough? Or do we need to be doing more?Dr. Sara Metz:No. I would say it's a great step, but it goes back to, it depends on what the culture thinks of the debrief. I've seen plenty of folks walk into a debrief and say, "I just got to sit here and I don't give a shit. And I'm not going to talk," because they believe that stigma is still present. "I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to out myself." I will say the agency that you come from, I just did a debrief for them what, two days ago. Gosh how many people were in that room? I would say at least 20 folks who were involved in a critical incident, an officer involved shooting for that agency, 20 folks in the debrief. Every single one of them talked, every single one of them was willing to say what they had experienced the day of the incident, whether it was adrenaline dump, they weren't able to sleep, they hit the wispies, they snap at their kids when they got home, they talked about that.And they talked about four days later, which is when we did the debrief. They talked about the signs and the symptoms that were still present. And they talked about the things that were fading and healing naturally on its own. And as a group, we were able to talk about those signs and symptoms, normalize it for folks, "Hey, you're still not sleeping? Hey, I'm not sleeping either. All right. Well, here's some ideas. Here's some things we can think about to see if you can get that to heal on its own." But that dynamic took years to create, that took a long time for folks to really respect the process.But I would say there are definitely agencies now in Colorado and around the country, that are creating the right environment for those debrief to go well, and are also educating folks on all of the different things that they can do to take care of themselves. Whether that's wellness checks, whether that's in-service training that specifically highlights psychological stress injury, whether it's family night, getting the families involved, that they understand this shared language. There's so much that goes into a successful well integrated wellness program within an organization.Bill Godfrey:Dr. Metz, that's really remarkable what you're describing there. And it's encouraging to know that there are agencies that have been able to cross that bridge and deal with this a little more head on. You mentioned that our culture isn't very quick to change, and boy that's not an exaggeration. We have a saying in the fire service, "200 years of tradition unimpeded by progress," and we mean that shit.Dr. Sara Metz:Oh yeah, you do.Bill Godfrey:But on the lines of the symptoms and I may be off base here, but my personal experience. Now, Harry and Robert are both law enforcement, I'm from the Fire-EMS side. But my personal experience is that the immediate after, we're usually pretty there for each other. So Harry, you and I were telling the story in the earlier podcast about, when you were driving home for Sutherland Springs late at night, I was already in bed. And got the phone call and I knew, I got up got out of bed and we were on the phone how long?Harry Jimenez:I think I called Bill right after I left the scene. And I've been in the scene for probably 12 hours and I'm heading home and it was about an hour drive. And I think we spoke all the way until I pulled into my driveway, and he was making sure that I made it home.Dr. Sara Metz:Wow, that cool.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. So I guess where I'm going with that is, my personal experience and that may not be fair, but my personal experience is usually the immediate after the event, we're all kind of they're checking each other, but then I think we fall down. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit, it's a two-parted question. Number one is, in the near term, the days and the weeks that follow, what are the signs and symptoms that we need to be watching out for in each other? And then the second part of that is going to be, what are the things, if someone's reluctant to get help, reluctant to acknowledge that it's been an issue, what are the things that we as their peers can do? I'm not talking about supervisory intervention, but what are things that we as their friends and peers can do to try to help them see that they need it?Dr. Sara Metz:I think those are both great questions. I'm going to actually start with the second one first, and then I'll circle back to it here in a minute. But Robert will laugh at me because he knows where I'm going to go with this.Bill Godfrey:He's actually sitting here already chuckling, he's got this big smile on his face.Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah, he knows where I'm going. I promised him I would try to behave on this call. But this is where I think there's a little bit of tough love that needs to come in to this profession. I often hear that sort of thing. "Well, what if someone is reluctant?" Bullshit. Go to the doc because it's the right thing to do. You guys don't use that excuse for anything tactical. "Oh, I'm a little hesitant. Oh, I'm a little uncomfortable. That makes me nervous. I'm scared to do that," is not part of the culture. And yet it is so often the thing that prevents them from coming in the door. Now it's our responsibility as clinicians to create a safe space for that and to understand the culture and to do the work, to be culturally competent, to serve responder population.But I would say with all the love in the world, to my responders out there, "Get your butt in there, get checked out because it keeps you at the top of your game. And if you have a bad fit, a clinician who doesn't get it, or it doesn't feel like the right fit? Find one who is a good fit." And that's where responders, one of the things they can do to take care of each other is, everybody get out there, find clinicians that are good and share that information with each other. "Hey, you know what? I had a really great session. You should go see so and so." And have there be variety, have there be male clinicians, female clinicians, folks who specialize in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) versus talk therapy versus this, that, the other thing.But the more clinicians are available and the more responders will not feel shame and we'll share that information with each other, I think is my answer to the second part of that question. Now to the first question of, what are the signs and symptoms that folks should be looking out for? I think there's some really common ones. And what I typically will tell folks is, the body is actually fairly good at recalibrating itself over the course of a few days and a few weeks, what typically hinders that process is shame and judgment. So for example, if someone in the first few days, or first week or so, they go through a critical incident, they're involved in an active shooter scenario, for example, and they are having a hard time sleeping, they really want to drink because they know that will calm their system. They're moody, snapping at their kids, snapping at their partner... Go ahead.Bill Godfrey:By the way Dr. Metz, you had three guys shaking their heads up and down, yes, When you mentioned the drinking part.Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah, absolutely. It's a big one because unfortunately it works. So we know it works. The problem, it does so much damage to the system's calibration. It's trying to numb a system that would work if you gave it a chance.Bill Godfrey:That's interesting.Dr. Sara Metz:And part of that is letting your system be uncomfortable. Your system is looping and it's anxious and it's got adrenaline still sparking through your system, that's all normal. It's wildly uncomfortable and I don't dismiss it as, "Oh, just get over it." It is wildly uncomfortable, but alcohol and substances is nodding that, which doesn't allow the system, the human body that is actually very brilliantly structured in so many ways, it will recalibrate if you let it, but you have to let it do it in its own natural time. So when folks drink to try to numb because they're so uncomfortable, what we know the alcohol does is, it makes it so you cannot get REM sleep.REM sleep is where your system during your sleeping hours is going to, again, recalibrate. It moves experiences from the front of the brain, into the memory center, which is where we block them, because it means you remember it but you don't re-experience it. If you're drinking in the evenings or right before bed, that alcohol in your system locks the door to that process. So those experiences stay at the front of the brain, that's why things like flashbacks and re-experiencing happens, because it didn't get moved to the memory center. So we need that process to work and so we really encourage people, just give it a week or two, see if your system naturally recalibrates on its own. Watch for the increase in alcohol use, try to keep that out of the picture, watch for the moodiness, watch for the restlessness and the difficulty sleeping. Those are some of the pretty normal things that we see after a critical incident, but oftentimes they will say it on their own.And even if they don't, all that tells us as clinicians is that, "Yeah, go in and get a checkup." And it may just take some verbal processing or looking at it from another perspective, some additional coping strategies. Those are things we can certainly provide someone if they are not matched, really kind of moving through the process on their own in a week or two. But back to Harry's point a while back, it's shame and fear of judgements that prevents people from doing that. They think, "I have to just figure this out on my own. If I say, I'm not healing on my own, people won't think I'm a good partner. They don't want me as a car partner. They won't want me to back up. They won't won't walk me on their crew." What we have to help people recognize is, "We'll get you there, you're not going to live in the red forever. We'll get you back, but we need to know what those symptoms are so we can help you."Bill Godfrey:It's really fascinating listening to you explain that. And I mean, I've been a paramedic for over 30 years and knowing the physiology doesn't mean you take it home and into your brain. And something you said kind of-Something you said kind of made me think about something my therapist once threatened me with a baseball bat over. And he said, "Damn it, sometimes you just have to sit with those uncomfortable feelings."Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah, so true.Bill Godfrey:If you keep pushing them away and you never process them, is that kind of a little bit related to what you're talking about here?Dr. Sara Metz:Absolutely, it is. And again, I really try to encourage responders to recognize, you all are well equipped to be uncomfortable. You do it all the time in environments that you choose to be uncomfortable in. You go into burning buildings, you go into hoarder house for medicals, you go through the maze, you put the gas mask on, you guys go into critical incidents of shootings, there are a million and one scenarios where you guys will put yourself in uncomfortable situations and you believe that it's worth it. But for whatever reason you guys, hate, all humans do, this is not just a responder thing, but people hate to be uncomfortable when it comes to their feelings and it comes to processing their experiences. If responders would go into it with that same level of, "All right, I just got to hunker down and be uncomfortable because it's serving a purpose," they would do a lot better.Bill Godfrey:You just need to set your office on fire and then we'll show up.Dr. Sara Metz:There you go.Bill Godfrey:I'm sorry, that's a terrible idea. Just for the record. That was a joke.Dr. Sara Metz:... wow, how have I never tried that? I have South Metro just down the road, they'll come in a heartbeat.Bill Godfrey:Robert, you were getting ready to jump in and say something, I'm sorry.Robert McMahan:Yeah, Dr. Metz, we've been talking about how to deal with these things and making sure that we get our officers and first responders in to see a clinician. If we do that initial debrief, and typically after a shooting, we'll send an officer in for a one-on-one with a therapist and oftentime they come out okay. But you and I saw a number of first responders months after the incident, where issues started cropping up. Can you talk about that a little bit?Dr. Sara Metz:It is a great point, because we often will see things start to bubble to the surface right away. However, it is very, very common and very, very normal for those symptoms to take months, sometimes years to fester. I often will describe psychological stress and compare it to an infection. Sometimes an infection again, without a paramedic on the call, probably somewhere else, but sometimes you'll notice it fairly quickly-Bill Godfrey:Just for the record, I used to be, I don't do that stuff anymore. For the last-Dr. Sara Metz:I knew this stuff back in the day, all right.Bill Godfrey:The last patient I touched was when a space shuttle went up and that guy died. I'm not the guy to touch on it, I'm the guy that goes send for the defibrillator.Dr. Sara Metz:Again this comes back, yeah I talk about it all the time, shame and judgment. Prolong when people will get help, if you take that piece out and simple have someone say, "Well, I was doing okay and now I'm not, I guess it's time to go to the doc." They go to the doc, they say what their symptoms are and they get the help they need. It's very normal. It really is fine. Honestly, the other side of the normal spectrum is that, it's absolutely fine if someone does absolutely fine forever after a critical incident. Every now and then I'll have a responder come into my office and say, "Everyone is telling me that this, even though it's not bothering me now, it's going to." And then they get anxious thinking, "So this is just going to be the spawn, it could go off at any point I feel in my head at any moment?" No, live your life.If it pops up, it pops up. If it doesn't, it doesn't make you a psychopath. If you're fine, uou're fine. It's great to be able to articulate why you're fine, so you have an understanding of what strategies seem to be working for you, but if you're fine, we're not going to try to poke the bear.Harry Jimenez:Doctor, Harry here. When you were talking about what type of things to look short-term, mid-term, long-term, I felt that you were describing me. Just to put in perspective, military with five combat deployments and then law enforcement for over 30 years. What you're saying is exactly the way I felt, after multiple deployments and law enforcement and loosing an officer under your watch and being involved in critical incidents and saving someone's life and not remember how the hell that happened. I thought, "Okay, I'm visible, everything's fine." And then one day, hill came down crashing on me and the first thing that I did was fight. Fight not because of the shame or the stigma, but was fighting with myself. "How come this is happening now, since I've been good all these years?"And it took me a couple of clinicians to finally, like you said, find the one person that I felt that could understand me, if you may, in my own whatever crazy designation I gave to that. And there were two things, first he told me, each one of us experienced the same incident in an own personal different way. And that was a very significant to me because sometimes we as first responders, we look to the left and to the right and if the person that you know that responded is not going through what you're going, you might start trying to cover it and push it down because you don't want to seem to be weak or weaker. And when he told me that, "No, we all going to feel it and understand it and react in own personal way."And the second one which goes with, I remember now, because you mentioned about the alcohol, he told me, "Harry we're going to go back to not only this incident, but we're going to go back to every one of these incidents that we know that you are dragging for years and you have not face." And I thought he was insane and I immediately refused, I said, "No, I don't want to re-live that." And he said, "Oh, on the contrary, you still live in it." He told me a story and I don't know if you have heard this and if you do please tell us more about it. He said, "When the first person start deciding that, AA, Alcoholic Anonymous, it was a good idea, a lot of people laugh to the whole idea. Because they say, 'So you're going to get a group of drunks together to talk about drinking, that makes no sense.'" And talk to us about that.I mean, that was my experience. I was like, "No way I was going to re-live this in my own brain, thinking about it." And he helped me... basically the same analogy, he got me around with other people that were coping with their own incidents. And in a way allows you to free yourself.Dr. Sara Metz:Mm-hmm (affirmative), totally agree.Bill Godfrey:It's fascinating to know how parallel our lives have all been, even though we didn't know each other until the last few years that we've been teaching and training. And Dr. Metz, I'd like you to kind of comment on this and if you'll forgive me, I'm going to do a little bit of wind up here with it. I went through most of my career, some ups and downs, but I did not really struggle with any one particular thing. But what has been a challenge for me, and the best way I can give this example is the idea of institutional noise, it's not typically one gunshot that makes you go deaf, it's not wearing hearing protection while you go through thousands of gunshots or it's not being around a jet engine one time without hearing protection. It's being around them all the time. That idea of that constant repeated exposure. And Dr. Metz, are you by chance familiar with the Enneagram?Dr. Sara Metz:Mm-hmm (affirmative), I am.Bill Godfrey:Okay. So I'm an Enneagram eight. And for those that don't know what it's about it-Dr. Sara Metz:You're and eight aren't you.Bill Godfrey:Yeah, don't worry about it, I'll just say this. It means that I tend to be a fairly strong personality and aggressive, and that's cover for not wanting to reveal vulnerability.Harry Jimenez:I will never have guessed that.Bill Godfrey:I know, shocking. Exactly. And now I cry at a double mint twin commercial. It's just these moments of just uncontrollable sadness that lasts for a second, second and a half, two seconds, three seconds. We'll be teaching the classes that we teach and there's some sensitive material that we talk about and some things that we cover. And there's particular modules that I don't like to teach, because about 50% of the time I get choked up doing it and I don't want to get choked up in front of the class to do that. And I'm not really worried about somebody making fun of me for getting choked up because, screw them if they don't get it. This is serious topics, and we're talking about kids dying and things like that. Is that a real issue? That it's not necessarily one horrible... in other words, it can be one horrible tragic event, but can it also just be a career of shit?Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah. And most likely, it's probably a combination of both of those. Absolutely, are there folks who have been through really significant pin point events that they can point to and say that, "That has stuck with me all this time and I've never fully been able to process through it," absolutely. We also do see folks who are 20, 25, 30 plus years into their career and they may say exactly what you're saying, that there's not a specific event that they point to, but they're tired. They're burned out, they're tired. They feel they've lost compassion for people, that usually takes about 30 seconds on the job of, "Oh, I don't like people at all." So that sort of thing-Bill Godfrey:Yeah that was me at 3:00 in the morning every time.Dr. Sara Metz:Real quick, like nope I've decided I hate humans. Those sorts of things absolutely happen. And we still have to look at the whole human and figure out how to help them. Are there specific events that we need to reprocess? Is there just more burnout, tired, that sort of repair that needs to happen again. Think of it in terms of muscle aches versus a broken bone. A broken bone, we have to do something very specific with, muscle aches where the whole system is just, "I don't really know what's going on I just feel icky." We can treat either one, we just would treat them differently.Robert McMahan:And Dr. Metz, I think for me I hit about that 28 year mark, and then we had an officer killed in the line of duty that we worked. And I didn't know what was happening to me, I was depressed not real bad, but it was getting worse. And about a year later, you were in our office talking to our command staff about wellness programs and you started to talk about some of this stuff and I went, "Holy crap, that's me." I think you remember that day.Dr. Sara Metz:I do.Robert McMahan:And I grabbed you and we went to my office after that and we started talking. As a result of that, I spent many hours on your couch after that. And I'm not ashamed of that and we don't need to be ashamed of this, and we got to get over that shame and stigma. For me, when we were talking through those things, the analogy we used with me was that, my bucket got full, and you can only put so much crap in a bucket. And I think it's that cumulative stress and cumulative effect of seeing all those things, that one day you just reach a capacity where it starts to really affect you.Dr. Sara Metz:You do. And so often people again, will tell themselves, "Well I was handling it just fine. What's wrong with me now that I can't when handled it just fine all those years?"Robert McMahan:Oh, that sounds familiar.Dr. Sara Metz:Yeah. And what people forget, to Robert's point is, just because the bucket wasn't full didn't mean it wasn't filling up. And at a certain point, once it's full, everything is skimming off the top. Anything you put in there, it doesn't fit anymore. So if you wait until it's completely overflowing, yes of course we can still help, but that's just the point at which it overflowed. It doesn't mean that whatever you were doing was working for all those years, it just means there was room in the bucket for it. And oftentimes unfortunately, once the bucket overflows, we gotta deal with what's right at the top first. But then we probably are going to have to go back through the years and really process some things that may have happened years ago, that they were sitting at the bottom of that bucket waiting to be dealt with.Bill Godfrey:Dr. Metz, quick question on the bucket. If you wait until it overflows, and then you deal with the overflowing stuff, is it possible for people to deal with the overflowing stuff and never empty the bucket and just be one marble shy of overflowing again?Dr. Sara Metz:Well, they can, I don't recommend it. I say, clean that shit out. That's like going into the dirtiest closet in your house and saying, "I shall clean for five minutes and then shut the door again." Clean the damn closet out. And again, it requires you being uncomfortable, but it's work that ultimately does benefit the person.Robert McMahan:The concept of that bucket makes me think that, if we are getting to these first responders earlier in their careers, taking care of these things, even if it's not bothering them so much, but we need to be taking care of that early on so that bucket doesn't fill up so fast.Dr. Sara Metz:Very much so.Robert McMahan:Yeah. And I think one of the ways we can do that is by, as peers remembering to reach out to each other in the days, weeks and months after those events, and checking in on each other. What do you think about that?Dr. Sara Metz:I completely agree. And I think this is where too, teaching the language to the young guns who are just starting out in law enforcement, in the fire service. Teaching them the language makes it so much easier for them to speak this fluently throughout their career. The folks who've been doing this, the older school generation, they didn't learn the language and so they are more likely to be struggling with a lot of this and feeling they're floundering and really struggling at the tail end of their careers or post retirement. But the ones who are really willing to lean into this, step forward and learn the language, have such incredible value to give back to the younger generation, because once they learn the language to be able to check in and share those experiences with the younger ones, it's so hugely valuable.Bill Godfrey:So Dr. Metz, we need to obviously get wrapped up here, but there's one last area I want to go into just briefly before we wrap up and close out. So I opened by talking about how we kinda got to this conversation, which was wrapping up that other podcast. And Robert, I don't know if you remember what you said to me not five minutes after we quit recording that other podcast, do you remember?Robert McMahan:No, I don't.Bill Godfrey:You said, "Damn, I wish I would've just said get help, it doesn't make you weak."Robert McMahan:Yeah. And thanks for reminding me of that. If you're listening to this, you've probably been to some event, you've been to some traumatic scene, and it doesn't have to be a full blown active shooter event, all these things take a toll on us. But you also know people that have been involved in events and you have anniversary dates that we remember from the really bad ones. And so, if you have those people in mind and those anniversary dates, reach out to each other and take care of each other, and please get some help if you need it.Even if you don't think you need it, it doesn't hurt to check in once in a while with a therapist, just to get a checkup. We go to the doctor for checkups and that's okay, this is okay too. And I think if we would do that as a first responder profession, we would as Dr. Metz said, stay at the top of our game.Bill Godfrey:As in, you can't always tell when your own bucket is full.Robert McMahan:Exactly.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. This has been a great conversation, Dr. Metz, I cannot thank you enough for taking the time out of your schedule to share with us your words of wisdom and your thoughts. And I want to give you the opportunity to have the closing words here.Dr. Sara Metz:Oh gosh, no pressure. Well, I will say that Robert is just one of the coolest people I've ever met. And so I appreciated him asking me to join the three of you today and I enjoyed our conversation and if there's anything else that I can do for the podcast or for you folks, let me know. But I echo what Robert said in that, take care of yourself and take care of each other. And a big part of doing that is staying tactically fit, ready to go and staying psychologically fit as well. And if you're willing to put the effort into that, there's a lot of us out there that are absolutely willing to step into your space and help you thrive in your career and thrive in your retirement.Bill Godfrey:We spend our careers trying to save lives, let's make sure we save each other too.Robert McMahan:That's right.Dr. Sara Metz:Agreed.Bill Godfrey:Well, Dr. Metz, if you'd like, I can list your counseling group in the show notes. I'm not sure if that's something you'd like me to do or not for people to reach out-Dr. Sara Metz:Sure.Bill Godfrey:... to you for some additional information or maybe even information about how they can get a program started somewhere in their locale. And again, thank you so much for taking the time. Robert, Harry, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for this episode. Please, if you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please do subscribe to the podcast and until next time, stay safe.

Episode 27: Emotionally Responsible Room EntryRoom entry tactics are a delicate topic in law enforcement, but this discussion is about considering the impact of a full dynamic entry on children. You don't want to miss this!Bill Godfrey:Thank you for joining us on our next podcast. Today we are going to pick up on a topic that we briefly discussed a few weeks ago in the staging podcast. It was an odd place for it to come up, and we want to revisit that a little bit. My name is Bill Godfrey, I'm the host of the podcast, one of the instructors here at C3 Pathways. I've got three of the other instructors with me today, Harry Jimenez?Harry Jimenez:Hello Bill. Thank you for having me.Bill Godfrey:Thanks for being here Harry. We have Robert McMahan.Robert McMahan:Hi Bill.Bill Godfrey:Hey. And Kevin Burd.Kevin Burd:Hi Bill.Bill Godfrey:All right. So we've got today, aside from myself, a law enforcement group, because this by and large is a law enforcement topic for the most part. And the issue is this, you have an active shooter event at a school or some other venue where kids are involved. It could be teenage kids, but we're really focusing on those younger kids, middle school and elementary in this topic. The threat has been dealt with, it is either neutralized or no longer on the scene, the patients have been transported and we're at a stable state. We still need to clear the campus. We need to come up with a way to move the kids in an orderly fashion from the rooms or the locations where they're at, to transportation ultimately to be moved to an offsite reunification center.Bill Godfrey:The problem is that we don't always shift gears when we need to, and we start kicking in doors and doing very, very aggressive room entries that ended up scaring the kids even more than they've already been traumatized. And in a couple cases, this is really caused some issues for kids, that quite frankly weren't exposed to the threat, didn't see it, didn't witness it, didn't hear it, had the bejesus scared out of them from a very, very aggressive dynamic room entry coming in hot and heavy. So today we're going to talk about the impact of that, and maybe are there ways to avoid that, are there some ways to do that a little bit better. Now, to set the stage, because Robert I want you to tell your personal story, but to set the stage here for all of those that are listening.Bill Godfrey:My understanding is talking about how to do room entries with law enforcement, is about trying to get firefighters to agree on which nozzle is the best. There is no right or wrong answer, everybody's got an opinion and nobody's right except the opinion that I'm advocating for has got to be the right one. It's like a lose, lose zero sum game. So I don't want to get hung up necessarily in that, but I'd like the three of you, as we go through this conversation, to talk about what are the kinds of things that you could do? What should we be aware of? And Robert, if you would set the stage for us, because you personally experienced this on an incident, where you were the IC and responsible for it. Set the stage a little bit about what happened, to the degree you feel comfortable talking about it. Again, we don't need to name the incident specifically.Bill Godfrey:And what the implications and the outcome were, and looking back on it, what you would have liked those officers to do instead.Robert McMahan:Sure Bill. A couple of years ago I was involved in a school shooting, and once we got the incident stabilized and we knew we had people in custody, there was still a good degree of campus left to be cleared, and to get those students out in an orderly fashion, like you said. And I think that's key, the word orderly fashion. And we had officers that were continuing to clear in a hard dynamic mode. And many of our campuses are taught to lock down and stay locked down in place, so there wasn't good communication prior to the incident about how we would approach those classrooms and get them to come out. So they were not coming out. And incidentally the officers ended up doing some very hard breaches and causing a lot of damage to those doors, and doing a dynamic entry and pointing weapons at kids and yelling all those law enforcement commands that we give when we give those kinds of entries.Robert McMahan:Some of the feedback we got after the incident was that our students were scared of us, they were traumatized. And I think we lost some credibility with the community when that occurred. And we need to remember that we don't want to victimize any more kids or create any more victims or have this kind of effect on the students and teachers, because we in the end want them to know that we came there to rescue them, to take care of them and not create this kind of trauma.Bill Godfrey:Robert, what were the age ranges? I mean, were we talking elementary school, middle school? Do you recall the age ranges?Robert McMahan:This was, I think, six through 12. So it was-Bill Godfrey:Pretty young.Robert McMahan:Some of the younger kids there, definitely all the way through high school students, and even the high school students didn't take a while. They really were pretty shocked by what occurred, as we were.Bill Godfrey:So Kevin, I know this is a passionate topic for you as well. And while you're retired now, you were a SWAT team leader right up until when you retired and went down. Have you dealt with this before? Has your team addressed that? Have you seen this come up in training with tactics in law enforcement discussions?Kevin Burd:Yeah, absolutely. And I learned early in my SWAT career that tactics are intel driven and our environment dictates our tactics. So dynamic entries, really even a SWAT perspective have faded away. We still train in them, but our tactics are intel driven. So if you approach a door and there's no stimulus that you have to do a dynamic entry, why are we doing a dynamic entry? Because we're talking about most schools with fire rated doors, steel frames, industrial door locks and jams. If nothing is giving me a stimulus or actionable intelligence that something bad is going in there. And then look at the other side too, what are we training our kids to do with lockdown drills?Kevin Burd:In that same perspective, having the opportunity to attend... I don't think I'm being unrealistic, I've probably been a part of well over a thousand lockdown drills, because the state I came from, they were mandated to do 10 security drills a school year, four of which being lock downs. So I got to observe all those. And we're trying to build those relationships and give teachers insight of what it might look like post-incident.Kevin Burd:So we come up with ways, we build that relationship with that law enforcement officer, "Hey, this is the police, were coming in, nothing to be alarmed." I'm not trying to take a tactic away from law enforcement. If something is still active, yes, we have to do what we have to do. But what's the statistics tell us, typically it's a single shooter, right? 99.9% of the time. If nothing is happening, why do we need to create a crisis during the crisis, and potentially traumatize the children that are in that room. And when I talk about that intel, if I'm responding to a school and I know it's an elementary school and there are five to 10 year olds, 11 year olds or 12 year olds, do I need to enter that room and take control the way we train a lot of those tactics while the incident is still hot, if you will, right?Harry Jimenez:No, absolutely. And you have to understand that dynamic entry is never pretty. As we train as law enforcement we're used to the big bang, and as a breacher, it doesn't matter how you cut, it's going to be noisy. I'm ready for it. But when you're training, you're sitting on the other side of that door, and you feel that strength and that noise, that dynamic entry. It doesn't matter which part of the country you are in, you're going to traumatize, especially small children. And Kevin, you mentioned the statistics. We know the 98% of the time, it's a single shooter. And if the shooter has been neutralized and there's no driving force, exactly what you said, why there's a need for a dynamic entry? Even as we train as law enforcement officers, we tend to have an adrenaline dump in our system.Harry Jimenez:And when that happens, as law enforcement, because we're human beings and we have seen over and over how we are attack because of feelings. Well, as a human being, responding to a school environment where you expect children, you get some physiological and some psychological response. And your physiological response is the tunnel vision, losing your hearing. And then you have that mindset of what's it going to be, is that tiger behind the door? That tiger's going to attack me. We need to reevaluate those entries. We need to reevaluate. And many of the new SWAT operators are going to the training. But there's many of us out there that learn the old way, and we have not evolved into the new mindset of understanding what is an emotional, responsible entry.Robert McMahan:Yeah, I like to think of it in the term of discretion. Officers are given a lot of discretion and we need to be discretionary in how we're entering these rooms, and certainly taking control of the room, but we don't have to do it in such a hard fashion, that we're creating this catastrophic event for students that didn't need to be. And certainly be ready for that other line that might jump out, but be discretionary about how you do it.Bill Godfrey:Let me ask this question for the three of you, because I introduced Kevin as having some SWAT background and experience. Is it different from someone who's had SWAT training versus your typical patrol officer or deputy in what they know or what they learned or their performance level in being able to execute different room entries? Can you guys talk a little bit about that? Is there a difference there, and how does that play out?Robert McMahan:Well Bill, I think it depends on the training obviously. And across the country we're seeing officers get very high-end training to do room clearing. And I think that's been the standard raised by these active shooter events. Not realizing that we have street officers, patrol officers, responding to the scene, they're the ones going to be making the first entry. So we're giving them those kinds of training and equipment to make... They're coming in with the hard tactical vest and rifles. So they are getting that training and they have the ability to make that type of entry as well as the SWAT guys.Kevin Burd:Yeah, and I agree. We have to have the tools for the toolbox, right? But again, where are we in the incident, and what's the intel telling you, what environment are you working in, and what tool are you going to use for that moment, right?Robert McMahan:Absolutely.Kevin Burd:And I agree 110%, you got to be discretionary. Law enforcement, your discretion is a major part of your profession, right? So we have to give them the tactics for the first two minutes, five minutes, seven minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, right? When we have a driving force, when we have a stimulus and we have to use those trainings. I am a big supporter of, I feel that SWAT teams should be assisting in the training for patrol, right? Because that's where the tactics come from. But we just can't be narrow minded, if you will, and only train in those hard dynamic entries of when the potential of bullets are going to start flying are right there, right?Kevin Burd:We have to also look at, this is going to be a prolonged event. And again, looking at the statistics and the data, these events might be over in 10 or 15 minutes. So if there's no driving force, there's no stimulus for 45 minutes or an hour, why are we-Harry Jimenez:Why are we breaching the door?Kevin Burd:And going in. Now, again, I'm not trying to take away anything safety wise. You can still use those tactics, you can still use... and law enforcement will know what we're talking about, the angles. We can do a... whatever you want to refer to it as, cutting the pie, slicing the pie, threshold evaluation, combat clear, whatever you want to call it. We can still get into that room effectively with some cover possibly, depending on the environment, and not screaming and yelling and pointing rifles at five and six year olds.Bill Godfrey:Kevin, you reminded me of something that one of our other law enforcement instructors brought up when we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. They mentioned doing, if I remember correctly, they called it a threshold evaluation from the hallway through the door, pieing it off or something. Is that what you're-Kevin Burd:Yes.Bill Godfrey:Can you guys talk a little bit about what you mean by that? I certainly know that the fire EMS folks that are listening are not going to know what we're talking about there, because it's a little bit fuzzy to me. But I don't want to take it for granted that all our law enforcement folks that are listening are necessarily going to know what we're talking about. Can we address that?Kevin Burd:Yeah, sure. So when we talk about a threshold evaluation, it's actually an interesting conversation because having the opportunity to work with a lot of schools, there's different trains of thought on what actions they're going to take within the classroom. As an example, on the classroom door entering into the room, some schools prefer to have some type of covering there during an incident, some leave it open. Like you said before, there's different... We can debate tactics, right? Tactics are like ice cream, everybody's got their favorite flavor, okay?Harry Jimenez:It's true.Kevin Burd:As an example, if there is no window covering, we can do a threshold evaluation, if you will. The door can still be closed, we can see into the room. I don't like throwing percentages. You hear a lot of times, "Oh, I can see 30% of the room, 70% of the room." We can get an idea of what the room looks like by clearing that window, by basically doing a slicing the pie motion, if you will, through the door, looking through the window and see what we're entering into. Same thing when we opened the door, right? I'm sure by now most schools across the country have something in place where if an incident occurs, a lockdown occurs, there is a master set of keys or fobs or something along those lines. At this point, hopefully you're having that conversation, law enforcement can open that door. And same thing, you're just gradually moving across that door to see what you're entering into.Bill Godfrey:You're talking about from the hallway?Kevin Burd:From the hallway, right? And again, what we did locally in our training was, "This is the police, were coming in." And we can do that kind of... I don't want to paint the wrong picture, not a slow and methodical, but kind of a slow and methodical entry into the room so they can clearly see a uniformed police officer. Because again, with our school resource officers and the folks we're putting in those schools, we want to build those relationships and trust that at the end of a lockdown, you see a uniformed officer come in or someone that looks like a law enforcement officer and the impression that I think it gives, especially the younger kids is, everything's going to be okay now.Bill Godfrey:Robert, was that a challenge for you on your incident? Did you have some non uniformed officers that were doing those entries?Robert McMahan:No. At that point they were... Well, yes. There were some non uniformed officers, there were some training uniforms, but the gross of those officers were in uniform at that point. And that's another sidebar. If you're going to go to these incidents, put something on that identifies you as an officer because that can create a whole other problem for students and other responding law enforcement as well. But I think what Kevin was hitting on is, as you start to enter that room and look at that room, just some simple communication might be the thing that gets you to realize what's going on in that room. If the teacher and students can respond to you before you even entered that room that they're okay, then they're probably okay and you don't need to do a hard dynamic entry. If they're all laying on the floor looking in the corner, then you might have a problem.Bill Godfrey:That's what the FBI calls a clue?Robert McMahan:Yes, exactly. So there's a lot of things that can be done to calm this thing down and to keep it calm and maintain that order and restore order, rather than more chaos.Harry Jimenez:Now, as a former operator, I need to defend my breachers and my dynamic entry special response team guys.Bill Godfrey:That's all right. I'm going to talk about which nozzle I prefer. Go ahead Harry.Harry Jimenez:It goes beyond that group of officers either conducting that door threshold evaluation, looking from the hallway, bridging the door. Perhaps many times what we have missed is actually some kind of control and order, but not from the actual officers responding, but somebody in command. And this is the part that the active shooter incident management is so important, because now you don't have... We started the conversation saying the scene is safe, there's no driving force, all the survivors have been transported to hospitals. Now, we have a crime scene. We're going to what we call the third phase, right? We have the threat, rescue, and now we're going to the clearing. If we're clearing, if your command structure have received some kind of active shooter incident management, they will understand the concept.Harry Jimenez:There's no driving force, there's no need to be breaching. Because it's not only going and creating some emotional and mental scars for those children, which is going to happen if you have somebody pointing with a gun. I work on the cover many years, and I remember every single time that I have a gun pointed to my face, and it leaves a mark. And if you're at a tender age it's going to leave more of a scar mentally and emotionally. But how many times we have watched on TV the video, when we have officers in the parking lot emptying a classroom, emptying a school, and all the children are running, no order, running with their hands in the air scared, and it's a mess.Harry Jimenez:And it makes you wonder, why are you doing this? Everybody's transported, there's no threat, why are you doing this? Why are you creating these images that we can watch over and over and over? And it just makes you wonder, if not the officer responding to the scene but actually that chain of command, they may need to consider some active shooter incident management training.Bill Godfrey:Harry raised something that made me think about it, he mentioned crime scene. So we've been focused on talking about the room entry, which is what we wanted to do. The idea of this emotionally responsible room entry. But I think this sense of emotional responsibility goes a little bit deeper. For example, we're going to empty this school out room by room. We need to move these kids either to an assembly area in preparation to moving them to an offsite, or what I actually prefer is to move them straight to the bus, get them on the bus and get them off the site if you can coordinate that.Bill Godfrey:But let's talk a little bit about the other piece, and that's the route of travel that you're going to take them, because number one, it is a crime scene, and do we want to take them past or through the areas where there's blood on the ground, there might be fatalities. How often does that get thought of before we start emptying rooms? Are we being deliberate about saying, "Okay, we're going to take these rooms and go this direction, but on these rooms we're going this way, because we want to avoid..." Robert, what's your thoughts on that? Is that something that's come up in your discussions in training? Or what do you see is-Robert McMahan:Absolutely, you're hitting right on it? And you can take students that maybe didn't even hear the shooting, weren't a part of it and traumatize them just by walking them through or by that crime scene. So you can choose your routes and do this in an orderly fashion. Like you said, take them right out and put them on the bus. And even before you leave the classroom, in a previous podcast we talked about staging and accountability. If you can have those students, they're still in their classroom with their teacher because they locked down. You're clearing, you find them, you talk to them, you can get a roster of the students right there. You know who they all are, they've got their teacher and you can take them as a group in an orderly, calm, fashion, down a different route that doesn't go through the crime scene, and put them on a bus and not create any more trauma for them.Robert McMahan:And I think it's more than just a thing that we should be thinking about it, I think it's a responsibility to those children and to those families to handle it that way in order to help them. I mean, otherwise we're not helping them. I mean, yeah, we're getting them off the scene, but we're not doing all we can to help them through this event. Because even kids that haven't been directly involved in it are going to be traumatized because it happened on their campus, it happened at their school and that's going to bother them. We don't need to add to it.Bill Godfrey:I think that that's so very true. Harry, I'm reminded of the dinner we shared with our dear friend Lindsay Webster, who was a survivor of an active shooter event. And we were talking about various topics related to that. And that was when it really... Something that she said really brought home this sense of seeing a person that's been subjected to this, seeing themselves as either a victim or a survivor. And Lindsay talked quite eloquently about that. I remember that ride home with Harry. We were riding back to the hotel, and we must have spent 30 minutes in the car talking just about that, because she said her emotional healing, separate from the physical, but the emotional healing for her didn't really come into play until she got to the point where she quit seeing herself as a helpless victim in this thing, and instead started seeing the incident, "Okay, this is something that happened to me, but it doesn't define me. I'm a survivor." And moving past that.Bill Godfrey:And it really resonated. And I think there's a little bit of this in that, isn't there?Kevin Burd:Yeah, absolutely. And we have a great relationship with the I Love U Guys Foundation. And one of the things they talk about with recovery is recovery starts when the crisis begins, right? And I actually like to think, to go back to what Robert and Bill you brought up, is really recovery starts before the crisis begins because we have to plan for the incident and plan for that recovery before it ever happens. Does that make sense? And with having that crime scene in mind and not introducing trauma to someone that may not have been there, they're going to be traumatized one way or another, right? Because it happened on their campus, right? And I relate it to fire drills. We run fire drills at all of our schools and we've been doing it for years, right? And I knew growing up, if I was in the second grade, I would come out, I would make a right, I'd make my first left, go out that door, and there you go. But you have to have plan B in place also. So that is just not the only way it can happen.Kevin Burd:So if we have that scene, to the best we can, we can not put those students through the areas where something happened. Maybe there's no way around it. There might be that situation, but we have to think about that ahead of time and also make that part of training, right? You run the fire drill. Obviously we're not going to set a fire, but let's put a barricade at the end of the hallway during one of the drills and say, "You can't go this way." It's like the deer in the headlights, right?Harry Jimenez:Now what?Kevin Burd:This is the way we always go.Harry Jimenez:Now what? What do I do?Kevin Burd:Yeah. And we have to introduce that into the training for when... Yeah.Bill Godfrey:So we're talking about, loosely this idea of emotional responsibility as responders dealing with these events. How do you ensure that your incident changes gears? Because that seems to me to be, you could remind people, you can tell them about it in training, you can go through those emotions, but it seems short of somebody saying, "Okay, all stop. Timeout. Here's what we're going to do, here's where we're going to go. Everybody slow down, calibrate yourself, calm down." I don't know. I don't know how to say that, Robert, but you've been in that position.Bill Godfrey:I mean, because you've responded to three active shooter events in your career. All three very, very different experiences. What do you think, if you needed to go be the incident commander of one, how would you be able to effectively shift that tone and shift gears of the whole incident when you've got your troops and the city next door and the county next door and mutual aid from alphabet soup agencies you didn't even know existed? Have you thought about that? How do you do that?Robert McMahan:There has to be a point where that gets announced, "Okay, we're moving into this phase." But you cannot do that effectively if you don't train it first. And everybody's got to follow the training. We talk about it throughout the ACM class, stay in your lane, but you got to do these things. We talked about it even with the staging thing, about over convergence of resources. It's great to train to go to staging, but if people don't do it you're going to have over convergence of resources. And it's great to train on a response that's emotionally appropriate for the circumstances. But if you don't follow the training, it's not going to happen. So it falls on every officer from the youngest, newest officer on scene to the incident commander. Everybody's got to make sure that training occurs, and make sure that they understand the transition that has to take place when it's announced that, "Hey, we're moving into this phase of our operation."Harry Jimenez:Absolutely, Robert. And it takes somebody to pump the brakes. You have to pump the brakes. You have to understand that the adrenaline rush going through the door, threat is down, all the survivors have been transported. Somebody has to call it and say, "Okay, now we have the rest of the people to take care of, all the rest of the students, the rest of the teachers, but also the rest of the responders." In my experience, everybody's running on adrenaline and fumes. And at some point somebody had to realize, "Okay, let me call all the responders and make sure that they're also doing okay." Because that is a responsible thing to do.Harry Jimenez:I said it once, I'll say it again, somebody in that chain of command needs to be familiar and have been through an active shooter incident management, because you cannot practice what you have never even seen. And unfortunately there's a lot of jurisdictions out there that they send their officers to training, but the command staff is enabled to understand what happens after the last viable patient is transported. How do we transition to that next phase? And until that command staff understands it, sometimes the brass is going to push back, and those are the incidents that we see the children running with the hands in the air, through the parking lot screaming because nobody's in control.Kevin Burd:Agreed. Get on the air, somebody, pulse check, right? If you're pumping 175, 200 beats a minute, and we're 20, 30 minutes into this and there's no stimulus, there's no driving force, it's time to take it back. The stress response we talk about, right? And start thinking clearly. Get out of that tunnel vision, get out of that auditory exclusion. But it's also important to incorporate that stress into training, right? Because training without stress is like drinking decaf coffee, it tastes good, but what do you get out of it at the end of the day, right? But at some point during that incident it's done and over with, we need to pump the brakes and start thinking rationally and making clear, concise decisions.Bill Godfrey:Is this potentially an opportunity to rotate some crews out when we change phases? If you get a staging area stood up, which is one of the subjects we talked about just a few weeks ago on the podcast. And it's critical to success of one of these things. You're not really going to be short of resources, because everybody and their brother is going to come, whether they were invited or not, they're going to come. So you've arguably got enough law enforcement that should be in staging to be able to organize three, four or five more contact teams, and to brief them on exactly what you want. Is that something that perhaps we should consider as a... I don't want to use the phrase best practice, but as a better practice to say, "When we're making that shift, let's take those initial officers and rotate them out, let them take a break, and put the fresh officers in, who can go in with clear instructions of what's intended and what the plan is, and begin moving the kids." What are your thoughts?Robert McMahan:I think that's a great idea. I think the role of tactical is probably the best place to start to pump the brakes and to get control of those contact teams. And even if you can't switch them out right away, at least contact each contact team individually and say, "Okay, we're moving into this phase. You understand that? Slow down." But absolutely, if I were tactical I'd be looking at getting those contact teams that were in the heat of battle, so to speak, or dealing with a lot of casualties, rotated out for some other teams that haven't been on that adrenaline high, that can come in with a fresher perspective, if you will, and a little slower cadence to respond to these rooms.Bill Godfrey:Sure. So Harry, I want to go back to something you said just a couple of minutes ago. You made the comment, "Don't forget to check on your other responders. We need to take care of folks." And most of our listeners don't know, like Robert, have also responded to active shooter events. I'm guessing the one that sticks out and was the toughest was the Sutherland Springs shooting. And I remember that night when you called me on your way home. Now, just to remind everybody it was daylight when that thing occurred.Harry Jimenez:11:35 AM.Bill Godfrey:And it was late at night when you called me because I-Harry Jimenez:Past midnight.Bill Godfrey:Yeah. I got up, got out of bed and I knew the first thing I asked Harry, first thing I said to you was, "Are you okay? How are you doing?" And of course the answer was, "I'm fine." And I knew he wasn't, and I got up and got out of bed, went in the other room and we were on the phone probably an hour. And I don't know that I ever shared with you, but I was worried about you for quite a while. So I think it is important to talk about that. Is there anything that sticks in your mind that would be a good suggestion for leadership or responders to be able to reach out and help each other just informally?Harry Jimenez:Just like Robert mentioned, there comes a time, probably when you're running tactical or the first level supervisor realizing, "Hey, everybody got transported. We don't have a driving force." Look at the board and realize how many people have been transported. And unfortunately we have to assess how many people are still on the scene. And at that point when you start counting and you realize we need to activate EOC because we need a refrigerated truck because we have too many bodies, that is a good point to start looking at swapping people. Get those first responders, fire EMS, and law enforcement, those that where they're putting hands on patients, pull them back, make sure that they're okay.Harry Jimenez:As law enforcement, as all first responders, we tend to work in adrenaline and nobody wants to accept that sometimes a crime scene is too much, especially depending on the crime scene, and the worst thing in the world is to see a child. So that's the moment that we need to be thinking about swapping people and getting a fresh crew there, control the scene, get the perimeter under control, get a new command staff, if you may, for that next phase of the recovery to process the scene, to start dealing with the family members of the survivors, the family members of those that did not survive.Harry Jimenez:And in my experience, you're going to see everybody and their sister with a camera just land on your scene. And it takes a toll dealing with county officials, city officials, family members, trying to set up some reunification locations and family supports services. And realize that all of a sudden you're trying to deal with your emotions, and at the same time you're trying to do your job. It can get really heavy. It can be a lot.Bill Godfrey:Robert, how about you?Robert McMahan:I think there's two other things we've got to watch for in that concept. And one is our cops don't want to go home. They don't want to quit the incident, so to speak. They want to work it all the way through. And if you're one of those first guys in, or you're in the thick of things, you probably shouldn't be staying there longer than necessary. And we do need to rotate you out, because you're not fine. You may think you're fine, but you're not. And the second piece of that is, we often have our star player, so to speak. We have our star detective that we want to be leading this investigation. And I have seen in some of these shootings where that star detector was actually one of the first guys in the door.Robert McMahan:So he's already been exposed to that trauma, and then we want to run him through the investigation and they don't get a break from that. And that can affect a lot of things in the response and in their investigation letter. So we need to be thinking about rotating all the people, and we may have to give up a star player later on in that recovery phase, because they were an initial responder to begin with. We got to take care of those guys too. They can become victims of this as well, and we got to watch for that.Bill Godfrey:And there's star players from other agencies. I agree with you. And I don't think it's just unique to police, I think fire and EMS are the exact same way about not wanting to go until it's done. In fact, to me, on the fire EMS side, that's one of the warning signs. When they don't want to be relieved and don't want to go back to quarters or returned to service, to me that's a red flag waving in the face. I had a peer who was a responder on one of the more horrific events. I don't want to say which one. But a lot of us missed the signs and he killed himself.Harry Jimenez:And this is a good point to whoever's listening out there.Robert McMahan:Bill, we talked about this a while back, and it's important to remember that we're there to stop the killing, stop the dying, but you also got to take care of your first responders after the incident. Because if you let them be victimized by this, and they will, they're going to be hurt, they're going to be injured in an emotional, mental health way. But you can't let that injury go unchecked, you can't let that bleed. You got to get them help. And they may say they're fine, make them get help anyway. Because if we stop the bleeding and stop the dying for the civilians and don't take care of the first responders, we've done our first responders an injustice. And you will lose first responders if you don't take care of them.Bill Godfrey:So we started off talking about a very narrow topic, and that was the idea of emotionally responsible room entries, but clearly the idea of emotional responsibility in responding to these events extends well beyond that. And at every level and every rank how we handle the incident while it's unfolding, how we progressed through the phases, how we clear, how we move people, doesn't have to be just kids by the way. Lindsey was a grown adult woman, accomplished and successful and it was tough for her, as it is for Christina and everybody else who has to recover from this. And I think in the final phase of that, we've got to be emotionally responsible, again at all levels. From leadership and all the way down to the line ranks about making sure we're all okay and checking out on each other.Harry Jimenez:And with that, somebody out there is going to be listening to this podcast. And whoever you are, you may need to ask for help and you're too hard headed to ask for help. It's okay. It's okay to ask for help. Don't kill yourself from the inside out, because you can still do a lot of good to others. So take the first step.Robert McMahan:Yeah, I'd like to echo that Harry, it is okay to ask for help. I've done it. I had a 32 year career and I've done it and I'm okay. I'm okay now. But you can do it too. So leaders all the way down first-line officers, take care of each other.Harry Jimenez:Amen. Same here.Bill Godfrey:Well gentlemen, thank you very much for your time today and talking about this difficult topic. And I appreciate the honesty and the candor as I know our audience does as well. So Harry, Robert, Kevin, thank you for taking the time today and for being here and discussing this important topic. Ladies and gentlemen if you have not subscribed to the podcast, please do. We release a new podcast every Monday. If you have some suggestions for topics that you would like us to cover, please feel free to either email us those ideas at info@c3pathways.com. We're here on a regular basis picking these things apart. We do from time to time have some guests on here as well. And of course our email address and phone number is always available if you need anything from us or we can do anything. In the meantime, stay safe.

James read a great book by Kevin Kelly called 'The Inevitable', all about technology and the future. So Harry and James sit down to talk about the themes from the book and how some of his ideas on what will happen in the future might impact musicians. . .including but not limited to AI, having a community of fans, remixes, live streams, VR, and more. It's an interesting discussion for sure!

We're back! Baseball is happening still, and we're vaguely aware of it! So Harry talks about the two most famous curses to afflict the sport. Then Carly takes us on a tour of Chicago's Graceland Cemetery and it's two most haunted memorials. Instagram: @knownunknownspodcast Twitter: @UnknownsPod knownunknownspodcast.com paypal.me/knownunknowns

You've likely heard of Harry Campbell, otherwise known as "The Rideshare Guy," and chances are, if you are a driver for services like Uber or Lyft, you listen to his podcast religiously; and if you don't, well, do. So Harry recently emailed me to invite me to an event that he's putting on next week, with the impossibly awesome name Curbivore. It's bringing together thought leaders from the intersection of the food industry and mobility tech, to discuss these unprecedented challenges imposed by COVID-19. Curbivore is being produced with a colleague of his, Jonah Bliss. Jonah was formerly part of the original team at Turo, so suffice to say, he knows a thing or two about the mobility industry generally. Harry thought Jonah and I should have a chat about what's going on in this particular slice of the mobility space. So I agreed. What's especially interesting about Curbivore -- and why I agreed to do this admittedly very promotional episode despite that I've received zero compensation for it of any kind; this is not a sponsored episode -- is the lineup of speakers which promises an impressive cross-section of people from the food and tech industries, and crucially, public/municipal organizations as well. Registration is free so you should probably register: Curbivore.co --- This episode is sponsored by · Charity Promotion: Democracy Works: This advertisement is part of a charitable initiative in partnership with Democracy Works. howto.vote · Charity Promotion: BallotReady: The goal of this initiative is to increase voter education and encourage your listeners to get the vote out during the 2020 General Election this November. https://www.ballotready.org/ · Charity Promotion: HeadCount: The goal of this initiative is to increase voter registration and encourage your listeners to get the vote out during the 2020 General Election this November. https://www.headcount.org/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/autonomous-cars-with-marc-hoag/message

The real-life political climate bleeds into the Wizarding World this week. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is very much a political commentary. So guest Amy Otero and I did our very best to stay focused on the movie at hand. As it turned out, neither of us realized just how relevant director David Yates' first Harry Potter movie would be. If Year Four represents Harry's loss of innocence, then this next film sees the boy wizard and his friend brave the dark and complex real world for the very first time. We'll talk about how Dumbledore's Army speaks to today's world, why Imelda Staunton's Dolores Umbridge is worse than Lord Voldemort, and what Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch) brings to the group. So get ready to be inducted into a secret society of wizard revolutionaries because darkness is on the rise. It's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. SYNOPSIS Now in his fifth year at Hogwarts, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) learns that many in the wizarding community do not know the truth of his encounter with Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes). Fearing Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) is after his job Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), minister of magic, appoints Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton), as Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts. But her teaching is deficient and her methods cruel. So Harry prepares a group of students to defend the school against a rising tide of evil. SHOW NOTES Listen to our Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone episode featuring Bri Azmoudeh of Geeky Girl Gab! Check out our Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets episode featuring Teri Sears! Listen to our Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban episode featuring Jackson Smith! Listen to our Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire episode featuring Freddy Yaniz! Join the Crooked Table Crew by becoming an official patron over at Patreon.com/CrookedTable Subscribe to the Crooked Table Podcast on Apple Podcasts so that you never miss a moment! Listen to the Crooked Table Podcast on Spotify! The Crooked Table Podcast is also on Stitcher! Reach Robert Yaniz Jr. on Twitter at @crookedtable. Connect with Crooked Table on social media: Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Tumblr

1999. Winter. Bondi. Harry's been on the streets so long he could easily forget what time is. So Harry keeps an eye on it. EveryContinue reading

SARAH BRILL launches her novel 'SYMPHONY FOR THE MAN"  1999. Winter. Bondi. Harry’s been on the streets so long he could easily forget what time is. So Harry keeps an eye on it. Every morning. Then he heads to the beach to chat with the gulls. Or he wanders through the streets in search of food, clothes, Jules. When the girl on the bus sees him, lonely and cold in the bus shelter that he calls home, she thinks about how she can help. She decides to write a symphony for him. So begins a poignant and gritty tale of homelessness and shelter, of the realities of loneliness and hunger, and of the hopes and dreams of those who often go unnoticed on our streets. This is the story of two outcasts – one a young woman struggling to find her place in an alien world, one an older man seeking refuge and solace from a life in tatters. It is also about the transformative power of care and friendship, and the promise of escape that music holds. An uplifting and heartbreaking story that demands empathy. Amid the struggles to belong and fit in, we are reminded that small acts of kindness matter. And big dreams are possible. SHOW NOTES: Writes4Women www.writes4women.com Facebook @writes4women Twitter / Instagram @w4wpodcast W4W Patreon https://www.writes4women.com/support-us-on-patreon Sarah Brill "Symphony for the Man" SPINIFEX PRESS https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/9781875559817 Facebook @sarahbrillwriter Pamela Cook www.pamelacook.com.au Facebook @pamelacookauthor Twitter @PamelaCookAU Instagram @pamelacookwrites Listen Up Podcasting (Kel Butler) www.listenuppodcasting.com.au Facebook @kelbutler / @listenuppodcasting Twitter @KelB See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.

Mikhail Horowitz is back, right in the front of the show talking about the acts performing at the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. I'll give you just one band that's playing: Asleep at the Wheelchair.And Steve is dried up. He can't come up with anymore ideas for the podcast. So Harry goes to work. First order of business, make sure Steve's no long dried up by getting his brain hydrated. It's funnier than it sounds. We also got Uncle Floyd doing "Deep in the heart of Jersey" and Andy Breckman singing "How I met your Mother." 

You've heard of Grandma Moses, the primitive painter? Well, Harry accuses Steve of being a primitive comic. So Harry gives Steve lessons to up the quality of his work. Also, Nancy Tucker is Steve's guest singing a song she wrote, "Piano," and Steve and Harry sing an old Tin Pan Alley song "Goofus."

THEY'RE BACK!!! After what seemed like a long summer break, best mates Harry & Pricey finally reunited this morning!  Find out what Pricey did to annoy all her friends in Perth, Australia Producer Rog has World Cup chat which Harry had banned but somehow still makes it on the show! The guys play "Whos Ya Daddy?" and try to guess your daddy's job. Career Confidential - We go behind the scenes of a magazine. Its like "The Devil Wears Prada!" Pricey has an apology to make to a certain nation of the world. So Harry went to Kathmandu, Nepal on his holiday and what you think he did versus what he actually did will shock you. PLUS Inspired by H&P's travels through Airport Security and customs we invade Priceys handbag live on air and reveal the contents.    

I'm so delighted to find this work from deviantART user Mollinda! It fits perfectly with what I thought was the most fascinating part of this trio of chapters, and that is the information that Bob relays to Harry after going out exploring in Mister's body. There isn't a lot of art out there featuring Bob and Mister, so if you see any others, be sure to send them my way! First things first: Harry gets a tiny bit framed for murder in these chapters. It's kind of infuriating, because there's a moment where he really gets the drop on Trixie and you think that dumbass is finally going to get what's coming to her. But it turns out that while Trixie may be a dumbass, she's very good at taking orders from smarter people, as well as good at messing up magic circles. So Harry's carefully laid plan comes to nothing, and someone winds up dying anyway. Harry flees to his house, and this is when he gets the info from Bob on what to expect from Mavra. Turns out that Mavra isn't relying on her sorcery skills to get her through, and has "recruited" some help by brainwashing regular people and outfitting them with assault rifles and hand grenades. Oh, goody. Harry gets picked up by Ebenezer McCoy, whom we haven't seen in a minute, and they get ready to head into what amounts to a secret war zone. I wonder what will happen next?!

I'm so delighted to find this work from deviantART user Mollinda! It fits perfectly with what I thought was the most fascinating part of this trio of chapters, and that is the information that Bob relays to Harry after going out exploring in Mister's body. There isn't a lot of art out there featuring Bob and Mister, so if you see any others, be sure to send them my way! First things first: Harry gets a tiny bit framed for murder in these chapters. It's kind of infuriating, because there's a moment where he really gets the drop on Trixie and you think that dumbass is finally going to get what's coming to her. But it turns out that while Trixie may be a dumbass, she's very good at taking orders from smarter people, as well as good at messing up magic circles. So Harry's carefully laid plan comes to nothing, and someone winds up dying anyway. Harry flees to his house, and this is when he gets the info from Bob on what to expect from Mavra. Turns out that Mavra isn't relying on her sorcery skills to get her through, and has "recruited" some help by brainwashing regular people and outfitting them with assault rifles and hand grenades. Oh, goody. Harry gets picked up by Ebenezer McCoy, whom we haven't seen in a minute, and they get ready to head into what amounts to a secret war zone. I wonder what will happen next?!

This week on StoryWeb, Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles. Born in 1876, Susan Glaspell was a prominent novelist, short story writer, journalist, biographer, actress, and, most notably, playwright, winning the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison’s House. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the ground-breaking Provincetown Players, widely known as the first modern American theater company. In fact, it was Glaspell who discovered dramatist Eugene O’Neill as she was searching for a new playwright to feature at the theater. Though she was a widely acclaimed author during her lifetime, with pieces in Harper’s and Ladies’ Home Journal and with books on the New York Times bestsellers list, Glaspell is little known today. She comes down to us for two related works: her one-act play Trifles, written in 1916, and a short story based on the play, “A Jury of Her Peers,” written in 1917. The play and the story were based on Margaret Hossack’s murder trial, which Glaspell covered as a young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News in her home state of Iowa. Trifles ­­– which she wrote in just ten days – is a masterful account of the way two housewives successfully unravel the mystery of another housewife’s murder of her husband. Mr. Wright has been found dead in his bedroom, strangled with a rope. His wife, Mrs. Wright, is in the kitchen, acting “queer,” according to Mr. Hale, the neighbor who initially discovers the murder. The play takes place the day after the murdered man is discovered and after his wife has been taken to jail. Three prominent men of the community – Sheriff Peters, County Attorney Henderson, and Mr. Hale – go to investigate the murder scene. Sheriff Peters and Mr. Hale bring their wives along with them, just in case they can discover any clues to the murder. It is widely assumed that Mrs. Wright killed her husband, but what is her motive? The three men are truly stumped. What would cause an ordinary housewife in a seemingly calm and tidy home to kill her husband? As the detectives are investigating the murder scene in the bedroom upstairs, Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale look around the kitchen and the parlor. Little by little, they begin to spy clues to Mrs. Wright’s emotional state. Erratic stitches in a piece of quilting when all the other needlework was straight, beautiful, unblemished. An empty birdcage with a broken door. A dead canary – its neck twisted – hidden in Mrs. Wright’s sewing basket in a piece of silk. The women realize without even speaking to each other that Mr. Wright had killed the bird and driven his wife to murder. And with silent, knowing looks at each other, they decide not to tell the men what they’ve discovered. For an outstanding reworking of Glaspell’s play, see Kaye Gibbons’s 1991 novel, A Cure for Dreams. Gibbons, a North Carolina writer, obviously had Trifles in mind as she depicts ##, a character who “hides” her crime in her quilting. You can learn more about the connections between Trifles and A Cure for Dreams in my first book, A Southern Weave of Women: Fiction of the Contemporary South. (Check out Chapter 6, “The Southern Wild Zone: Voices on the Margins.” My discussion of A Cure for Dreams begins on page 194, and I explore the links between Glaspell and Gibbons on pages 201-202.) Trifles also make me think of Adrienne Rich’s early poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” The elderly Aunt Jennifer has spent her adult life being “mastered” by her husband. His ring – that is, her wedding band – weighs heavy on her hand. But that weight doesn’t stop her from creating scenes of liberation, power, and strength in her needlepoint. In her tapestry, Aunt Jennifer depicts tigers – “prancing, proud and unafraid.” There’s a story there, Rich seems to say, a sign for those who are adept enough to read it. Finally, Trifles reminds me of African American women quilters who sewed into their quilts messages about the underground railroad. The classic study of these quilts is Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad. Something seemingly so simply and utilitarian as a quilt has the power to be subversive. As Alice Walker notes in her landmark essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” women’s creativity – and the clues it provides to women’s lives – can be found everywhere if one simply knows where to look. Quilts, gardens, kitchens – “just” women’s work – can illuminate the secrets of women’s lives. One thing’s for sure: Glaspell’s work deserves more attention. Oxford University Press published Linda Ben-Zvi’s biography of Glaspell in 2005, and both Trifles and “A Jury of Her Peers” are widely anthologized and frequently taught in classrooms across the country. If you want to join me in learning more about Glaspell, visit the website of the International Susan Glaspell Society. They even offer a timeline of Glaspell’s writing of Trifles. And to learn about Glaspell’s most enduring legacy, the Provincetown Players, visit the Provincetown Playhouse website, dedicated to preserving the history of this truly revolutionary theater. Listen now as I read Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” in its entirety.   When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away—it was probably farther from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted. She hated to see things half done; but she had been at that when the team from town stopped to get Mr. Hale, and then the sheriff came running in to say his wife wished Mrs. Hale would come too—adding, with a grin, that he guessed she was getting scarey and wanted another woman along. So she had dropped everything right where it was. "Martha!" now came her husband's impatient voice. "Don't keep folks waiting out here in the cold." She again opened the storm-door, and this time joined the three men and the one woman waiting for her in the big two-seated buggy. After she had the robes tucked around her she took another look at the woman who sat beside her on the back seat. She had met Mrs. Peters the year before at the county fair, and the thing she remembered about her was that she didn't seem like a sheriff's wife. She was small and thin and didn't have a strong voice. Mrs. Gorman, sheriff's wife before Gorman went out and Peters came in, had a voice that somehow seemed to be backing up the law with every word. But if Mrs. Peters didn't look like a sheriff's wife, Peters made it up in looking like a sheriff. He was to a dot the kind of man who could get himself elected sheriff—a heavy man with a big voice, who was particularly genial with the law-abiding, as if to make it plain that he knew the difference between criminals and non-criminals. And right there it came into Mrs. Hale's mind, with a stab, that this man who was so pleasant and lively with all of them was going to the Wrights' now as a sheriff. "The country's not very pleasant this time of year," Mrs. Peters at last ventured, as if she felt they ought to be talking as well as the men. Mrs. Hale scarcely finished her reply, for they had gone up a little hill and could see the Wright place now, and seeing it did not make her feel like talking. It looked very lonesome this cold March morning. It had always been a lonesome-looking place. It was down in a hollow, and the poplar trees around it were lonesome-looking trees. The men were looking at it and talking about what had happened. The county attorney was bending to one side of the buggy, and kept looking steadily at the place as they drew up to it. "I'm glad you came with me," Mrs. Peters said nervously, as the two women were about to follow the men in through the kitchen door. Even after she had her foot on the door-step, her hand on the knob, Martha Hale had a moment of feeling she could not cross that threshold. And the reason it seemed she couldn't cross it now was simply because she hadn't crossed it before. Time and time again it had been in her mind, "I ought to go over and see Minnie Foster"—she still thought of her as Minnie Foster, though for twenty years she had been Mrs. Wright. And then there was always something to do and Minnie Foster would go from her mind. But now she could come.  The men went over to the stove. The women stood close together by the door. Young Henderson, the county attorney, turned around and said, "Come up to the fire, ladies." Mrs. Peters took a step forward, then stopped. "I'm not—cold," she said. And so the two women stood by the door, at first not even so much as looking around the kitchen. The men talked for a minute about what a good thing it was the sheriff had sent his deputy out that morning to make a fire for them, and then Sheriff Peters stepped back from the stove, unbuttoned his outer coat, and leaned his hands on the kitchen table in a way that seemed to mark the beginning of official business. "Now, Mr. Hale," he said in a sort of semi-official voice, "before we move things about, you tell Mr. Henderson just what it was you saw when you came here yesterday morning." The county attorney was looking around the kitchen. "By the way," he said, "has anything been moved?" He turned to the sheriff. "Are things just as you left them yesterday?" Peters looked from cupboard to sink; from that to a small worn rocker a little to one side of the kitchen table. "It's just the same." "Somebody should have been left here yesterday," said the county attorney. "Oh—yesterday," returned the sheriff, with a little gesture as of yesterday having been more than he could bear to think of. "When I had to send Frank to Morris Center for that man who went crazy—let me tell you, I had my hands full yesterday. I knew you could get back from Omaha by to-day, George, and as long as I went over everything here myself—" "Well, Mr. Hale," said the county attorney, in a way of letting what was past and gone go, "tell just what happened when you came here yesterday morning." Mrs. Hale, still leaning against the door, had that sinking feeling of the mother whose child is about to speak a piece. Lewis often wandered along and got things mixed up in a story. She hoped he would tell this straight and plain, and not say unnecessary things that would just make things harder for Minnie Foster. He didn't begin at once, and she noticed that he looked queer—as if standing in that kitchen and having to tell what he had seen there yesterday morning made him almost sick. "Yes, Mr. Hale?" the county attorney reminded. "Harry and I had started to town with a load of potatoes," Mrs. Hale's husband began. Harry was Mrs. Hale's oldest boy. He wasn't with them now, for the very good reason that those potatoes never got to town yesterday and he was taking them this morning, so he hadn't been home when the sheriff stopped to say he wanted Mr. Hale to come over to the Wright place and tell the county attorney his story there, where he could point it all out. With all Mrs. Hale's other emotions came the fear now that maybe Harry wasn't dressed warm enough—they hadn't any of them realized how that north wind did bite. "We come along this road," Hale was going on, with a motion of his hand to the road over which they had just come, "and as we got in sight of the house I says to Harry, 'I'm goin' to see if I can't get John Wright to take a telephone.' You see," he explained to Henderson, "unless I can get somebody to go in with me they won't come out this branch road except for a price I can't pay. I'd spoke to Wright about it once before; but he put me off, saying folks talked too much anyway, and all he asked was peace and quiet—guess you know about how much he talked himself. But I thought maybe if I went to the house and talked about it before his wife, and said all the women-folks liked the telephones, and that in this lonesome stretch of road it would be a good thing—well, I said to Harry that that was what I was going to say—though I said at the same time that I didn't know as what his wife wanted made much difference to John—" Now, there he was!—saying things he didn't need to say. Mrs. Hale tried to catch her husband's eye, but fortunately the county attorney interrupted with: "Let's talk about that a little later, Mr. Hale. I do want to talk about that, but I'm anxious now to get along to just what happened when you got here." When he began this time, it was very deliberately and carefully: "I didn't see or hear anything. I knocked at the door. And still it was all quiet inside. I knew they must be up—it was past eight o'clock. So I knocked again, louder, and I thought I heard somebody say, 'Come in.' I wasn't sure—I'm not sure yet. But I opened the door—this door," jerking a hand toward the door by which the two women stood, "and there, in that rocker"—pointing to it—"sat Mrs. Wright." Every one in the kitchen looked at the rocker. It came into Mrs. Hale's mind that that rocker didn't look in the least like Minnie Foster—the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back, and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side. "How did she—look?" the county attorney was inquiring. "Well," said Hale, "she looked—queer." "How do you mean—queer?" As he asked it he took out a note-book and pencil. Mrs. Hale did not like the sight of that pencil. She kept her eye fixed on her husband, as if to keep him from saying unnecessary things that would go into that note-book and make trouble. Hale did speak guardedly, as if the pencil had affected him too. "Well, as if she didn't know what she was going to do next. And kind of—done up." "How did she seem to feel about your coming?" "Why, I don't think she minded—one way or other. She didn't pay much attention. I said, 'Ho' do, Mrs. Wright? It's cold, ain't it?' And she said, 'Is it?'—and went on pleatin' at her apron. "Well, I was surprised. She didn't ask me to come up to the stove, or to sit down, but just set there, not even lookin' at me. And so I said: 'I want to see John.' "And then she—laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh. "I thought of Harry and the team outside, so I said, a little sharp, 'Can I see John?' 'No,' says she—kind of dull like. 'Ain't he home?' says I. Then she looked at me. 'Yes,' says she, 'he's home.' 'Then why can't I see him?' I asked her, out of patience with her now. ''Cause he's dead,' says she, just as quiet and dull—and fell to pleatin' her apron. 'Dead?' says I, like you do when you can't take in what you've heard. "She just nodded her head, not getting a bit excited, but rockin' back and forth. "'Why—where is he?' says I, not knowing what to say. "She just pointed upstairs—like this"—pointing to the room above. "I got up, with the idea of going up there myself. By this time I—didn't know what to do. I walked from there to here; then I says: 'Why, what did he die of?' "'He died of a rope round his neck,' says she; and just went on pleatin' at her apron."  Hale stopped speaking, and stood staring at the rocker, as if he were still seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. Nobody spoke; it was as if every one were seeing the woman who had sat there the morning before. "And what did you do then?" the county attorney at last broke the silence. "I went out and called Harry. I thought I might—need help. I got Harry in, and we went upstairs." His voice fell almost to a whisper. "There he was—lying over the—" "I think I'd rather have you go into that upstairs," the county attorney interrupted, "where you can point it all out. Just go on now with the rest of the story." "Well, my first thought was to get that rope off. It looked—" He stopped, his face twitching. "But Harry, he went up to him, and he said, 'No, he's dead all right, and we'd better not touch anything.' So we went downstairs. "She was still sitting that same way. 'Has anybody been notified?' I asked. 'No,' says she, unconcerned. "'Who did this, Mrs. Wright?' said Harry. He said it businesslike, and she stopped pleatin' at her apron. 'I don't know,' she says. 'You don't know?' says Harry. 'Weren't you sleepin' in the bed with him?' 'Yes,' says she, 'but I was on the inside.' 'Somebody slipped a rope round his neck and strangled him, and you didn't wake up?' says Harry. 'I didn't wake up,' she said after him. "We may have looked as if we didn't see how that could be, for after a minute she said, 'I sleep sound.' "Harry was going to ask her more questions, but I said maybe that weren't our business; maybe we ought to let her tell her story first to the coroner or the sheriff. So Harry went fast as he could over to High Road—the Rivers' place, where there's a telephone." "And what did she do when she knew you had gone for the coroner?" The attorney got his pencil in his hand all ready for writing. "She moved from that chair to this one over here"—Hale pointed to a small chair in the corner—"and just sat there with her hands held together and looking down. I got a feeling that I ought to make some conversation, so I said I had come in to see if John wanted to put in a telephone; and at that she started to laugh, and then she stopped and looked at me—scared." At sound of a moving pencil the man who was telling the story looked up. "I dunno—maybe it wasn't scared," he hastened; "I wouldn't like to say it was. Soon Harry got back, and then Dr. Lloyd came, and you, Mr. Peters, and so I guess that's all I know that you don't."   He said that last with relief, and moved a little, as if relaxing. Every one moved a little. The county attorney walked toward the stair door. "I guess we'll go upstairs first—then out to the barn and around there." He paused and looked around the kitchen. "You're convinced there was nothing important here?" he asked the sheriff. "Nothing that would—point to any motive?" The sheriff too looked all around, as if to re-convince himself. "Nothing here but kitchen things," he said, with a little laugh for the insignificance of kitchen things. The county attorney was looking at the cupboard—a peculiar, ungainly structure, half closet and half cupboard, the upper part of it being built in the wall, and the lower part just the old-fashioned kitchen cupboard. As if its queerness attracted him, he got a chair and opened the upper part and looked in. After a moment he drew his hand away sticky. "Here's a nice mess," he said resentfully. The two women had drawn nearer, and now the sheriff's wife spoke. "Oh—her fruit," she said, looking to Mrs. Hale for sympathetic understanding. She turned back to the county attorney and explained: "She worried about that when it turned so cold last night. She said the fire would go out and her jars might burst." Mrs. Peters' husband broke into a laugh. "Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worrying about her preserves!" The young attorney set his lips. "I guess before we're through with her she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about." "Oh, well," said Mrs. Hale's husband, with good-natured superiority, "women are used to worrying over trifles." The two women moved a little closer together. Neither of them spoke. The county attorney seemed suddenly to remember his manners—and think of his future. "And yet," said he, with the gallantry of a young politician, "for all their worries, what would we do without the ladies?" The women did not speak, did not unbend. He went to the sink and began washing his hands. He turned to wipe them on the roller towel—whirled it for a cleaner place. "Dirty towels! Not much of a housekeeper, would you say, ladies?" He kicked his foot against some dirty pans under the sink. "There's a great deal of work to be done on a farm," said Mrs. Hale stiffly. "To be sure. And yet"—with a little bow to her—"I know there are some Dickson County farm-houses that do not have such roller towels." He gave it a pull to expose its full length again. "Those towels get dirty awful quick. Men's hands aren't always as clean as they might be." "Ah, loyal to your sex, I see," he laughed. He stopped and gave her a keen look. "But you and Mrs. Wright were neighbors. I suppose you were friends, too." Martha Hale shook her head. "I've seen little enough of her of late years. I've not been in this house—it's more than a year." "And why was that? You didn't like her?" "I liked her well enough," she replied with spirit. "Farmers' wives have their hands full, Mr. Henderson. And then—" She looked around the kitchen. "Yes?" he encouraged. "It never seemed a very cheerful place," said she, more to herself than to him. "No," he agreed; "I don't think any one would call it cheerful. I shouldn't say she had the home-making instinct." "Well, I don't know as Wright had, either," she muttered. "You mean they didn't get on very well?" he was quick to ask. "No; I don't mean anything," she answered, with decision. As she turned a little away from him, she added: "But I don't think a place would be any the cheerfuler for John Wright's bein' in it." "I'd like to talk to you about that a little later, Mrs. Hale," he said. "I'm anxious to get the lay of things upstairs now." He moved toward the stair door, followed by the two men. "I suppose anything Mrs. Peters does'll be all right?" the sheriff inquired. "She was to take in some clothes for her, you know—and a few little things. We left in such a hurry yesterday." The county attorney looked at the two women whom they were leaving alone there among the kitchen things. "Yes—Mrs. Peters," he said, his glance resting on the woman who was not Mrs. Peters, the big farmer woman who stood behind the sheriff's wife. "Of course Mrs. Peters is one of us," he said, in a manner of entrusting responsibility. "And keep your eye out Mrs. Peters, for anything that might be of use. No telling; you women might come upon a clue to the motive—and that's the thing we need." Mr. Hale rubbed his face after the fashion of a show man getting ready for a pleasantry. "But would the women know a clue if they did come upon it?" he said; and, having delivered himself of this, he followed the others through the stair door.   The women stood motionless and silent, listening to the footsteps, first upon the stairs, then in the room above them. Then, as if releasing herself from something strange, Mrs. Hale began to arrange the dirty pans under the sink, which the county attorney's disdainful push of the foot had deranged. "I'd hate to have men comin' into my kitchen," she said testily—"snoopin' round and criticizin'." "Of course it's no more than their duty," said the sheriff's wife, in her manner of timid acquiescence. "Duty's all right," replied Mrs. Hale bluffly; "but I guess that deputy sheriff that come out to make the fire might have got a little of this on." She gave the roller towel a pull. "Wish I'd thought of that sooner! Seems mean to talk about her for not having things slicked up, when she had to come away in such a hurry." She looked around the kitchen. Certainly it was not "slicked up." Her eye was held by a bucket of sugar on a low shelf. The cover was off the wooden bucket, and beside it was a paper bag—half full. Mrs. Hale moved toward it. "She was putting this in there," she said to herself—slowly. She thought of the flour in her kitchen at home—half sifted, half not sifted. She had been interrupted, and had left things half done. What had interrupted Minnie Foster? Why had that work been left half done? She made a move as if to finish it,—unfinished things always bothered her,—and then she glanced around and saw that Mrs. Peters was watching her—and she didn't want Mrs. Peters to get that feeling she had got of work begun and then—for some reason—not finished. "It's a shame about her fruit," she said, and walked toward the cupboard that the county attorney had opened, and got on the chair, murmuring: "I wonder if it's all gone." It was a sorry enough looking sight, but "Here's one that's all right," she said at last. She held it toward the light. "This is cherries, too." She looked again. "I declare I believe that's the only one." With a sigh, she got down from the chair, went to the sink, and wiped off the bottle. "She'll feel awful bad, after all her hard work in the hot weather. I remember the afternoon I put up my cherries last summer." She set the bottle on the table, and, with another sigh, started to sit down in the rocker. But she did not sit down. Something kept her from sitting down in that chair. She straightened—stepped back, and, half turned away, stood looking at it, seeing the woman who had sat there "pleatin' at her apron." The thin voice of the sheriff's wife broke in upon her: "I must be getting those things from the front room closet." She opened the door into the other room, started in, stepped back. "You coming with me, Mrs. Hale?" she asked nervously. "You—you could help me get them." They were soon back—the stark coldness of that shut-up room was not a thing to linger in. "My!" said Mrs. Peters, dropping the things on the table and hurrying to the stove. Mrs. Hale stood examining the clothes the woman who was being detained in town had said she wanted. "Wright was close!" she exclaimed, holding up a shabby black skirt that bore the marks of much making over. "I think maybe that's why she kept so much to herself. I s'pose she felt she couldn't do her part; and then, you don't enjoy things when you feel shabby. She used to wear pretty clothes and be lively—when she was Minnie Foster, one of the town girls, singing in the choir. But that—oh, that was twenty years ago." With a carefulness in which there was something tender, she folded the shabby clothes and piled them at one corner of the table. She looked up at Mrs. Peters and there was something in the other woman's look that irritated her. "She don't care," she said to herself. "Much difference it makes to her whether Minnie Foster had pretty clothes when she was a girl." Then she looked again, and she wasn't so sure; in fact, she hadn't at any time been perfectly sure about Mrs. Peters. She had that shrinking manner, and yet her eyes looked as if they could see a long way into things. "This all you was to take in?" asked Mrs. Hale. "No," said the sheriff's wife; "she said she wanted an apron. Funny thing to want," she ventured in her nervous little way, "for there's not much to get you dirty in jail, goodness knows. But I suppose just to make her feel more natural. If you're used to wearing an apron—. She said they were in the bottom drawer of this cupboard. Yes—here they are. And then her little shawl that always hung on the stair door." She took the small gray shawl from behind the door leading upstairs, and stood a minute looking at it. Suddenly Mrs. Hale took a quick step toward the other woman. "Mrs. Peters!" "Yes, Mrs. Hale?" "Do you think she—did it?" A frightened look blurred the other thing in Mrs. Peters' eyes. "Oh, I don't know," she said, in a voice that seemed to shrink away from the subject. "Well, I don't think she did," affirmed Mrs. Hale stoutly. "Asking for an apron, and her little shawl. Worryin' about her fruit." "Mr. Peters says—." Footsteps were heard in the room above; she stopped, looked up, then went on in a lowered voice: "Mr. Peters says—it looks bad for her. Mr. Henderson is awful sarcastic in a speech, and he's going to make fun of her saying she didn't—wake up." For a moment Mrs. Hale had no answer. Then, "Well, I guess John Wright didn't wake up—when they was slippin' that rope under his neck," she muttered. "No, it's strange," breathed Mrs. Peters. "They think it was such a—funny way to kill a man." She began to laugh; at sound of the laugh, abruptly stopped. "That's just what Mr. Hale said," said Mrs. Hale, in a resolutely natural voice. "There was a gun in the house. He says that's what he can't understand." "Mr. Henderson said, coming out, that what was needed for the case was a motive. Something to show anger—or sudden feeling." "Well, I don't see any signs of anger around here," said Mrs. Hale. "I don't—" She stopped. It was as if her mind tripped on something. Her eye was caught by a dish-towel in the middle of the kitchen table. Slowly she moved toward the table. One half of it was wiped clean, the other half messy. Her eyes made a slow, almost unwilling turn to the bucket of sugar and the half empty bag beside it. Things begun—and not finished. After a moment she stepped back, and said, in that manner of releasing herself: "Wonder how they're finding things upstairs? I hope she had it a little more red up up there. You know,"—she paused, and feeling gathered,—"it seems kind of sneaking: locking her up in town and coming out here to get her own house to turn against her!" "But, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife, "the law is the law." "I s'pose 'tis," answered Mrs. Hale shortly. She turned to the stove, saying something about that fire not being much to brag of. She worked with it a minute, and when she straightened up she said aggressively: "The law is the law—and a bad stove is a bad stove. How'd you like to cook on this?"—pointing with the poker to the broken lining. She opened the oven door and started to express her opinion of the oven; but she was swept into her own thoughts, thinking of what it would mean, year after year, to have that stove to wrestle with. The thought of Minnie Foster trying to bake in that oven—and the thought of her never going over to see Minnie Foster—. She was startled by hearing Mrs. Peters say: "A person gets discouraged—and loses heart." The sheriff's wife had looked from the stove to the sink—to the pail of water which had been carried in from outside. The two women stood there silent, above them the footsteps of the men who were looking for evidence against the woman who had worked in that kitchen. That look of seeing into things, of seeing through a thing to something else, was in the eyes of the sheriff's wife now. When Mrs. Hale next spoke to her, it was gently: "Better loosen up your things, Mrs. Peters. We'll not feel them when we go out." Mrs. Peters went to the back of the room to hang up the fur tippet she was wearing. A moment later she exclaimed, "Why, she was piecing a quilt," and held up a large sewing basket piled high with quilt pieces. Mrs. Hale spread some of the blocks out on the table. "It's log-cabin pattern," she said, putting several of them together. "Pretty, isn't it?" They were so engaged with the quilt that they did not hear the footsteps on the stairs. Just as the stair door opened Mrs. Hale was saying: "Do you suppose she was going to quilt it or just knot it?" The sheriff threw up his hands. "They wonder whether she was going to quilt it or just knot it!" There was a laugh for the ways of women, a warming of hands over the stove, and then the county attorney said briskly: "Well, let's go right out to the barn and get that cleared up." "I don't see as there's anything so strange," Mrs. Hale said resentfully, after the outside door had closed on the three men—"our taking up our time with little things while we're waiting for them to get the evidence. I don't see as it's anything to laugh about." "Of course they've got awful important things on their minds," said the sheriff's wife apologetically. They returned to an inspection of the block for the quilt. Mrs. Hale was looking at the fine, even sewing, and preoccupied with thoughts of the woman who had done that sewing, when she heard the sheriff's wife say, in a queer tone: "Why, look at this one." She turned to take the block held out to her. "The sewing," said Mrs. Peters, in a troubled way. "All the rest of them have been so nice and even—but—this one. Why, it looks as if she didn't know what she was about!" Their eyes met—something flashed to life, passed between them; then, as if with an effort, they seemed to pull away from each other. A moment Mrs. Hale sat her hands folded over that sewing which was so unlike all the rest of the sewing. Then she had pulled a knot and drawn the threads. "Oh, what are you doing, Mrs. Hale?" asked the sheriff's wife, startled. "Just pulling out a stitch or two that's not sewed very good," said Mrs. Hale mildly. "I don't think we ought to touch things," Mrs. Peters said, a little helplessly. "I'll just finish up this end," answered Mrs. Hale, still in that mild, matter-of-fact fashion. She threaded a needle and started to replace bad sewing with good. For a little while she sewed in silence. Then, in that thin, timid voice, she heard: "Mrs. Hale!" "Yes, Mrs. Peters?" "What do you suppose she was so—nervous about?" "Oh, I don't know," said Mrs. Hale, as if dismissing a thing not important enough to spend much time on. "I don't know as she was—nervous. I sew awful queer sometimes when I'm just tired." She cut a thread, and out of the corner of her eye looked up at Mrs. Peters. The small, lean face of the sheriff's wife seemed to have tightened up. Her eyes had that look of peering into something. But next moment she moved, and said in her thin, indecisive way: "Well, I must get those clothes wrapped. They may be through sooner than we think. I wonder where I could find a piece of paper—and string." "In that cupboard, maybe," suggested Mrs. Hale, after a glance around. One piece of the crazy sewing remained unripped. Mrs. Peters' back turned, Martha Hale now scrutinized that piece, compared it with the dainty, accurate sewing of the other blocks. The difference was startling. Holding this block made her feel queer, as if the distracted thoughts of the woman who had perhaps turned to it to try and quiet herself were communicating themselves to her. Mrs. Peters' voice roused her. "Here's a bird-cage," she said. "Did she have a bird, Mrs. Hale?" "Why, I don't know whether she did or not." She turned to look at the cage Mrs. Peter was holding up. "I've not been here in so long." She sighed. "There was a man round last year selling canaries cheap—but I don't know as she took one. Maybe she did. She used to sing real pretty herself." Mrs. Peters looked around the kitchen. "Seems kind of funny to think of a bird here." She half laughed—an attempt to put up a barrier. "But she must have had one—or why would she have a cage? I wonder what happened to it." "I suppose maybe the cat got it," suggested Mrs. Hale, resuming her sewing. "No; she didn't have a cat. She's got that feeling some people have about cats—being afraid of them. When they brought her to our house yesterday, my cat got in the room, and she was real upset and asked me to take it out." "My sister Bessie was like that," laughed Mrs. Hale. The sheriff's wife did not reply. The silence made Mrs. Hale turn round. Mrs. Peters was examining the bird-cage. "Look at this door," she said slowly. "It's broke. One hinge has been pulled apart." Mrs. Hale came nearer. "Looks as if some one must have been—rough with it." Again their eyes met—startled, questioning, apprehensive. For a moment neither spoke nor stirred. Then Mrs. Hale, turning away, said brusquely: "If they're going to find any evidence, I wish they'd be about it. I don't like this place." "But I'm awful glad you came with me, Mrs. Hale," Mrs. Peters put the bird-cage on the table and sat down. "It would be lonesome for me—sitting here alone." "Yes, it would, wouldn't it?" agreed Mrs. Hale, a certain determined naturalness in her voice. She had picked up the sewing, but now it dropped in her lap, and she murmured in a different voice: "But I tell you what I do wish, Mrs. Peters. I wish I had come over sometimes when she was here. I wish—I had." "But of course you were awful busy, Mrs. Hale. Your house—and your children." "I could've come," retorted Mrs. Hale shortly. "I stayed away because it weren't cheerful—and that's why I ought to have come. I"—she looked around—"I've never liked this place. Maybe because it's down in a hollow and you don't see the road. I don't know what it is, but it's a lonesome place, and always was. I wish I had come over to see Minnie Foster sometimes. I can see now—" She did not put it into words. "Well, you mustn't reproach yourself," counseled Mrs. Peters. "Somehow, we just don't see how it is with other folks till—something comes up." "Not having children makes less work," mused Mrs. Hale, after a silence, "but it makes a quiet house—and Wright out to work all day—and no company when he did come in. Did you know John Wright, Mrs. Peters?" "Not to know him. I've seen him in town. They say he was a good man." "Yes—good," conceded John Wright's neighbor grimly. "He didn't drink, and kept his word as well as most, I guess, and paid his debts. But he was a hard man, Mrs. Peters. Just to pass the time of day with him—." She stopped, shivered a little. "Like a raw wind that gets to the bone." Her eye fell upon the cage on the table before her, and she added, almost bitterly: "I should think she would've wanted a bird!" Suddenly she leaned forward, looking intently at the cage. "But what do you s'pose went wrong with it?" "I don't know," returned Mrs. Peters; "unless it got sick and died." But after she said it she reached over and swung the broken door. Both women watched it as if somehow held by it. "You didn't know—her?" Mrs. Hale asked, a gentler note in her voice. "Not till they brought her yesterday," said the sheriff's wife. "She—come to think of it, she was kind of like a bird herself. Real sweet and pretty, but kind of timid and—fluttery. How—she—did—change." That held her for a long time. Finally, as if struck with a happy thought and relieved to get back to every-day things, she exclaimed: "Tell you what, Mrs. Peters, why don't you take the quilt in with you? It might take up her mind." "Why, I think that's a real nice idea, Mrs. Hale," agreed the sheriff's wife, as if she too were glad to come into the atmosphere of a simple kindness. "There couldn't possibly be any objection to that, could there? Now, just what will I take? I wonder if her patches are in here—and her things." They turned to the sewing basket. "Here's some red," said Mrs. Hale, bringing out a roll of cloth. Underneath that was a box. "Here, maybe her scissors are in here—and her things." She held it up. "What a pretty box! I'll warrant that was something she had a long time ago—when she was a girl." She held it in her hand a moment; then, with a little sigh, opened it. Instantly her hand went to her nose. "Why—!" Mrs. Peters drew nearer—then turned away. "There's something wrapped up in this piece of silk," faltered Mrs. Hale. "This isn't her scissors," said Mrs. Peters, in a shrinking voice. Her hand not steady, Mrs. Hale raised the piece of silk. "Oh, Mrs. Peters!" she cried. "It's—" Mrs. Peters bent closer. "It's the bird," she whispered. "But, Mrs. Peters!" cried Mrs. Hale. "Look at it! Its neck—look at its neck! It's all—other side to." She held the box away from her. The sheriff's wife again bent closer. "Somebody wrung its neck," said she, in a voice that was slow and deep. And then again the eyes of the two women met—this time clung together in a look of dawning comprehension, of growing horror. Mrs. Peters looked from the dead bird to the broken door of the cage. Again their eyes met. And just then there was a sound at the outside door. Mrs. Hale slipped the box under the quilt pieces in the basket, and sank into the chair before it. Mrs. Peters stood holding to the table. The county attorney and the sheriff came in from outside. "Well, ladies," said the county attorney, as one turning from serious things to little pleasantries, "have you decided whether she was going to quilt it or knot it?" "We think," began the sheriff's wife in a flurried voice, "that she was going to—knot it." He was too preoccupied to notice the change that came in her voice on that last. "Well, that's very interesting, I'm sure," he said tolerantly. He caught sight of the bird-cage. "Has the bird flown?" "We think the cat got it," said Mrs. Hale in a voice curiously even. He was walking up and down, as if thinking something out. "Is there a cat?" he asked absently. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at the sheriff's wife. "Well, not now," said Mrs. Peters. "They're superstitious, you know; they leave." She sank into her chair. The county attorney did not heed her. "No sign at all of any one having come in from the outside," he said to Peters, in the manner of continuing an interrupted conversation. "Their own rope. Now let's go upstairs again and go over it, piece by piece. It would have to have been some one who knew just the—" The stair door closed behind them and their voices were lost. The two women sat motionless, not looking at each other, but as if peering into something and at the same time holding back. When they spoke now it was as if they were afraid of what they were saying, but as if they could not help saying it. "She liked the bird," said Martha Hale, low and slowly. "She was going to bury it in that pretty box." "When I was a girl," said Mrs. Peters, under her breath, "my kitten—there was a boy took a hatchet, and before my eyes—before I could get there—" She covered her face an instant. "If they hadn't held me back I would have"—she caught herself, looked upstairs where footsteps were heard, and finished weakly—"hurt him." Then they sat without speaking or moving. "I wonder how it would seem," Mrs. Hale at last began, as if feeling her way over strange ground—"never to have had any children around?" Her eyes made a slow sweep of the kitchen, as if seeing what that kitchen had meant through all the years. "No, Wright wouldn't like the bird," she said after that—"a thing that sang. She used to sing. He killed that too." Her voice tightened. Mrs. Peters moved uneasily. "Of course we don't know who killed the bird." "I knew John Wright," was Mrs. Hale's answer. "It was an awful thing was done in this house that night, Mrs. Hale," said the sheriff's wife. "Killing a man while he slept—slipping a thing round his neck that choked the life out of him." Mrs. Hale's hand went out to the bird-cage. "His neck. Choked the life out of him." "We don't know who killed him," whispered Mrs. Peters wildly. "We don't know." Mrs. Hale had not moved. "If there had been years and years of—nothing, then a bird to sing to you, it would be awful—still—after the bird was still." It was as if something within her not herself had spoken, and it found in Mrs. Peters something she did not know as herself. "I know what stillness is," she said, in a queer, monotonous voice. "When we homesteaded in Dakota, and my first baby died—after he was two years old—and me with no other then—" Mrs. Hale stirred. "How soon do you suppose they'll be through looking for the evidence?" "I know what stillness is," repeated Mrs. Peters, in just that same way. Then she too pulled back. "The law has got to punish crime, Mrs. Hale," she said in her tight little way. "I wish you'd seen Minnie Foster," was the answer, "when she wore a white dress with blue ribbons, and stood up there in the choir and sang." The picture of that girl, the fact that she had lived neighbor to that girl for twenty years, and had let her die for lack of life, was suddenly more than she could bear. "Oh, I wish I'd come over here once in a while!" she cried. "That was a crime! That was a crime! Who's going to punish that?" "We mustn't take on," said Mrs. Peters, with a frightened look toward the stairs. "I might 'a' known she needed help! I tell you, it's queer, Mrs. Peters. We live close together, and we live far apart. We all go through the same things—it's all just a different kind of the same thing! If it weren't—why do you and I understand? Why do we know—what we know this minute?" She dashed her hand across her eyes. Then, seeing the jar of fruit on the table, she reached for it and choked out: "If I was you I wouldn't tell her her fruit was gone! Tell her it ain't. Tell her it's all right—all of it. Here—take this in to prove it to her! She—she may never know whether it was broke or not." She turned away. Mrs. Peters reached out for the bottle of fruit as if she were glad to take it—as if touching a familiar thing, having something to do, could keep her from something else. She got up, looked about for something to wrap the fruit in, took a petticoat from the pile of clothes she had brought from the front room, and nervously started winding that round the bottle. "My!" she began, in a high, false voice, "it's a good thing the men couldn't hear us! Getting all stirred up over a little thing like a—dead canary." She hurried over that. "As if that could have anything to do with—with—My, wouldn't they laugh?" Footsteps were heard on the stairs. "Maybe they would," muttered Mrs. Hale—"maybe they wouldn't." "No, Peters," said the county attorney incisively; "it's all perfectly clear, except the reason for doing it. But you know juries when it comes to women. If there was some definite thing—something to show. Something to make a story about. A thing that would connect up with this clumsy way of doing it." In a covert way Mrs. Hale looked at Mrs. Peters. Mrs. Peters was looking at her. Quickly they looked away from each other. The outer door opened and Mr. Hale came in. "I've got the team round now," he said. "Pretty cold out there." "I'm going to stay here awhile by myself," the county attorney suddenly announced. "You can send Frank out for me, can't you?" he asked the sheriff. "I want to go over everything. I'm not satisfied we can't do better." Again, for one brief moment, the two women's eyes found one another. The sheriff came up to the table. "Did you want to see what Mrs. Peters was going to take in?" The county attorney picked up the apron. He laughed. "Oh, I guess they're not very dangerous things the ladies have picked out." Mrs. Hale's hand was on the sewing basket in which the box was concealed. She felt that she ought to take her hand off the basket. She did not seem able to. He picked up one of the quilt blocks which she had piled on to cover the box. Her eyes felt like fire. She had a feeling that if he took up the basket she would snatch it from him. But he did not take it up. With another little laugh, he turned away, saying: "No; Mrs. Peters doesn't need supervising. For that matter, a sheriff's wife is married to the law. Ever think of it that way, Mrs. Peters?" Mrs. Peters was standing beside the table. Mrs. Hale shot a look up at her; but she could not see her face. Mrs. Peters had turned away. When she spoke, her voice was muffled. "Not—just that way," she said. "Married to the law!" chuckled Mrs. Peters' husband. He moved toward the door into the front room, and said to the county attorney: "I just want you to come in here a minute, George. We ought to take a look at these windows." "Oh—windows," said the county attorney scoffingly. "We'll be right out, Mr. Hale," said the sheriff to the farmer, who was still waiting by the door. Hale went to look after the horses. The sheriff followed the county attorney into the other room. Again—for one final moment—the two women were alone in that kitchen. Martha Hale sprang up, her hands tight together, looking at that other woman, with whom it rested. At first she could not see her eyes, for the sheriff's wife had not turned back since she turned away at that suggestion of being married to the law. But now Mrs. Hale made her turn back. Her eyes made her turn back. Slowly, unwillingly, Mrs. Peters turned her head until her eyes met the eyes of the other woman. There was a moment when they held each other in a steady, burning look in which there was no evasion nor flinching. Then Martha Hale's eyes pointed the way to the basket in which was hidden the thing that would make certain the conviction of the other woman—that woman who was not there and yet who had been there with them all through that hour. For a moment Mrs. Peters did not move. And then she did it. With a rush forward, she threw back the quilt pieces, got the box, tried to put it in her handbag. It was too big. Desperately she opened it, started to take the bird out. But there she broke—she could not touch the bird. She stood there helpless, foolish. There was the sound of a knob turning in the inner door. Martha Hale snatched the box from the sheriff's wife, and got it in the pocket of her big coat just as the sheriff and the county attorney came back into the kitchen. "Well, Henry," said the county attorney facetiously, "at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to—what is it you call it, ladies?" Mrs. Hale's hand was against the pocket of her coat. "We call it—knot it, Mr. Henderson."    

Harry wakes in the hospital wing and is discharged by Madame Pomfrey - he heads out to find Ron and Hermione and is intercepted by Percy Weasley who is excited about the quidditch win Harry procured for the house. Harry goes to Myrtle's bathroom to find R&H working on the polyjuice potion and fills them in about Colin's petrification and Dobby's visit. The trio returns to the G common room and finds out a dueling club will be starting that night and decide to check it out. Led by Prof's Lockhart and Snape - the students are shown the disarming charm before being split into pairs to try it out. Harry and Draco are placed together. The two hit each other with non-disarming spells and are then chosen by Snape to act as demonstrators in front of everyone. After some worthless advice from Lockhart - the two boys square off and Draco produces a large snake with Lockhart fails to get rid of. The now irritated snake heads toward Justin Finch-Fletchley and Harry calls out to the snake for it to ssssstop. The snake turns and makes eye contact with Harry - and everyone else stares, too. Snape deals with the snake and Harry is quickly led from the Great Hall by Ron with everyone shocked and staring. Confused, Harry learns that he is a parselmouth and can talk to snakes - which is highly uncommon and was last known to be a trait of Salazar Slytherin himself. The next day Herbology is canceled and Harry feels that Justin deserves an explanation and wants to clear the air. So Harry heads to the library and overhears a group of Hufflepuffs discussing how Justin is hiding from Harry and believes him to be the heir of Slytherin. Harry confronts the group to explain himself but leaves them frustrated. After a brief run-in with Hagrid, Harry discovers that NHN has been petrified - along with Justin and Peeves catches Harry “in the act”. Harry is taken by McG straight to Dumby's office. The post TPTMNBN 2-11 Skirmish Society appeared first on The Podcast That.

~ The Lives of Harry Lime: Ticket to Tangier, Part 5 Harry Lime: I’m not a connoisseur, Patsy... I don't know a thing about carpets!Patsy: Do you know about heroin?[Photo © ChiccoDodiFC/Bigstock.com]   It's Against My Morals: In this episode, Harry finds out why Patsy brought him to Tangier. She has something to show him and a job for him to do. But what Patsy expects of him goes against his morals — she wants him to help her sell the drugs she smuggles in to Europe from Tangier, Morocco. Although Harry isn't the most honest of businessman, he is not and will not be involved in drug trafficking. Persuasive Tactics: Even if it is true that he hasn't sold drugs before, Patsy — now known as Mrs Magetti — is sure he could do it. After all, Harry knows how to break the law and get away with it, so what's so different about drugs? Mrs Magetti explains how she got into this predicament. (Surely, Harry would help a woman in distress!) Her husband, Rico Magetti, had recently gotten into drug trafficking, but she knew nothing of his business. She was left with the drugs when he died.  Poor Rico! How did he die? When Harry finds out that it was Mrs Magetti who had killed Rico, he draws the line. He gives a firm answer, 'No!' Even though he could make a lot of money on this deal, Harry definitely does not want to be an 'accessory after the fact' to murder.  Let's Try a New Tactic: Mrs Magetti won't take 'no' for an answer. She tries a new tactic and taunts Harry saying he's not living up to his name! Then, when Harry asks about the value of the heroin, she's ready to reel in her fish.    DL089~DL095: Keywords & Transcript Login to download the free PDF. Not a member? Register now. Membership is free. Have fun learning the keywords with English-Chinese Flashcards and Games.DL093 Keywords on Quizlet Harry and Mrs Magetti are both very strong-willed. Harry has his morals. Although not completely honest, it's his morals (when compared to the morals of those around him) that make him so likable. So Harry has his morals, but Mrs Magetti has the opportunity to make a lot of money. Who do you think will win out in the end? Will Harry hold true to his morals, or will the almighty dollar be too hard to resist? What do you think? Which would make the better story? Please, leave your comment below.