Suffolk Police Department honors 36 civilian employees

Just a year into her job as a 911 operator for the Suffolk County Police Department, Donna McCabe took a call from a distraught man.

"He said he was going to blow his brains out and he had a shotgun," she recalled Friday.

The man told McCabe he'd been discharged from the military and had a history of drug and alcohol addiction. He was sitting, he told her, with the loaded gun in a car in front of his parents' Bay Shore house, upset after losing custody of his daughter.

As police began arriving on the scene - complete with a trained hostage negotiator - the man told McCabe he felt he had nothing to live for. "I got him to calm down, he just was so upset and despondent."

She was also blunt. "I told him he was going to go to jail," she recounted, and that he'd have to get his act together if he wanted to be part of his daughter's life. "If you leave this way, you'll never have contact with her," she remembered saying.

After 27 minutes, McCabe persuaded the man to throw the shotgun shells out the window, followed by the gun, and then to talk with the hostage negotiator.

"I was sweating bullets," she said of the March 2009 incident. "I was so drained."

On Friday, McCabe and 35 other civilian employees were honored for their contributions to the police department.

Police Commissioner Richard Dormer said that while patrol officers often are called the backbone of the department, civilians such as records clerks and dispatchers are as integral to operations.

"There's a second backbone, one less visible but equally as important," he said, as politicians, police officials, union representatives and family and friends of honorees looked on. Without civilian workers, he said, "we would come to a grinding halt."

It's the sixth year the department has bestowed such honors, said Patricia E. Sitler, the department's principal program examiner and chairwoman of the awards committee. Reasons for the honors varied.

Public safety dispatcher Kerry Allen-Lever received a special service award for locating a missing, legally blind man on her way home from work.

Principal clerk Christine Pfeiffer worked with the Department of Social Services to track requests for police help in Child Protective Services cases - efforts that helped save $5 million last year, Sitler said.

Chief surgeon and medical director Scott S. Coyne creating a medical crisis action team to provide fast, emergency medical services during major police incidents.