Trigger warning to my audience: This story discusses suicide and I’m not holding back from what I saw. Please take care when deciding whether or not to read this post. I won’t be offended if you choose to skip any of these stories to protect your own mental health.

Disclaimer: This story is based on a real call I ran once. Identifying factors such as names, locations, and some details have been changed for privacy purposes.

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It hadn’t been a bad day. Harley and I were on one of our many extended shifts, but the weather in the mountains had cooled down considerably and there was a light breeze wafting through the trees. The weather was beautiful and I’d been enjoying standing outside whenever we weren’t on a call.

We’d had a new EMT training with us for the first twelve hours of our shift. Savannah was sweet; very green and very hesitant to perform any of her skills. But as we coached her we’d noticed improvement in her confidence.

There had only been 2 or 3 calls for us that day. Old folks falling, bonking their heads or elbows, and we would stand them up to help them back to bed, or to the gurney if they needed to be checked out at the hospital.

We call it the rider’s curse. The best time to get dropped on a critical call – a code, a car accident, a stroke or heart attack – is when you have preceptors there to guide you through the protocols and keep your head on straight while you’re spinning in circles. But the rider’s curse made for a day of non-critical patients.

But Harley and I were glad that sweet Savannah had left when she did. Because sometimes, even seasoned medics and EMTs are faced with calls they don’t know how to handle.

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Moments after Savannah pulled out of the parking lot in her minivan, the sun descended in the west a few inches and the cool, inviting breeze turned chilly. I had pulled on my red jacket and stood outside the ambulance while Harley was thinking out loud.

“She’s not going to make it here.” He said. I nodded. “I mean, I get her hesitation, she’s new. But we had the same notes for her after every call. Blood pressure, pulse ox, blood sugar… she only had to do three things. And this is like her tenth ride.”

I agreed. “She did fine with the small stuff. But you’re right. If we’d had anything more critical than a ground level fall, she would have been in the way.”

I felt the temperature drop at least ten degrees and the wind picked up. I jumped in the truck and we adjusted the heaters a bit to get the chill out of the air.

The sound of the radio burst to life with the loudest DiiiiiiiIIIINNNGG, and our squad phone lit up with its own little jingle.

“Medic 1, code three for a triple six.”

Harley picked up the mike. “Medic 1, we’re enroute, go ahead with additional.”

The dispatcher crackled over the static, “Medic 1, I show you responding to a triple six – body found hanging in the parking lot behind Dave’s Diner.”

Harley flipped a few switches and the lights lit up our station parking lot. Once we got to the road he pressed another button and the sirens screeched out into the busy streets.

“I don’t like dead bodies.” I said and Harley nodded in agreement. “And I really don’t want to cric anyone today…” I mused as we hit a turn that took us the short way to our destination.

Harley chuckled, “Why not?”

“God, that would be the last thing I want to do. But if he’s hanging and still alive I may not have a choice!” I started mentally preparing for what needed to happen. “Ok, so I’ll need my, intubation bag, cric kit, and a 6.0 tube. You’ll work on an IV and vitals and anything else we need. I’m going to focus on airway.”

Harley nodded and smiled. “I got your back. Don’t worry.”

I knew I didn’t need to tell him what I needed him to do. Really, I was just running through the scenario before it came to life so I would have all my ducks in a row. Harley would take care of everything in his scope – on top of assisting me with the various parts I had to play.

Harley cut the sirens as we pulled into a secluded four-space parking lot. The road was blocked by large boulders so I didn’t see a scene until we rounded the corner.

I caught a glimpse of a body sitting on the ground under a tall pine tree.

“There he is!” I cried and jamming my finger against the glass. Harley parked the ambulance and we grabbed our supplies. “It looks like a Halloween decoration.” I whispered to Harley as a plain-clothed officer approached us.

The officer was right to the point. “I found him while I was patrolling. No one had called him in yet.”

As we approached, I couldn’t stop thinking that this wasn’t real. It had to be a prank.

There he sat, on the ground with his legs straight out in front of him. His hands, which were blue at the fingertips, were laced together in his lap. They almost matched the dark blue of his hoodie, half zipped over a dark red t-shirt. His once hazel eyes were bloodshot, half-lidded, and bulging. A swollen tongue parted his purpled lips with a long strand of suspended saliva hanging from the tilted corner of his mouth.

The belt was tight around his unnaturally elongated throat, creating a distinct demarcation between the pale color of his collar and the blues and purples of his face. I followed the tautness of the belt up to the branch. It couldn’t have been more than four feet off the ground.

This is too surreal to be real. I could see it right in front of my eyes, but it wasn’t a body. It was slumped in an unnatural way, looking like a artist’s mannequin dressed in casual attire. It’s too…positioned… posed… to be real.

“He’s dead.” I said without feeling for a pulse.

The officer tilted his head. “Are you sure?”

I cleared my throat. “He’s got obvious signs of death. Cyanosis, acrocyanosis, dilated pupils.”

“Is he stiff?” The officer asked.

Harley reached down, grabbed the sitting man’s pant leg, and gave it a gentle shake, expecting it to be rigid. It wasn’t.

“What the hell?” Harley dropped the leg. “Rigor hasn’t set in.” Harley reached for the monitor and began to apply ecg leads to his forearms and ankles. I knelt down so I was eye level with our patient and, with shaky hands, felt his wrists.

I felt something.

“Harley!” I silently screamed. He looked up immediately, hearing my barely audible whispers. “Check the other side. I thought I felt a faint pulse but it’s gone.”

Harley placed two gloved fingers over the man’s radial and looked at me with wide eyes, then relaxed his shoulders. We both turned to the cardiac monitor and confirmed that our initial suspicions had been correct. He was asystole – flatline – and our anxious minds and quickened heart rates had fooled us for half a second.

This man was dead.

The fire department pulled up asked how they could assist us. At this point, our job was done. Some of the firefighters had started to put up a protection curtain across the rocks to keep looky-loos from seeing anything or walking in off the street.

Harley and one of the firefighters removed the leads and I walked from the tree to where one of the police officers was holding an ID. He handed it to me to document for my chart.

William Grant. August 29, 1987.

“Does anyone recognize him?” The officer called to those of us on scene.

“I know the name, but he looks… different.” I muttered.

The officer scoffed, “I’m sure he does. He was probably alive last you saw him.” Some of the firefighters laughed.

I shrugged. “If I’m remembering right, I recognize the name from a homeless man we’ve run on a few times. Bearded. Dirty.”

Everyone turned to the figure sitting below the tree. This man was clean. Freshly washed clothes, save for the urine incontinence on his pants, shaved face, sharp haircut.

“Must not be who you’re thinking of,” someone said.

And they may have been right. We see lots of people – some names stick in your brain for no good reason while others float out into the universe.

I pulled my jacket tighter around me and shoved my hands in the pockets.

“You ok? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” One of the firefighters motioned to me.

“I don’t like dead bodies.” I muttered again.

The group chuckled. “Well, you’re in the wrong line of work then,” someone said over the rest.

They’d been joking, of course. If anyone says they actually like dead bodies, I’d be concerned. But that was enough for me. As soon as the fire medic came back to us and said he’d called the hospital to inform them of time of death, I loaded my stuff in the truck.

Harley jumped in soon after me.

“Can we get out of here, please?” I asked while my hands shook in my lap.

Harley had the ambulance turned around and headed back on the street almost before I finished my plea. He could read my thoughts.

“It was so weird. I really thought I felt a pulse for a second.” I said as we drove in silence.

“I know, I did too.”

We talked all the way back to the station in the dark. The sun had finally set behind the mountains and everything felt quiet.

It wasn’t just the body, though. The whole scene was eerie, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“The ground wasn’t disturbed.” Harley said, again reading my mind.

“What do you mean?”

He looked at me after he parked the truck. “Around the body. There was no sign of kicking up dirt, there were no drugs or personal belongings around him. No note. It was like he just… sat down.”

That was it. He just… sat down. With his hands in his lap and legs stretched out in front. He just. Sat. Down. Nothing around him to comfort him. Just loneliness.

“I recognized the name when the officer gave me his ID.” I said. “William Grant. I think he was that homeless man we ran on a few weeks ago. By the dumpsters in the same area the police found him tonight.”

“I remember,” Harley confirmed.

“Is it more creepy that he…” I paused, “if it is him, that he cleaned up to do it?” I thought about the tangled beard and near dreadlocks he’d had at our last encounter. He was an alcoholic, suffering from withdrawal and internal demons.

“It didn’t look like a typical hanging.” Harley mentioned. “I’ve been on a few, and they all vary from person to person. But this one was weird.”

I’d been on suicides before. Some more gruesome than others. But Harley was right, this one was weird.

Did he get himself together after our last encounter? Was he doing well, staying clean, working on a job? Sitting there under the tree, he looked like a college student or a guy getting ready to go out to dinner with some buddies.

Did he get the cut and shave, and clean his clothes so that those who found him wouldn’t see him for his struggles? So that he could leave a better impression of himself? A more “respectable” impression?

“I’m just glad Savannah got out of here before we got that call.” Harley said, breaking my internal dialogue.

I nodded vigorously. “That would have destroyed her.”

---

That scene haunted me. I heard rumors and whispers that it couldn’t have been a suicide. The scene was too clean.

Some thoughts swirled around that this man was murdered somewhere else and posed there to create the narrative of self-hanging. I’m not sure if that’s true. I didn’t look into it again after that night.

I’m not sure which story made me feel better: suicide or murder. Neither really.

Harley and I still talk about William Grant occasionally. The first few weeks after the call, we’d kept an eye out for him at his usual places, but no one had seen or heard from him. One person said they’d heard he went to the valley. Another said he just left without taking his stuff from the shelter.

We couldn’t tell anyone what we knew. That he wasn’t coming back. That would have violated privacy laws, and even though William Grant was dead, he still had a right to privacy and peace.

There was no memorial or marker at the rocks and pine tree where he’d died. It was like no one knew, or cared, I guess.

We have run at least one thousand calls since that day. But sometimes, when the weather turns cooler and the wind picks up as the sun goes down, I still see that still body and bloated blue face under a tall pine tree.