The agent who prevented a suicide celebrates the outcome: “He went to the Police Station to thank me for saving him”

Emilio Pavón recounts the intervention in an abandoned warehouse in Arrecife, where he managed to prevent a man from taking his own life

July 29 2021 (09:02 WEST)
Updated in July 29 2021 (09:14 WEST)
The National Police agent Emilio Pavón
The National Police agent Emilio Pavón

National Police officer Emilio Pavón had already responded to other alerts for suicide attempts in his previous assignments, but unfortunately, when he arrived, it was too late. However, now he has the satisfaction of having saved a life in Arrecife.

The events occurred last week, although the Police made it public this Tuesday, reporting that two officers had prevented a 48-year-old man from “jumping into the void” in an abandoned warehouse in the capital.

“On Monday, he went to the Police Station to thank me for saving him,” says Emilio Pavón proudly, who was the one who lunged at him to keep him safe. “He tried to talk to me, but I'm in Gran Canaria these days and it wasn't possible,” he said on Radio Lanzarote - Onda Cero, emphasizing that the satisfaction is greater when seeing that the man “has caught a little air to keep moving forward, which is what we all do every day.”

“He spent a week in psychiatry, but when talking to him, you notice that he is not a psychiatric patient. It seems that what he has is a bad streak, which alternates one thing with another: family, partner, work...”, explains this officer, who celebrates that the man has already regretted what he tried to do.

"All we could see was what the flashlight illuminated"

It was the ex-partner who called the police alerting them to what was happening, and Emilio Pavón remembers with anguish those first moments until finding the exact location. “They never give you very specific signs and in Arrecife it gets a bit complicated because of that,” he explains. Finally, between the woman's directions and the GPS, they managed to locate the warehouse where they were, in an open field near Hormiconsa.

“It was already dark and the warehouse had no light,” he details, describing the scene that does not erase from his mind, when they turned on a flashlight and found the man already standing on a handrail, holding onto a column and tied around the neck to a beam with a steel cable.”

“All we could see was what the flashlight illuminated,” recalls this agent, who also remembers that the warehouse was full of rubble and garbage. “You arrive, you don't know the area, you don't know the warehouse, you don't even know where to go up, or where to act...”, he explains about how those first moments were.

“It was a matter of seconds, or that the spark would jump and he would say I'm jumping,” he relates. For that reason, while his partner stayed in the lower part trying to illuminate the area, he went up a ladder and began to approach the man, trying to start a conversation.

“I asked him what's wrong, what are the problems, let's try to solve it, everything has a solution... what you have to use in these cases”. At some point, the man even threatened to jump if he kept getting closer, but he finally managed to get close enough.

“There came a moment when I thought he was going to jump, and I lunged at him, grabbed him by the legs and brought him inside, I threw him on top of me,” he says about the critical moment of the intervention, which ended with the best possible ending.

“Thank God there were no major injuries, except for some scratches and that we all ended up like a croquette, there breaded in the landing”. Afterwards, the man burst into tears. “He was having a bad time. Our problems come together and in the end, the only way out we see is to throw ourselves tied to a thread,” laments this agent, who managed to give this man a new opportunity, who is now grateful for not having consummated his attempt.

“They don't prepare you for this”

“You act using a little common sense, which is what governs, because they don't prepare you for this,” emphasizes Emilio Pavón. Regarding his training to intervene in this type of situation, he points out that the National Police offer courses of many types, but “access is difficult” and does not reach everyone, so “they are usually oriented to the sub-inspection scale or higher”.

For that reason, he explains that the usual thing is that in suicide attempts “a person of higher rank goes to negotiate”. However, that night only he and his partner were available. “The one in Arrecife is a fairly small local police station, in which we sometimes find very few officials, and that night was one of them. We also had pateras and other jobs,” he points out.

In his case, he recently ascended to officer and in the course he explains that they had a subject that focused a lot on this topic, but he insists that what prevails in a situation like this is “common sense. “Each person is a world and each person tells you their problems and you have to tackle it with experience, with skill and with language. We were talking and what we tried was to reach the man,” he recalls, satisfied with having achieved it.

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