By Kelli Smith
Dallas Morning News
Reprinted – by Texas Metro News
After Darron Burks was fatally shot, the police department’s wellness unit stepped in.
In the late hours of Aug. 29, Joe King woke to a flurry of texts.
“Three officers are down.”
“One critical, one deceased, one injured.”
“You need to get out here.”
The Dallas police officer yanked on an outfit and sprinted to his car. He tried to shake an eerie feeling as he drove, but couldn’t ignore the resemblance to July 7, 2016 — when a sniper fatally shot five officers downtown in the deadliest attack on U.S. police since 9/11.
King lost a close friend and colleagues then. Now, as an officer in the Dallas Police Department’s wellness unit, he felt an additional responsibility. He barreled toward the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office, realizing he’d soon encounter a sea of grieving staff.
The wellness unit was about to face its biggest test.
When grief blanketed the Dallas Police Department after the 2016 police ambush, an internal team devoted to mental wellness didn’t yet exist. Officers silently struggled to carry on, and some hung up their badges, police have said. The Assist the Officer Foundation saw a 300% spike in confidential counseling, but the topic remained hushed for years, police have said.
The wellness unit, launched in 2022 in part because of trauma from the downtown attack, sought to change that stigma around mental health.
After critical incidents — like homicides, suicides, crimes involving children and fatal accidents — a network of respected police employees calls responding officers to check on their well-being. A full-time unit also hosts classes about wellness, brings in counselors and provides resources for those in need.
The unit’s prominence skyrocketed after its inception, inspiring law enforcement nationwide, police officials have said.
But its heaviest challenge came this summer after a gunman shot three officers in southeast Oak Cliff. The gunman killed Officer Darron Burks, a former math teacher who’d recently joined the department, in a brazen attack as he sat in his squad car.
Sr. Cpls. Karissa David and Jamie Farmer were shot and wounded as they responded to check on Burks. Other officers chased the gunman to Lewisville, where they fatally shot him.
In the hours after, hundreds of officers gathered at the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office and the hospitals where Burks, David and Farmer were taken. For some, memories surfaced of July 7, 2016, when panic and mourning stretched across hospitals and crime scenes.
This time, however, in the ranks were wellness officers like King, who began to jot down names.
Dallas police wellness unit has gained momentum
On the night of Burks’ death, then-Dallas police Chief Eddie García was in Miami to celebrate a fellow chief’s wedding. As soon as he heard about the shooting while leaving a dinner, García said, he packed his bags and coordinated the earliest flight out of Florida.
By the time García landed, King and other wellness officers had fanned out, speaking to those hardest hit — like the South Central Patrol Division, where Burks was based — and compiling names of people they’d need to check on.
The team had a lengthy list from supervisors’ references, those who seemed to be struggling, people who knew Burks or the injured officers, and employees who’d responded to the crime scenes that day.
In the morning, García visited Farmer and David, then Burks’ family. King was in front of a crowd of rookies at the police academy, addressing their shock and detailing resources because of a concern he suspected many of them shared: What am I getting myself into?
King told them they’d wrestle with moving forward in their career, but emphasized that what occurred was rare. He rebutted that the shooting was part of the danger of the job.
“We did not sign up to be just basically executed because we do a profession,” King said. “We didn’t sign up for that. Nobody does.”
It was a message he knew might not resonate with everyone, he said, but if they “talked to 50 people and only two people get something from it — that’s two people that it’s touched.”
“It’s like catching water with a net,” King said. “It’s just so big. People are going to slip through, but it’s our job to keep continuing looking for the people that are affected.”
Their effort to better wellness has made waves since the creation of the unit, which García oversaw with the help of former Assistant Chief Reuben Ramirez. The noticeable impact after Burks’ death, and other serious incidents, has been “enormous,” García said.
In summer 2023, two officers died by apparent suicide, and two others died while off duty. The wellness unit jumped into action, holding group sessions about mental health. And this year alone, the team has made more than 3,700 calls to officers, King said.
“They’ve been on the spot constantly,” García said. “Having them in place, and knowing what they know, and having the resources they have is absolutely integral.”
King said support from the top is instrumental. That doesn’t appear as if it will change even though García left in October for a city management role in Austin. Interim Chief Michael Igo has signaled continued support for the wellness unit.
When Burks was killed, García was already in talks to leave the department, the former chief said. The wellness team gave him comfort that officers were still in good hands.
“We’re planting trees that we’re never going to experience the shade of, right?” García said during an interview in September before he left Dallas.
“I wasn’t going to be here forever. The fact that we set the wellness unit in place I think really does give us a very strong foundation to ensure that all of our officers, if they need help, get the help they need.”
Officers see ‘night and day’ difference in wellness resources
Sr. Cpl. Jaime Castro, president of the Dallas Police Association, said the night of Aug. 29 felt identical to July 7, 2016 — only with a different death toll.
That night in 2016, a sniper fatally shot DART officer Brent Thompson, 43; and Dallas police officers Michael Krol, 40; Lorne Ahrens, 48; Michael Smith, 55; and Patricio “Patrick” Zamarripa, 32, at the end of what had been a peaceful protest. Other officers and civilians were wounded.
The gunman plotted to murder white police officers during a peaceful protest for Black lives. Micah Johnson, who was Black and had not been part of the protest, was killed inside El Centro College by an explosive device delivered by a robot.
The chaos in the aftermath of Burks’ death brought back memories of that day, Castro said, adding there were numerous crime scenes, a manhunt and fears that more officers could be killed when trying to take the gunman into custody.
“A lot of us broke down,” he said, “because it was almost exactly as that night.”
He rounded up veteran officers who’d lived through 2016. “It’s our turn,” he told them. “We need to let younger officers know it’s going to be OK.”
They couldn’t have the environment they had after the 2016 ambush, he said, when some people took to drinking, pulling away from loved ones and isolating. People walked around in shock even years later, he said, and police headquarters was in “dead silence.”
Already, though, he spots a difference: in the on-site counselors, in the wellness unit’s quick-turn meetings and in granted requests to take time off work. He doesn’t yet have official numbers, but said there was “a huge increase in counseling” after Burks died.
“With Burks, you could tell that, hey, it hurt really, really bad,” Castro said. “It really did, but you could tell that the rebound effect was much smoother. You could tell that the officers were able to get out there slowly but surely. The hypervigilance wasn’t there like the way it was. You’re able to see that officers were coping in the way we wished we could cope.
“We didn’t see the officers that were walking around kind of like zombies, like the way we were.”
When the wellness unit formed, officers shared some skepticism, which Castro chalked up to trust; police were wary it could be dangled bait, and if they bit, they’d “get caught up in something.” Now, officers know the effort is honest and legitimate.
“They have saved so many lives,” Castro said about the wellness unit. If it had been in place in 2016, he believes many of the officers who retired their badges “would be here.”
King likens the wellness unit to a lighthouse; police know where to go if they need help or someone to talk to. That’s a stark contrast from 2016, he said, when officers were “flatfooted.”
“It’s literally a night-and-day difference,” King said. “We had nothing like this with 7/7.”
In the days after Burks’ death, he said, the wellness unit reached out to dozens of employees — but said just as many reached out themselves.
The wellness unit also had an established network of counselors ready to help, and was flooded with several other offers after Aug. 29, to the point they had to turn some away, he said.
Now, the team is already scheduling events to get ahead of difficult dates. This December, when Burks’ police academy class will reach a year since they’d graduated together. The holidays. Next August, during the one-year anniversary of the shooting.
“In a funeral, everybody’s showing up with a casserole,” King said. “We need to be on top of this throughout the many months after, years after.
“It’s gonna be necessary.”
Always on call
Seven days after Burks’ death, King sat on his couch, watching the action film Jack Reacher.
Burks’ funeral was the next morning, and the week hadn’t slowed. The wellness unit talked to hundreds of officers and still checked on police who’d responded to the day-to-day calls: fatality accidents, homicides and suicides.
As he prepared for an overdue night of sleep, King’s phone rang.
Carmen Gonzalez Fletcher, a Dallas police crime scene analyst, was killed in a car crash in Fort Worth, a supervisor told him. Two days prior, she’d been in a wellness class set up after Burks’ death, learning about how the mind and body process trauma.
Now, her colleagues were at headquarters, not yet aware they’d lost another one of their own, the supervisor told King. Could he help her address them?
King wasn’t on call that night, but that didn’t matter, he said. Someone had enough trust in him to reach out for help.
He arrived at Dallas police headquarters within an hour.
| This story, originally published in The Dallas Morning News, is reprinted as part of a collaborative partnership between The Dallas Morning News and Texas Metro News. The partnership seeks to boost coverage of Dallas’ communities of color, particularly in southern Dallas. |
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