INDIANAPOLIS -- IMPD officers had already tried for half an hour to coax a man off the railing of I-465 when Sgt. Daniel Rosenberg arrived.
Rosenberg is a member of IMPD's Crisis Negotiations Unit (CNU). He is called to help bring peaceful resolutions to encounters with people who are suicidal, have barricaded themselves inside buildings or who have taken hostages.
Around 4:30 a.m. Friday morning, Rosenberg was called to the I-465 bridge over West Washington Street to take over negotiations with an unresponsive man sitting precariously on the railing and threatening to jump.
The man was largely uncommunicative to officers – except to tell them to stay back if they tried to approach.
"He wasn't responding at all. The officers had been talking to him for quite a while. They couldn't get much out of him. About the only thing they could get out of him was that he wanted to see the sunrise," Rosenberg said. "Certainly in my business that can be a dangerous thing, because they're telling you that something is going to occur. They're giving you a timeline."
At that point, sunrise was about three hours away. But Rosenberg says he didn't let the clock cause him anxiety.
"Deadlines really become a point of conversation. You don't want to think of them as anxiety. You want to think of them as, OK, that's important. That's a point of emphasis," Rosenberg said. "What is important about why we’re here? What is important about this moment now? What is important about the sunrise? And that can get you to the crux of the issue. I wouldn't say it creates a dire situation, but it does give us something to talk about. And it gives me something to listen to. We talk through deadlines a lot. Sometimes a deadline is not a deadline … it's just part of the story."
The man would later tell officers that he was homeless and suffering from depression, and that he'd "been on the ledge before." Before they could learn any of that, though, Rosenberg needed him to tell him two things: Why that night was the night; and his name.
"So the first hour was really just kind of getting to that point where I finally got his name. And I never got his full name. It was just his first name," Rosenberg said. "But there's something powerful in introducing yourself to someone. Once we got that introduction to each other, that's really when I got a chance to start listening."
And as he listened, Rosenberg worked to convince the man that he cared about him and how the night ended for him.
"Once we got to that point where he had a little trust for me, the way that I got him to resolve the situation was that I wanted him to know that I would personally be hurt if he did something to harm himself," Rosenberg said. "And I also wanted him to know that I wasn't going to leave him, no matter how long we were up there – whether it was several sunrises. That I wasn't going to leave him."
At 6:34 a.m. – two hours and three minutes after the first IMPD officers arrived – the man stepped down from the wall. He submitted to police without incident and was transported to St. Francis Hospital in Mooresville for treatment.
Rosenberg says the biggest misconception about his job is that he can say a few magic words and someone will have an epiphany and step down from the ledge. That's not how it works in real life, he says.
"One of the things that you learn in law enforcement is that, even though a lot of people think we have control over certain situations … him deciding to come off that ledge, at the very end, was his decision. I couldn't force that," Rosenberg said. "He had to decide to do it himself. And I was thankful that he did."
