PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — Wanda DuFrain is in a difficult struggle.
She’s trying to keep living life, but it’s impossible to move on from the 37 years of memories she made with her late husband, Blaine DuFrain, who died tragically four years ago.
“You want to be happy again,” Wanda said through tears. “So it's a struggle, as you can tell.”
Wanda and Blaine were perfect for each other.
She was a 911 dispatcher for Treasure Island. After serving in the U.S. Coast Guard, he was hired as a St. Petersburg Police officer in 1985.
“All I remember is how happy he was to be a police officer, and his name rhymed, so Blaine DuFrain was notorious for just joking with the other officers,” Wanda said. “He never said, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm going to work today.’ He put on that badge and he was proud to be serving, you know, the city.”
But Wanda says police work started to take its toll on her husband in the mid-to-late Nineties. There were stressful, dangerous calls.
“He had a very stressful call where he had a young 14 or 15 year old young man come at him with a gun,” she recalled. “Point blank.”
There were also gruesome, unspeakable crime scenes and an ever-present fear he would be targeted by bad guys he’d locked up.
“When he started having more anxiety, he knew he wanted to retire,” Wanda said. “It just got so stressful.”
His work as an officer was put on pause, at one point, after a voluntary Baker Act.
Though he continued working for the department for a few years after that episode, eventually, Blaine did retire. All the while, he was medicated for his anxiety.
However, he continued to live with the stress and fear.
“He had a hard time being a civilian after leaving law enforcement. I think maybe all the officers do. Maybe they feel like, okay, I'm not wearing a badge and a gun anymore, but you still are always looking over your shoulder. And in protective mode. I don't think that ever goes away,” Wanda said.
As a result, the couple moved to what seemed like the middle of nowhere: a gated community in rural Citrus County. Still, the anxiety continued.
“He wrote a letter to the sheriff's office, saying he was being followed with a tag number. He thought someone had poisoned our well,” Wanda recalled. “What I didn't know is that he was having nightmares again, and the doctor said, ‘Well, just double up on your medication. Maybe that'll help you sleep at night.’”
In November 2020, Wanda went for a walk. When she returned home, she found Blaine dead.
“The image you can't get over — as being a 911 prior dispatcher — and you have to now call 911 and call and say, ‘My husband shot himself,’” she said.
Since that day, Blaine’s suicide has taken her through a range of feelings. There’s been anger, numbness, embarrassment, and the shame of self-doubt.
“‘Didn't you not see it coming? And you should have called someone. Or you should have, you know, why didn't you do this? Was there something else you could have done?’” Wanda said. “And I was like, I can't keep questioning myself.”
Luckily, Wanda found support in the form of other spouses who have lost their first responders to suicide. The group, under the umbrella of Concerns of Police Survivors (C.O.P.S.), meets monthly via Zoom and allows members to lean on each other.
Now, after some healing, Wanda feels purpose.
She is using her voice to push for more mental health resources for first responders.
“You’ve got to be able to tell someone and not be judged, and be able to get the time off you need. And maybe they need to be reevaluated at that point,” she said.
The widow is also trying to destigmatize first responder suicides. There has been progress.
In 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Public Safety Officer Support Act, which passed Congress with overwhelming support.
The act allows for the payment of death and disability benefits in situations where a first responder, who has been exposed to traumatic events while on duty, dies by suicide or is totally and permanently disabled as a result of a suicide attempt. The act applies to all such cases since Jan. 1, 2019.
According to Wanda, Assistant Chief Mike Kovacsev with the St. Petersburg Police Department is graciously helping her through that complicated federal process. In fact, she says the department has shown her tremendous support since her husband’s death.
“They're phenomenal,” she said. “For them to help me with the funeral, most departments — from what I've talked to the other wives — they wouldn't even entertain it.”
As she’s learned from other members of her support group, some departments still aren’t comfortable recognizing or even acknowledging first responder suicides, which is why Wanda still has work to do on behalf of the husband who will always be part of her life.
“He will always be remembered,” she said tearfully. “And I'm hoping that I can help another wife or maybe talk to [current] police officers.”
Meg Ross, the ambassador for the First Responder HopeLine (1-866-4FL-HERO) — an anonymous hotline Tampa Bay first responders can call for help — believes more can be done to reduce the rate of first responder suicides.
She believes there’s a need to make sure the community has adequate resources, a need for more education, a need to make resources as accessible as possible, and a need to ensure local public safety leaders support their employees using those resources.
“It has to start from the top — that they recognize that first responders need to be able to access behavioral health resources, and when they do, they need to be assured that there will be a job if they do the work that they need to do to get through these crises,” she said.
Ross, however, believes the tide is turning.
She says attitudes are changing, resources are increasing, and more and more agencies are making mental health a priority.
“It’s okay to not be okay,” Ross said. “But it’s not okay to stay that way.”
