Paul Bass Photos
Officer Vanessa Thompson and Detective Omaida Nieves at tourniquet training Wednesday.
Officer Gregory Dash saw bright red blood flowing from the leg of a shot man on a Newhallville porch. So he reached to the left side of his duty belt to retrieve the police department’s latest weapon of choice.
The “weapon” was a tourniquet. The department has in recent weeks outfitted all its cops with the tourniquets and trained them in how to use them.
Just in time for the 20-year-old man who was fading in and out of consciousness on the Shelton Avenue porch around 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Dash was one of the first officers at the scene. He and his partner Paul Nakos had been blocks away, near Goffe and Orchard, seeking a silver car believed to be connected to a shooting that had happened minutes earlier when they heard a report on the police radio about three people hit by bullets on Shelton Avenue.
So they hurried over. They found one cop, Sgt. Brendan Borer, on the scene, surrounded by 20 other people.
Dash looked at the porch. Two, not three, young men had been hit by bullets.
Dash, a 27-year-old officer who served as a medic in the National Guard before becoming a New Haven cop in 2016, slipped into “visual triage” mode.
“When you go to a shooting scene,” he said, “you try to balance the law enforcement [role] with being able to ID who needs help right away.”
He noticed that one of the gunshot victims, a 19-year-old man, was alert, sitting up, talking. He’d been hit in the ankle.
He saw the second man — who would turn out to be the first victim’s older brother — “lying on his back in a pretty large pool of blood, in and out of it. Not really talking.” That man, clearly, was Dash’s “immediate patient.”
Firefighters arrived. One exposed the bullet wound on the victim’s right upper thigh. Smoke poured out from it in the cold.
Dash recognized the bright red color as a sign that it was “an arterial bleed.” Meaning: “You have only minutes until you bleed out or die.”
The doctors at Yale-New Haven’s emergency department do miracles keeping gunshot victims alive, Dash knew — if the cops and firefighters and ambulance crews can get the victims there in time.
On Shelton Avenue, Dash told Sgt. Borer, “He’s going to die if he doesn’t have a tourniquet.”
Elm Street Lesson
Yale-New Haven’s Pina Violano with NHPD emergency services chief Nick Marcucio at Wednesday’s training.
It just so happened that New Haven has been training officers for moments like this one, under a new policy.
The policy grew out of a review of an incident in September 2017, when a barricaded gunman shot two cops on Elm Street. Paramedics couldn’t immediately get to the officers because the officers were inside the “warm zone” of a standoff, recalled Asst. Chief Otoniel Reyes.
Fortunately the officers survived. But in the after-incident review, cops realized that, if the shot officers had been bleeding badly, they might not have gotten help in time. So the department decided to place tourniquets in police cruisers and train officers to use them so they could help bleeding victims at a scene where they could die within minutes.
Some officers, who were former paramedics, convinced the bosses it made more sense to equip all officers with the tourniquets rather than keep them in cruisers, because sometimes officers might not have time to head over to a car to retrieve them.
Yale-New Haven Hospital came up with $50,000 to pay for tourniquets. Then, over the past few months, Pina Violano, the hospital’s manager of injury prevention, and lead trauma surgeon Adrian Maung held training sessions for all the officers.
The last session took place Wednesday afternoon on the fourth floor of police headquarters at 1 Union Ave.
As luck would have it, Gregory Dash had been among the first officers to undergo the training, on top of training he had already received as an army medic. So he was prepared when the time came to use it Tuesday evening on Shelton Avenue.
“Stay Awake”
Dash knelt down to the left side of the 20-year-old victim on the porch. He placed the tourniquet as high as possible on the thigh. That way it would cover all other potential wounds that may not have yet been visible.
He then turned the windlass, a small metal rod, three times, then a fourth to cinch it.
“You know it works,” Dash said, “when it’s no longer bleeding.” Which, after the fourth turn, was the case.
He asked a firefighter to take a “pedal pulse” (at the victim’s foot). The firefighter couldn’t find a pulse. That was the message Dash hoped to hear; it meant the tourniquet was working, had cut off the blood flow.
Now he had to keep the victim from fading out. He tapped him on the cheek. “You’re not bleeding anymore,” Dash said. “Stay awake.”
Time froze.
“Grab my hand,” Dash told the victim. The man did. Dash felt a bond between them, a common quest to keep the man awake so he would stay alive. “He was hanging on the best he could.”
The victim was placed in an ambulance en route to the miracle workers at Yale-New Haven’s emergency department.
“Why We Do The Job”
Officer Gregory Dash before attending line-up for his Wednesday shift.
Dash next went to to help the less-injured brother. He rode with him in another ambulance to the hospital.
There, he stayed with that brother in his room. Meanwhile he noticed the commotion as hospital staff sought to save the 20-year-old brother’s life. Dash was upset, hoping against hope that the man would survive.
Then came word that while the man’s victim remained critical, his condition was now stable. Which meant there was a good chance doctors could save him.
One doctor pulled Dash aside. “If he pulls through,” the doctor said, it wouldn’t have been possible had Dash not acted quickly and effectively at the scene.
“It was overwhelming to hear that,” Dash recalled. “It’s humbling. It’s overwhelming.” For all his time in the army, training in life-saving techniques, he’d never had to use them. Now he had his first chance to carry out the mission that led him to choose to become a cop — “to save lives.” (The victim was still listed in critical but stable condition Wednesday afternoon, according to police.)
Dash remained at the hospital for hours. At one point Asst. Chief Reyes showed up to check on the condition of another officer whose cruiser had overturned during the response to the evening’s shootings, and to check in on the two gunshot victims. He stopped by the room of the 19-year-old brother with the ankle injury. “I’m doing OK,” the man told Reyes. Then he choked up and pointed to Dash. “Thanks to that officer right there,” he said, “my brother is alive.”
“That was heroic,” Reyes said about Dash’s work. “That’s why we do the job.”
Dash’s supervisor in the Dwight policing district, Lt. John Healy, called the episode “another example” of the officer’s “professional and proactive efforts on a daily basis. Officer Dash acted swiftly and without hesitation to preserve life in response to a chaotic shooting scene.”
Dash was dispatched back to the crime scene before being sent home at 1:30 a.m. On the drive, he engaged in his usual practice of replaying that shift’s events to figure out what he could have done differently.
He concluded that he had done this one right.
That’s what he told his wife when he came home. It was his most gratifying moment to date as a police officer. He had been at the right place at the right time, with the right tool and the right training. It made the ultimate difference.
Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:
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* Elisa Tuozzoli
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