A CHELMSFORD police officer has been praised after he brought a suicidal woman down from the ledge of a multi-storey car park.<\/p>\n
City response officer Sgt Paul Gooding, 41, was on duty when a woman climbed over the 12-foot safety barrier of the Meadows Q-Park car park off Baddow Road.<\/p>\n
The officer, who has been at Essex Police for 12 years and Chelmsford for seven, said: “There was no way you could get to her because she was the other side of a 12-foot fence.<\/p>\n
“She was sat on the ledge. I approached her really slowly, gave her my name and took my hat off and tried to make myself not like a police officer.<\/p>\n
“She was really hard to talk to and very hard to get any eye contact with her.”<\/p>\n
The Meadows Q-Park car park faces out on to Baddow Road and the busy Odeon Roundabout on Parkway, presenting another difficulty for the officers while dealing with the emergency.<\/p>\n
“It was a really busy intersection and she had a really big audience after a while,” continued Sgt Gooding, who is not a trained negotiator. However, 30 minutes after he arrived, he had help from a team of negotiators. But, the woman only wanted to talk to Paul.<\/p>\n
“I said \u2018I’m here with you, I can help you fight this. Come on, give me your hand, I can help you.\u2019 She grabbed out at my hand and it was a positive sign that she wanted me there,” he told the Essex Live website.<\/p>\n
“I said ‘when we get down I will stay with you’ and I did. I went in the back of the ambulance and we took her down to Rochford. It was five hours total, but worth every minute. I was just pleased and happy the way it went in the end. I had a little bit of pride and I was completely exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amazing work from Sgt Gooding.<\/p>\n
To read the story in full, go to: http:\/\/www.essexlive.news\/chelmsford-cop-helped-talk-down-woman-from-multi-storey-car-park\/story-29701469-detail\/story.html#hE3ecQrIIyoxl2zK.99<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A CHELMSFORD police officer has been praised after he brought a suicidal woman down from the ledge of a multi-storey car park. City response officer Sgt Paul Gooding, 41, was\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3065,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3064"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3069,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3064\/revisions\/3069"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}