Suicide, standoff highlight police work’s strain on mental health in Wyoming

In the videos that helped him become one of the city’s most well-known officers, Casper Police Lt. Danny Dundas joked with his colleagues, took on eating challenges and even lip synched through downtown.

But in an interview he gave to K2 News in early 2020, he acknowledged the job also had an emotionally taxing side.

“A few months into this on the street, you realize that it’s a different world than you think,” he said. “You see the darkest side of humanity, day in and day out, and it takes its toll on you.”

The following year on Sept. 27, 2021, he died by suicide. Dundas’ death reverberated through the community. The department released a statement a few days later that acknowledged the emotional toll of a career in law enforcement.

“We ask our officers to undergo these traumatic events, over, and over, throughout their entire career,” the department stated. “These burdens are tangible and they impact our officers, the families and loved ones of our officers, and each employee at the department … Although all of our police officers are highly trained professionals, they are, first and foremost, humans.”

Dundas experienced several traumatic events in his line of work, and while the department and his family sincerely sought to help him, the department stated, “our beloved friend, father, son, husband, and community hero took his own life as a direct result of the experiences he had been subjected to while in the service of our community.”

His story, unfortunately, is not unique. Other first responders in Wyoming have also taken their own lives or struggled through mental health crises. On Aug. 19, Deputy Jesse Adams in Sublette County died by suicide.

Just three days later, authorities responded to an east Casper apartment complex for a standoff involving a suicidal police officer. Michael Hughes is accused of firing off several shots during the incident which police say happened after an argument over the phone with his ex-wife.

He survived the situation physically unscathed, but faces charges of aggravated assault and battery, reckless endangerment with a firearm, and property destruction of over $1,000. He’d been drinking that night, and while he said he hadn’t taken it that day, he had also been prescribed ketamine.

“We join members of our community and the greater, nationwide law enforcement family in acknowledging the stressors associated with being a first responder and recognizing the human moments we all encounter,” the department said in a statement following the incident.

While departments, experts and officers themselves acknowledge the mental wear that comes with their occupation, there’s little data on law enforcement suicide in Wyoming. Some websites have tried to compile it, but many Wyoming officials and former officers say it’s likely undercounting the true toll.

What we do know is this: Wyoming has one of the nation’s highest suicide rates, police have higher-than-average suicide rates and the Wyoming police officer suicide rate documented in the 1960s was the highest in the country. Suicides also surpass officer deaths that occur in the line of duty.

There’s a notable stigma against officers seeking help, too, in part because they don’t want to seem like they can’t do the job anymore. If someone is diagnosed with PTSD, how will that affect their employment or community trust?

Anecdotally, there are more resources now to address officers’ mental health hurdles. But the challenges facing those officers have grown, too. Former officers and experts say part of the solution will be continual psychological support far beyond the critical incidents police endure.

Critical incident

In May 2018, a man shot then-Casper Police Officer Jacob Carlson several times during a gun battle that stemmed from a call about a child driving a car.

Randi Wittler — then-officer Randi Garrett — had arrived at the scene first. She ended up shooting and killing the man who had very nearly killed Carlson.

Carlson’s heart stopped several times. He spent weeks in the hospital and was left with injuries that he expected to limit his lifespan, he told the Casper Star-Tribune a year later.

Both officers have said they were initially asked to come back to work before they were ready. Wittler hadn’t processed everything yet, she said.

“It was maybe a week after and they’re already like, ‘Hey, when are you coming back to work?’” she said. “It just seems like you’re a body that is supposed to already be mended and fine, because you sign up for the job and you’re just expected to be completely 100% after something happens to you.”

As reported by the Star-Tribune, Carlson was initially asked to come back before he was medically cleared to do so.

They were both given more time, though Wittler said she still felt pressure to return to work as soon as possible.

The shooting changed Carlson, who retired less than a year later for both physical and emotional reasons. It had been hard to push his buttons before, but he developed a short fuse. He’d previously been opposed to counseling and medications, but after the incident, he remembers Wittler repeatedly nudging him to try them, and he’s glad she did. He wants others to know that medications didn’t change who he was, they just helped balance out the chemicals in his brain.

“I’m sure officers feel like, ‘Well, I can’t take anxiety meds. What if people find out that I’m taking this?’” he said. “And I think there is just a negative stigma with it … I take Lexapro. It took five or six medicines to figure out which one worked for me, but I know now if I quit taking my medicine, I probably wouldn’t still be married.”

Dundas, meanwhile, helped Wittler find a place in Florida to get in-patient care specific to law enforcement and military personnel.

“It’s best to go somewhere else, like in Florida, where you don’t know anybody, nobody knows you,” said Wittler, who’s since left the department. “It’s safe to just be with other law enforcement officers or firefighters, first responders in general.”

She was grateful the department let her attend, and said officials there are working to support mental health, even if they’re not perfect yet.

Members of the Rocky Mountain Information Network — under the U.S. Department of Justice — are now working to bring that sort of treatment to law enforcement and their families in Wyoming via three-day seminars. The network’s law enforcement coordinator Keith Groeneweg — who retired after 33 years in positions ranging from patrolman to commander with the Wyoming Highway Patrol — said he was inspired after attending a program in Louisiana.

“I saw their lives literally changed for the better by going through that experience of dealing with the trauma, some recent, some much further past,” he said.

The seminars include large group discussions, sharing in small groups with similar traumas and one-on-one therapies. Each one costs between $20,000 and $30,000, and Groeneweg said he hopes outside money can support the events so the departments themselves aren’t burdened with the cost.

Currently, Casper police can access a confidential wellness app , peer support teams, free appointments with mental health professionals with training to address first responder trauma, and four chaplains of different denominations, according to department spokesperson Amber Freestone.

After a major incident, there’s an investigation, a debrief and often an offer of mental health support. But both Carlson and Wittler recall that during their time as police officers, the support would ebb and flow, bolstered after big events — like a shooting — before slowly dissolving.

Having a more substantial, continual peer support group is ideal, Carlson said, because it can be hard to connect with those who haven’t experienced being a first responder. In July 2023, a new law went into effect protecting the confidentiality of conversations with peer support members, something Carlson supports.

And that continual support may be helpful far beyond the events deemed “critical” by law enforcement administrators.

How it was

Art Washut taught Carlson college courses and lived across the street from him at the time of the shooting. Washut — now a Republican representative in Casper — worked in law enforcement from 1980 to 2000, and can testify to its grueling nature. Mental health support for officers has improved, he said, even if it could still be better.

“It may be a car wreck today. It might be a SIDS death tomorrow. It might be particularly horrible, emotion-filled domestic or child abuse the next day,” he said. “Alcohol in my generation of officers is a big thing, and I’ve seen officers really ruin themselves with alcohol, and the drinking started before they retired to continue after they retired.”

Would-be officers often think they know what they’re getting into, Washut said, but there’s no way to know how your brain will react to a horrific scene like a decomposing body. He recalled a colleague who had long worked cases involving kids. One day he told Washut he just couldn’t do it any longer.

“He said, ‘I’m watching television last night, and I start crying, and I can’t stop,’” Washut remembered.

Washut once responded to a suicide call, only to learn at the scene that the person was a coworker. Washut knew them, but no one asked if he needed time off.

“In those days, it’s the job: Do the job and go home,” he said. “And there was no consideration of mental health for the personnel that responded to that call. I don’t remember any outreach at all.”

For Washut, the job gets even more difficult when an officer becomes a parent. He recalled a baby’s body found at the dump. When he went through birth certificates trying to identify the little one, his son’s certificate came up. He knew his kid was safe at home, but it rattled him.

“You try to keep these firewalls where you keep the job away from your personal [life], right?” he said. “And that was one of those cases that leaked over that boundary.”

It’s not just the major incidents that weigh on an officer, but the daily work, he stressed.

“I hope that towns, cities, counties across Wyoming cheer for their chief executives and prepare financially to provide the resources that are necessary on an ongoing basis to deal with these things, because it really needs to be, in my estimation, ongoing and not just responding after a critical incident,” he said.

Rep. Mike Yin (D-Jackson) sponsored a failed budget amendment in 2022 to fund $1 million in grants for law enforcement agencies to provide mental health resources. He also supported funding a conference that year to address suicide among law enforcement, a budget amendment that Washut sponsored.

Yin wants to trust police and he wants communities to be able to trust them, too, he said.

“Making sure that they are under the best conditions is both a benefit to them as officers, but to us as community members,” he said. “To have a healthy police force is important for healthy community policing.”

That August 2022 conference was just a starting place, said Peace Officer Standards and Training Executive Director Chris Walsh.

“The idea was to give people basically a roadmap on how to build something because it’s difficult to have one statewide process for everybody to do because each community has different resources available to it,” he said.

There’s been progress since then, said Allen Thompson, who leads the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police. At a conference last week in Casper, Thompson said he had three conversations in one morning about mental health and peer support among officers, and the event wasn’t focused on either.

“​​I think where we are seeing inroads is the officer that we’re hiring yesterday and tomorrow grew up in a society where mental health was part of the discussion,” he said. “It’s becoming more normal that we talk about the mental health aspect of people in general, and especially in law enforcement … I’m optimistic that it’s just going to get better going forward.”

Police departments in Wyoming choose what mental health resources to offer their officers, partially depending on local funding, which still leads to hit-or-miss supports.

The Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation recently started its own peer support group after someone advocated for it within the agency, Director Ronnie Jones said.

“We actually are a little bit behind the eight ball when it comes to this stuff,” he said. “Within the last eight to 10 months, we’ve been putting together a peer support program internally, and we have the framework put together.”

DCI often has to investigate officers like Carlson and Wittler after a shooting. They’re occasionally also called in to investigate officer suicides.

“Those are very difficult obviously for the agencies, but [also] for whoever ends up having to investigate them,” Jones said. “Very sad situations.”

Everybody’s broken

When Rollie Dunnuck returned from serving with the Marines in Iraq, he noticed that he didn’t work well with authority and was quick to anger.

The challenges led him to leave a firefighting position in Laramie and opt for more independent police work in Casper. And there, he said, he’d welcome physical encounters when they occurred: His mind was ready for them.

“​​You look at post-traumatic stress, and it’s a natural reaction to being in completely abnormal circumstances; things that we as humans are never supposed to go through or experience,” he said.

Dunnuck said he had good mental health supports at the department, but there was something missing: time to foster camaraderie. Short staffing and more work can limit time decompressing around the coffee pot, he said.

“Right now, with the low staffing we have, it’s really hard to have any form of break, and you just go from one thing to another, and it’s go, go, go, go,” he said. “And I think that takes a huge toll on officers, and I don’t have a good solution to it.”

There are other challenges, too, like getting enough sleep. Beyond that, there’s a feeling in the community that police are nothing but their job anymore, he said: “A cop’s just a cop, he’s not a dad, he’s not a husband, or he’s not a son.”

So while mental health supports are improving, he suspects officer mental health will continue to slump as cops grow more isolated, understaffed and face attacks online.

For him, it was connection to the faith-based Mighty Oaks program that helped him the most, offering support for veterans and first responders. Now, he’s a student at South Florida Bible College, focusing on Biblical studies and theology while working as an interim chaplain at the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office.

Dunnuck choked up a bit recalling his past, saying that he felt even his family was afraid of him at one point.

Whatever supports are created for police after a suicide need to be ongoing, said police psychologist Jack Digliani .

“We know police departments cannot provide grief counseling forever, but there could be mechanisms by which referrals are made for community support for longer-term work,” he said.

Digliani is a former officer with the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office and the Cheyenne Police Department, and has since helped departments in Wyoming and Colorado adopt models to prevent suicide. He recommends departments develop specific policies and encourage officers to ask for help, creating a climate designed to prevent suicides.

“There’s nothing incompatible with the independent cowboy and making it safe to ask for mental health assistance when needed,” he said. “A lot of it depends on how any individual police officer believes that the department will respond to their request for mental health assistance.”

Digliani also recommends making policies for after a suicide occurs: It’s unlikely any safety net will be able to prevent them all, he said.

Danny

Wittler remembers Danny Dundas as a man with a big, happy personality. They were good friends and both went to that support program in Florida.

“Those people who are like that, who are the life of the party, and [have] a lot of life in them, just because they’re always smiling doesn’t mean they’re happy inside,” she said. “Those type of people are nearly impossible to predict if they’re going to commit suicide or when they do.”

Wittler said there were some signs of his unhappiness, but they didn’t come into focus until after his death. He didn’t use all the resources there, she said, and like many others in his shoes, likely didn’t think he could be helped.

The department noted that his death resulted from his work.

“It is for these reasons the Casper Police Department declares, with one unified voice, that Lieutenant Dundas’ untimely death will be treated by this Department as a death incurred as a result of line-of-duty actions,” the department wrote after his death. “Though our hearts are broken, we choose to acknowledge the difficult nature of the profession to which Danny had, with his characteristic gusto and larger-than-life personality, diligently dedicated himself.”

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

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