CAMARILLO, Calif. — On October 6, 2021, a call came into the Ventura County Sheriff’s communication center, where 911 calls come in. The out-of-state caller was a woman from the Veteran’s and Military Crisis Line. She said she had a veteran on the line who lived in Camarillo and was threatening suicide with a knife. Ventura County Sheriff’s Deputy Marco Garibay and two of his partners responded to the subject’s apartment.
According to Garibay, the subject, an older male, was highly agitated. He told the responding officers that he hadn’t slept for days. And when he did manage to drift off, he could “still taste the brain and blood in his mouth.”
At that point, says Garibay, the situation escalated. The man began to scream and cry.
“You wouldn’t understand,” yelled the man, who Spectrum News will not identify for privacy reasons. He is currently addressing his mental health issues.
Garibay says he noticed that the man had military insignias on his apartment wall. Garibay recognized the man was a former Marine, and he asked his partner if he could take over, to try to calm the subject.
It only took a few moments for Garibay to defuse the situation.
Bodycam footage from the scene recorded Garibay finding common ground on someone else’s distant battleground.
“I was in artillery,” Garibay told the man.
“What?” said the man, somewhat startled. “You were Marines?”
Garibay said he was.
The man looked up at Garibay and said, “Semper Fi, bro.” He was using Marine shorthand for their Latin motto “Semper Fidelis” — always faithful.
Garibay responded with even shorter shorthand.
“Oorah, brother,” said Garibay.
“His walls fell,” said Garibay, remembering the incident. “The look in his eyes told me that I built a connection.”
But it wasn’t a chance meeting. Garibay was sent there on purpose. The dispatcher at the Ventura County call center specifically assigned Garibay to the call.
Last year, Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub discovered a disturbing trend at the 911 call center. He says there was an uptick not long after the US military withdrew from Afghanistan in mid-August. And this mirrors data from the Department of Veterans Affairs which has seen an increased call volume into its crisis phone banks.
Ayub says his 911 call center receives as many as 15 calls a month from veterans in crisis. The Sheriff read about a program at a law enforcement agency in the eastern United States that pairs officers who are military veterans with veterans who are in crisis. Ayub decided to create a similar program at the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.
Ayub launched “VOICE” — “Veterans Outreach in Crisis Events.” When a 911 call comes in, the dispatcher is trained to ask if anyone involved is a military veteran. If so, the dispatcher will send any one of 22 specially trained veterans like Garibay who saw combat in Iraq as a Marine artillery officer.
Although not officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, twenty years after seeing combat in the Middle East, Garibay says he fought — and won — his own battle for inner peace.
“Yeah, so, my family noticed that I would lose my temper sometimes,” said Garibay as he drove around with a Spectrum reporter in his cruiser. “Or, I’d get upset. I would have trouble adjusting to new situations.”
Recently Garibay found out one of his Marine buddies killed himself. He paused at a red light and sobbed, “So now I…I can’t even talk to him anymore,” Garibay said.
And it so happens that the veteran Garibay went to see was also in crisis about a buddy he lost. On the bodycam footage, the man said it was his friend’s “blood and brains” that he could taste when woke up in the middle of the night. His buddy was shot next to him on a battlefield in Vietnam — thousands of miles and decades removed from Garibay’s combat experience.
But time and distance didn’t matter. Garibay says he knew the man’s pain.
“And, unless you were a combat veteran,” screams the man on the bodycam footage. “Maybe you don’t understand.”
“He’s a Marine from a different generation,” Garibay said. “But we’re all the same.”