What started as a rescue call ended with a moment of kindness thanks to police officers in Nebraska.

Karen Ressegieu recently woke up to find her husband unresponsive.

"I woke up at 1:30 a.m., and he was still breathing. So, I, evidently, I went back to sleep, I'd never heard him. And at 6:15 a.m. I got up because we had a funeral that morning," Ressegieu said.

When medics arrived, they performed multiple rounds of CPR before telling Ressegieu her husband had died.

Despite the devastating news, Officer John Danderand said Ressegieu still kept putting everyone else first.

"She had a lot going on, she had some neighbors stopping by trying to figure things out, get information from her. And she had mentioned about three times that she had to get a cake frosted, they were supposed to attend a funeral that morning," he said.

Danderand decided to jump in to help.

"They said, 'Karen, can I frost that cake?'" Ressegieu said.

Sgt. Kraig Gomon said he snapped a couple of pictures to serve as a memory down the line, but it captured a part of the job that goes on behind the scenes.

"She was just more worried about everybody else than herself. And that was what struck me the most as her kindness. And for me, it was a small gesture for us to be able to try to return that to her," Gomon said.

Ressegieu said that morning was a blur, so having officers she could rely on helped her through the loss of her husband.

"And they said, so where does it go? And I pointed to where, so they delivered the cake, too," Ressegieu said.

It was a somber day made a little sweeter by a simple gesture.

"They just showed lots of kindness, you know, going out of their way," she said.

DENVER — Oftentimes, hoax perpetrators are seeking attention and reaction from the community, and we don’t want to help them in that pursuit. We also don’t want to encourage copycat hoaxes.

However, as at least 14 Colorado schools received “swatting” calls Wednesday, specialists point to a growing trend we believe you should be aware of.

Swatting is the act of calling first responders with a fake emergency to coax them into sending a significant police presence to a specific address

Ken Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, says he’s been tracking a “spate of school swatting threats that has gone on for months” across the United States. He says many previous mass swatting events have been traced to actors from foreign countries.

“Swatting threats typically cross multiple school districts, multiple communities, oftentimes multiple states and originate internationally,” Trump said. “They create anxiety, fear, uncertainty about school safety, drain local first responders from other needs out in the broader community, and can extend over a period of time while the investigation goes on — oftentimes for weeks or sometimes months.”

While it is, at this point, unclear if the multiple threats to Colorado schools were coordinated, Trump says these bad actors often have the specific goal of creating chaos, confusion and fear.

“These threats typically turn out to be unfounded, not credible, but every threat needs to be treated seriously [and] investigated thoroughly,” Trump said. “There’s not only a massive drain of law enforcement resources, but also swatting fatigue and fatigue by school districts: the risk of school communities not taking threats seriously, becoming complacent, and not treating each one seriously when there could be one possible threat that turns out to be credible.”

Sergeant Ryan Scheevel with the Boulder Police Department says he was impressed by the response of students and staff at Boulder High School Wednesday morning. The entire school’s lockdown procedure made law enforcement’s job of evacuating and sweeping the school for the potential threat much easier.

“It was very obvious that they had trained for that,” Scheevel said. “I would implore all schools, employers, anything like that to have a plan in place.”

Scheevel was just a couple hours into his shift Wednesday morning when he heard a weapons tone over his radio, and dispatchers relaying reports of a possible active shooter at Boulder High School. He and his fellow officers quickly realized the threat was likely a hoax, both through conversations with school administrators and messages from dispatch of other fake threats being called in across the state. Still, they had to push forward, per protocol, to ensure it was, in fact, a false alarm.

“We went and had them go into lockdown, and then started going [on] a systematic search of the school, hoping that we weren’t going to find anything, but planning that if we [did] find something — whether it’s a suspect or a victim or somebody’s injured — that we have the resources and a plan in place to deal with that,” Scheevel said.

Even after the all-clear, Scheevel and his fellow officers had to rely on their training and support from one another to process the other great cost of swatting threats: the emotional drain it puts on our law enforcement, teachers, and students.

“Two of my kids are school age, so anytime we get a call at a school, it definitely heightens your sense of what’s going on there,” he said. “When you’ve removed yourself from you that situation, you really think about like, 'That could have been my kids in there.’”

This article was written by Rob Harris for Scripps News Denver.

Jennifer Seeley was glued to her phone, safe at home but terrified nonetheless.

There was an active shooter at the Texas mall where she works as an assistant store manager. And she was searching desperately for information, praying. Was the gunman dead? Were her coworkers dead? What was happening?

So with law enforcement in the Dallas area town of Allen releasing information slowly on that horrible May 6 afternoon, she turned to social media for answers, stumbling across videos showing the bodies of some of the eight who were slain. Desperately she texted her coworkers.

“That’s where all of my information came from was what I saw on Twitter. And, you know, nobody was really releasing any information on what actually happened,” she says now, nearly two weeks later.

The shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets this month has law enforcement public information officers from around the country talking. Social media, they say, has accelerated everything. Now everyone can post images from their phone. That means if police don’t talk, reporters and the public will simply go online, as happened in Allen.

And that presents a major problem, says Katie Nelson, social media and public relations coordinator for the Mountain View Police Department in northern California. Nelson teaches about crisis management and social media best practices. And these days, she says, when it comes to responding, “The luxury of time does not exist."

POLICE APPROACHES HAVE EVOLVED

Police began to harness social media a decade ago, most famously after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. The four-day manhunt ended with police tweeting: “CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And justice has won. Suspect in custody.”

It was groundbreaking at the time, says Yael Bar Tur, a police communication consultant and former director of social media for the New York City police department. Now, she says, that it is the basic level expected of law enforcement.

“It’s not enough just to be on social media, you have to be good at it,” she says. “At the end of the day, you know, we have to use this tool because if you don’t, it is going to be used against you.”

In Allen, the mall shooting happened around 3:30 p.m. Allen police sent their first tweet around 4:20 p.m., announcing simply that police were at the mall and that an active investigation was underway. Seeley continued to fear that her coworkers at the Crocs store were hiding and the gunman was still on the loose.

At nearly 7 p.m., police in Allen said an officer had “neutralized the threat.” That meant he was dead. But the often-used term can be confusing to the public, says Julie Parker, a former broadcast journalist and law enforcement public information officer who now advises government agencies on how to respond to critical incidents.

“Normal people who don’t work in law enforcement don’t know what the word neutralized means,” Parker says.

Adding to the situation, the initial news conferences were brief and infrequent. One lasted less than two minutes, and police took no questions.

Eventually she learned that her coworkers had survived, but a security guard she knew was among the dead. Twenty-year-old Christian LaCour had helped jump start a customer’s car just a few days earlier.

“Very anxiety-inducing,” Seeley said of the whole experience.

MAKING THE BEST OF SOCIAL MEDIA

How to harness social media in the best ways — and quickly — was on everyone’s mind last week as public information officers gathered at a midyear conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police.

“You had a little more time to get information out five or six years ago. The expectation wasn’t there that it would be immediate, and I think it is now,” says Sarah Boyd, who is on the executive board of the association’s group on public communication.

She says her colleagues often text each other to discuss how communications are handled after tragedies. The responsibility weighs on her; she is well aware that the messages police tweet in the midst of a mass shooting might be read by someone hiding from the shooter.

“All they’ve got is their phone, and that tweet is their lifeline," says Boyd, a former newspaper reporter. She is now the public relations manager at the Clay County, Missouri, Sheriff’s Office in the Kansas City area.

This newest crop of public information officers, who like Boyd are much more likely to be former reporters themselves than in the past, also are demanding to have a seat at the table when officers are planning how to respond to mass casualty events and police shootings.

They note that the flow of information can go both ways, generating tips from the public, who might have cell phone or Ring doorbell video that could help investigators.

It can be challenging, though, with police nationally struggling to regain the public's trust in the wake of George Floyd's killing in 2020 and the protests that followed. Many factors — for example is the suspect still on the loose? — play a role in what can be released. And even if the suspect is killed, the investigation isn’t over; law enforcement still must determine whether the shooter acted alone, says Alex del Carmen, an associate dean of the school of criminology at Tarleton State University in Texas.

Missteps after the mass shooting at Uvalde, when law enforcement released shifting and at times contradictory information, show the importance of getting details right.

“People were just scratching their heads on the second or third day,” del Carmen says. He has sympathy, though, for the officers faced with communicating the unimaginable; entire careers can be defined by moments like these.

A MODEL FOR QUICKER INFORMATION

The bulk of the nation’s police forces are small, and there are vast differences in what each state allows them to release. In Missouri, for instance, 911 recordings are inaccessible to the public.

The public itself has no such restrictions, though.

After a man killed 10 people at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2021, an independent, part-time journalist began livestreaming on his YouTube channel before officers even arrived. The effect can be instantaneous — and, for authorities, quite dizzying.

“We’re putting out information quicker than I’ve ever seen before,” says Boulder police public information officer Dionne Waugh. Given the speed of social media, she says, there's simply no choice.

Amid a crush of media, each victim's family was assigned its own public information officer. All the while, what had happened was hitting Waugh personally; the victims included police Officer Eric Talley, a friend who died rushing into the store.

Though she described the experience as “life-changing” and “horrible,” she has led trainings in the years that have followed. She hopes that reliving it will help others.

Sadly, it wasn't long after Nashville Police Department spokesperson Don Aaron asked her to speak that he faced his own mass shooting. In March, a shooter killed three children and three adults at a Christian school in his city before being gunned down by police.

The police tweets were fast. The very first one announced that the shooter was dead. Surveillance video was released before the 10 p.m. nightly newscast. Body camera footage came out the following morning, in line with the department's policy of releasing such video quickly. The stream of information was fast, continual and generally accurate.

“As we have made decisions about releasing body cam in police-shooting situations, I have said to some of my colleagues across the country, especially when this first started, that I was flying a jet trying not to crash it,” says Aaron, a 32-year police veteran. “And so far, it hasn’t crashed.”

WAUKESHA, Wis. —

The night of the Waukesha Christmas Parade attack, Sarah Wehmeier-Aparicio said she realized something was wrong the moment the music stopped playing.

"Some of the kids stopped playing and I thought, 'Why aren't they playing?'" Wehmeier said. "That's when the screaming started and I turned around and he started driving through the band."

She's referring to Darrell Brooks Jr., who police said drove through the parade in an SUV. Six people died. More than 60 were injured.

She said she watched as the SUV sped past within inches of her, then heard gunfire, as police shot at the vehicle.

"The kids were running, but we still had several on the ground and then a police officer came running and said, 'Shots fired, everybody run,'" Wehmeier said. "A lot of students were injured, not able to move, just laying on the street and they just felt so helpless they were there."

The rest of the students scattered in storefronts, all while Wehmeier's own family was somewhere else along the parade route.

"I remember having to make that choice: am I going to be a mom right now or am I going to be the band teacher right now? I had to be the band teacher in that moment," Wehmeier said.

"Just checking the store, 'How are you guys doing?' Next store, 'How are you guys doing?' Then on the streets," Wehmeier said.

Wehmeier said community members trained in first aid helped tend to the injured students, while waiting for emergency responders. She said 12 of her students received medical treatment.

Sister station WISN was there when the final student, Erick Tiegs, 16, returned home from the hospital on Tuesday. He was playing trombone when the driver in the SUV struck him.

Wehmeier said some of the students' instruments likely protected their bodies from serious harm.

"We did hear our sousaphone, which is the marching version of the tuba, the doctor said that probably saved (the student's) life because the way it wrapped around him, it created a barrier that protected him as the car went over," Wehmeier said. "He said, 'Thank goodness for that sousaphone, it saved your life.'"

Wehmeier said since returning to school on Monday, the students have taken time to process the trauma by talking as a group, using the student services counselors and taking in the support that's flooded into their school.

Hundreds of handmade signs, handwritten notes, flowers and gifts have poured in from around the country for the Waukesha South marching band.

Comfort dogs also gathered outside the school one day to help students open up.

"I know some of the students who were towards the back of the band, they've really struggled because, 'If I had been in the one spot over, that would have been me,' and 'I should have been in that spot.' It's a lot more survivor's guilt, that they wish they had been in the spot of their classmates so they could have taken that for them," Wehmeier said.

Wehmeier said talking to each other about the trauma from that day has helped the group process the most. She also said starting to play again together as a band has helped students return to some sense of normalcy.

She said once her students learned the Dancing Grannies, another group struck in the parade, planned to march in a parade this weekend, the band wanted to rehearse again.

"For me personally, this is something somebody did to us and so it makes me feel extra strong about wanting to get back to normal," Wehmeier said. "I did mention to them about the Dancing Grannies and they said, 'You know what, we want to play tomorrow.'"

"(The Dancing Grannies) resiliency in the number of people they lost from their group and the fact they're ready to do a parade again this weekend is amazing and a great example," Wehmeier said. "I know our students have been really inspired by them."

Wehmeier said her life experience has prepared her for this work.

"I've been through other traumas in my life, so I know, as hard as things are right now, there is going to be some light in this at the end of the tunnel," Wehmeier said. "My students don't have that life experience yet and I have a really special honor to get to be at their side to walk them through this."

When asked what she is currently reflecting on, Wehmeier said she's wondering about how this could have happened.

"How many other people are slipping through the cracks with mental illness and trauma in their lives that allows them to get to this point, where they think that driving a car through a parade is an OK thing? What can we learn as a society to be preventive and proactive, to stop these things from happening," Wehmeier said.

SEATTLE, Wash. — Working in emergency services means putting yourself in dangerous situations.

Often, it is life or death, like when a devastating mudslide hit a community north of Seattle in 2014.

“I was deployed to the Oso mudslide about seven years ago and it was a mudslide that killed 40 people,” said Lt. Michael Dulas, with the Seattle Fire Department.

“My role was to help search the mudslide for people. So, we were literally digging, looking for people,” he said.

The weeks-long search effort left an impression on Dulas and hundreds of other first responders.

“We were up there for four 24 hour shifts in a row,” said Steve Yeutter, who works with Dulas at the fire department.

“The most normal part of that day was petting the search dogs at the end of the day,” said Dulas.

The Oso slide and its aftermath inspired Dulas to make a small but significant change within Seattle Fire. The department got dogs.

“Zoe’s a 2-year-old Bernedoodle, so half Bernese mountain dog and half poodle,” said Dulas.

Zoe is Mike’s dog and one of three therapy dogs who have joined the fire department as part of a pilot program. The other two, Hera and Bob, are also owned by Seattle firefighters.

“She’s just being a dog, bringing a smile to people’s faces, being goofy, doing dog things. And dogs are proven to lower your heart rate, lower your blood pressure,” said Dulas

Agencies across the U.S. are looking for a solution to the mental health crisis. Police and firefighters are now more likely to die by suicide than in the line of duty. About 30% of emergency responders will develop behavioral health conditions like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“For a number of years, those issues were really under-recognized, and it was just assumed, 'Oh, they’re tough. They see it every day,'” said Chip Schreiber, a clinical psychologist at UCLA who specializes in creating programs to reduce PTSD in first responders.

“Suicide and serious depression are the final common pathway of stress and symptoms that potentiate and then lead to greater conflict in the environment and ability to function in your family,” said Schreiber.

“In ’95, Seattle lost four firefighters in the Mary Pang warehouse fire. One of them was my very best friend. Randy Terlicker was his name,” said Yeutter. “Had a hard time for about 24 hours just even functioning.”

Yeutter has spent three decades with Seattle Fire.

Today, one of his jobs is working as a peer support coordinator, helping firefighters deal with a wide variety of scenarios.

“Possibly line of duty deaths, injuries to firefighters. Some of the other things that might trigger a response might be multi-casualty incidents, or possibly suicides or difficult runs with children,” said Yeutter.

Yeutter and Dulas both say they've had experiences where they wished there was more offered by the department.

“I lost a little brother who was in the Army to suicide. I’ve watched my older brother as a firefighter struggle with PTSD and that’s a lot of my motivation is just I want to take a different path and I want to be well,” said Dulas.

Both say there are more resources available to firefighters today.

“When you feel those reactions when you sick, when you feel stressed, when you can’t sleep for a couple weeks, get out there and ask for help,” said Yeutter.

“I want to see everyone retire healthy, happy, with their families intact and just go have a great life after,” said Dulas.

Firefighter Richard Jett happened to be working at a different fire station and ended up meeting two girls on a welfare check at a storage unit.Jett, a man of faith, knew God was trying to tell him something.At the time in October 2017, the girls were just 2 years and 4 days old.He ended up adopting them, joining his family of two other adopted children.His colleagues recently honored him in a surprise ceremony and given a surf trip by a charity in the area, S.W.E.L. (Surf Waves Enjoy Life), that takes veterans and first responders surfing.For more information on S.W.E.L, click here.

Two decades after the 9/11 attacks shook America to its core by crashing two planes into the World Trade Center, some of the men and women who were first to respond to the tragedy in lower Manhattan are recalling their harrowing experiences as this somber anniversary approaches.

James Hill, Gerry Giunta and Michael Gomes are members of the Massachusetts Task Force 1. The agency has responded to countless natural disasters since it was first founded in the early 1990s. But September 11, 2001, was the team’s first time dealing with a terrorist attack.

James Hill still remembers pulling into New York City a few hours after the World Trade Center towers had collapsed.

“We turned the corner and there was an airplane jet engine laying on the sidewalk,” Hill recalled.

For Gerry Giunta, it was the color from the building’s ash and debris that still sits in the back of his mind some 20 years later.

“Everything was monochromatic grey and as we got further it was like snow,” he said.

These three men were among the first to arrive in New York City, mere hours after the country was shaken to its core. But as they barreled toward New York City in old military vehicles, with no FM radios or cell phones, no one had any idea what to expect.

"It was really strange. Everything was grey. There was no color to anything; there was dust covering everything. You just had to take a deep swallow knowing what you’re going into and what you’re faced with,” Gerry Giunta added.

For eight days, with no sleep, the task force worked in coordination with New York City authorities, hoping against hope to find someone alive while sifting through what remained of the World Trade Center.

“It was 22 acres of utter destruction. You basically had two buildings, each floor was an acre, and the buildings were 110 stories high, so we were looking at 220 acres of concrete. And yet, we never saw a piece of concrete larger than a grain of sand,” Michael Gomes said about the impact of the towers imploding.

As the days passed, more and more families showed up looking for loved ones. Exhausted, this team continued to work, using the sphere from the World Trade Center, which survived the collapse, as their compass for every mission.

“All of that was a hole in the ground. We’d use that ball like it was a clock,” responder James Hill said.

The years have not been kind to those who were on the ground in those dark days and weeks after the towers fell. An estimated 4,000 first responders have died in the last two decades from illnesses related to 9/11. Two of them were from this task force.

“Out of 72 people, we’ve lost two. It’s something that’s always in the back of your mind, those aren’t great odds,” Michael Gomes said.

This team continues to move forward though, responding to new disasters as they unfold and using lessons learned from 9/11.

But like the memorials, now standing as reminders, the men and women of this task force are taking this 20th anniversary of 9/11 to reflect.

DENVER, Colo. – With the world stuck inside for weeks, some people are now stepping out and cheering on in a fight against an invisible killer – COVID-19.

“We’re all getting together and we’re all going to whoop it up a little bit and cheer them on,” said a Denver man from the balcony of his high-rise apartment.

The “them” the man is referring to are first responders, heroes he says are worth celebrating.

At Brooks Tower, downtown Denver’s oldest high rise, Kim Dozier is leading her neighbors as they cheer from their balconies for medical workers on the frontlines.

“Pass the love,” Dozier said. “There’s nothing else that matters right now.”

Acts like this are happening across the country

Whether praying from a hospital parking lot in Nashville, Tennessee or dancing in their driveways in Buffalo, New York – people caught in this pandemic are escaping from self-quarantine for a few minutes each night by gathering from a safe distance and howling as the coronavirus takes control of our lives.

Our news team obtained cell phone video from New York City’s Lower East Side, a hot spot for deaths linked to the virus.

The video shows proud New Yorkers hooting and hollering from their rooftops and balconies.

The excitement might make some forget the make-shift morgues now lining the city streets.

COVID-19 is has already killed thousands of people across the world – with health experts predicting many more deaths to pile up before this global pandemic ends.

But whether in New York or the oldest high rise in Denver, Colorado, Americans are making social distancing seem not that far away while making the world feel a little closer during this crisis.