JOB WELL DONE
Email leads Verona chief
to help prevent suicide
n BY NICK SWEDBERG
Every so often, Verona Police Chief Mitchell Stern will get an
email from a tourist asking for help to find lost luggage or report
a missing cell phone.
The problem for Stern is that he often can’t help them
because those occasional emails are meant for authorities in
the Italian city that shares the same name and is known primarily for being the setting of Shakespeare plays.
But one email sent to Stern in April was a matter of life and
death, and the 31-year police veteran immediately sprang into
action to help.
Stern had just left the department and returned home
around 5:20 p.m. on April 14 when he checked his work email.
A Chinese student in the United Kingdom had mistakenly
emailed him, asking for police to stop a friend in the Italian city
who was in the process of committing suicide, Stern said.
“(The friend) was confiding in him that she was depressed,”
the 54-year-old police chief said. “She had taken a bottle of
diazepam and was cutting her wrist.”
Stern said the student in the U.K. was texting the friend, also
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NEW JERSEY COPS
n
MAY 2016
a Chinese student,
through a popular
Chinese messaging
app. Usually, Stern
will Google the link
to the other Verona
police department’s
website and then
share it in a reply to
the sender of the
dozen or so routine
mistake emails each
year.
He
also
encourages the sender to contact the correct department, he
said.
“But this one, because of the nature of what was being reported, I knew I couldn’t just rely on … telling this young man to call
the Verona police,” Stern said.
Sometimes, contact information for the Italian department
doesn’t come up right away in a search, he said. That happened
this time, and because time was of the essence, Stern stepped
up his response.
He called the Italian embassy in