Collier Sheriff's Office lieutenant runs mental health bureau with heart and soul

Lt. Leslie Weidenhammer lifts up the mentally ill from their dark places.

Her memory runs deep. She knows the names of pets. Her internal radar as a law enforcement officer is ever-ready. Yet she also has a master’s degree in mental health counseling.

“It’s Leslie. I’m here to check on you,” she says gently, standing on a doorstep where she has stood countless times.

She gauges stress in the voice coming from the other side of the locked door, of a woman with schizophrenia.

Weidenhammer, 53, listens for the sound of furniture being pushed away from the door, whether paranoia has its grip today.

“Thankfully, she will call me when she is not doing well,” Weidenhammer said. “She has my cellphone.”

A former Collier County Sheriff's Office road patrol duty deputy, Weidenhammer is coordinator of the Sheriff's Office mental health bureau, which she helped launch in 2016 at the direction of Sheriff Kevin Rambosk. It is not a desk job far from danger.

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She and a colleague reach out to people on the edge due to mental illness, substance abuse, post-traumatic stress disorder and isolation. Anyone in crisis.

There are many people in crisis: in plain sight peddling bicycles on local roads, in and out of jail and the courts, and hidden behind closed doors in picturesque Collier County.

A woman with ‘extraordinary compassion’

Weidenhammer was making connections to people with mental illness long before the bureau was launched. She has been watching over many of them, like the woman with schizophrenia, for eight years. She stops at her home once a month or so.

“A lot of times I leave with great respect for her,” Weidenhammer said. “She lives with a lot.”

A homeless man called recently to tell her where he is staying after getting out of jail. They don’t call in the middle of the night.

“It’s usually during the day and or evening,” she said. “They’re pretty respectful.”

She prepares for potential danger each time she approaches a home, said Collier County Judge Janeice Martin, who presides over the county’s specialized diversion courts for mental health, substance abuse and military veterans.

“She is all cop,” Martin said, adding Weidenhammer treats all her encounters with respect, whether it’s a homeless person or someone high-profile. “She is really happy to do what matters, and it makes her feel she is making a difference.”

Weidenhammer has extraordinary compassion and seems to work around the clock, said Nancy Dauphinais, chief operating officer of David Lawrence Center, the nonprofit treatment facility.

“She has an uncanny ability to balance the risk and safety needs in a situation, while addressing the need to provide empathy, care and concern for all individuals involved,” Dauphinais said.

Weidenhammer said deputies logged 18,000 response calls last year to people in crisis. In the two years since the mental health bureau launched, deputies increasingly are sending referrals to her, to do checks on people near a breaking point. A licensed clinical social worker from David Lawrence was assigned to the mental health bureau earlier this year and goes with her.

“Sometimes it’s tough to tell how someone is doing,” Weidenhammer said. “A lot of times folks in this type of situation are isolated. In some situations, law enforcement becomes the people they can talk to.”

The hope is getting people where they need to be, usually treatment for the first time or 10th. People fall in and out of care and stop taking medication. They slip backward, and behavior leads family or a neighbor to call 911.

“Law enforcement frequently is caught in the middle of that,” Weidenhammer said. 

Law enforcement doesn’t have many choices, either take the mentally ill to jail, commit them for evaluation under the state’s Baker Act, or let them be, knowing further encounters with the law are likely.

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“We just realized we needed to meet people at a different place based upon their behavior and what they are going through mentally and emotionally," she said.

Started as a dispatcher and moved up the ranks

Weidenhammer has been with the Sheriff’s Office since 1992, when she started as a 911 dispatcher and moved up the ranks.

“I say I am an accidental advocate all of the time,” she said. “I guess I was at the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time, however you want to look at it.”

She’s racked up numerous honors, most recently in October when the Greater Naples Chamber of Commerce gave her its 2018 Distinguished Public Service Award for Law Enforcement. Both Martin and Rambosk nominated her.

“It is rare for a law enforcement agency to have a mental health unit, but I felt it was critical that we, as an agency, step up and meet that need in Collier County,” Rambosk said in a statement. “The goal is to connect people with the services they need rather than taking them to jail whenever it’s possible. Lt. Weidenhammer has done a terrific job of helping to shape that unit to maximize its effectiveness in our community.”

Before heading out to make contact with someone in crisis, Weidenhammer reviews the individual’s history with the Sheriff’s Office, if there is one, and tries to get a picture of the person.

She uses her tactical training that is critical for law enforcement officers when she arrives. There's no telling what greets her.

“We would like to know as much as we can before we walk up to the door,” she said. “I approach it the same way as I do throughout my whole career. I cannot afford not to approach it that way. Officer safety has to be first. I can’t help anybody if I am hurt.”

From country life to being a cop

Weidenhammer grew up in Martinsville, Indiana, a small farming town between Bloomington and Indianapolis. After getting her bachelor’s degree in physical education and sports medicine from Indiana University-Purdue University of Indianapolis, she moved to Southwest Florida in 1990.

She accepted a job with Eckerd Youth Alternatives Inc., where she worked at a camp in Clewiston with troubled young men who were there as an alternative to jail. The young men lived outdoors, and as a counselor, Weidenhammer was with them 24/7; at night she and other counselors had to restrain them.

It was a harsh environment, and she gave it nine months. She became the after-school program coordinator at the Greater Naples YMCA. She was putting her degree in physical education to work but wanted more.

Growing up, she dreamed of becoming a police officer. She only knew what a cop’s life was like by what she saw on television as a kid.

 A colleague at the YMCA, a retired Chicago police officer, convinced her to pursue it. She didn’t know if she could handle the sight of blood and bodies, so she applied for a dispatch job. After two years in dispatch, she became a community service deputy.

“I loved that job,” she said. Supervisors allowed her to go to crime scenes occasionally, which isn’t the norm today. “I wanted to be out doing things.”

She went full-force ahead into the training academy and spent six years, from 1997 to 2003, as road patrol deputy. She moved to the in-house training bureau with various duties, including training officers in crisis intervention.

She has worked on hostage negotiations, coordinated critical incident stress management internally for first responders, and became a certified police suicide prevention instructor. She is a victim’s advocate and is a Florida Department of Law Enforcement certified instructor for numerous courses for officers.

Collier one of few agencies to train in crisis intervention

A decade ago Rambosk wanted all road patrol deputies trained in crisis intervention. She was behind the camera working with the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness to put together the video for the 40-hour training.

Today close to 99 percent of patrol deputies have gone through crisis intervention training, and so have many correctional officers and civilian staff.

“I believe we are one of the few agencies that have expanded it to civilian staff,” she said.

Martin, the Collier County judge, first met Weidenhammer in 2009 when she took the crisis intervention training. Two years ago, Weidenhammer asked if there might be space for her with the specialized treatment courts because of the fledgling mental health bureau.

“I about fell over at this good fortune. I could not say yes fast enough, and her impact on our process was immediate,” Martin said in her nomination paper for Weidenhammer to receive the public service award last month.

Most people arrive in the treatment courts with a distaste for law enforcement, and Weidenhammer gains their trust to help them progress, Martin said.

“She does this by simply communicating respect and genuine concern, all the while maintaining impeccable boundaries and professionalism,” Martin said.

Weidenhammer can look to her own family for perspective. Growing up, she and a younger sister were never close, but they came together a few years ago.

“Statistically, they say one in four people are affected by mental health issues, and my family is no different,” she said. “My grandmother, who is now deceased, who I can talk about, we’re pretty sure that she probably had bipolar with some schizoaffective traits to it that was never treated. I can remember some things and times being around my grandmother, but I was young and that was just grandma.”

Her sister asked what she did at the Sheriff’s Office and shared her own diagnosis with depression.

“I can only think that part of that is because she knows what I do at the Sheriff’s Office,” she said. “I went back to get my master’s in mental health counseling. I guess there is a level of trust there now (with my sister) that before might not have been.”