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You make that long walk to the door in the middle of the night. Your heart races. A lump sticks in the back of your throat. You knock on the door. Another name is confirmed. Tragedy touches another family.

Law enforcement officers say a death notification is one of the most difficult parts of their jobs. After a homicide, suicide, car crash or other accident, officers must deliver the grim news. 

“When you are walking to the house, your heart is pounding. It’s not really fear, but it’s knowing what you are getting ready to do,” said Sgt. Debbie Butler,  who leads the Greensboro Police Department’s homicide squad.

“You know what you are getting ready to do to somebody’s world, but somebody has to do it.”

While every agency has a slight variation on the fine details of making a notification, the general standard is to make contact with a family member as soon as possible after the victim is identified.

If the victim’s family lives nearby, two officers usually go to the home.

If the family lives out of town or in another state, law enforcement officials there are asked to break the news and give the family a phone number to call for more information.

When officers arrive at the family’s home, they typically knock on the door and then confirm the deceased person’s name and relationship to the family.

“You always hear: 'Can we come in? Can we have a seat? ... We need to talk to you,” said Trooper Chris Knox  of the Highway Patrol. “At that point, they already know something has gone wrong.”

Officers say the best method is to just come out and say that someone has died and leave it to the family to ask whatever they want to know about the situation.

“I don’t go in too deep about whether alcohol was involved, who caused it, or if the person was wearing a seatbelt,” Knox said of the many traffic fatalities he’s investigated.

“They take control of what they want to know,’’ he said. “Sometimes, the family will be at a peace of mind to want to know more.”

The general requirement of two officers on a death notification is to allow for one officer to act in a support role or, in a worst case scenario, as backup for the range of emotions felt by family members.

“We’ve seen them punch walls, punch doors or lose control of all the faculties to the point where they have a lot of anger,” said Capt. Jeff Bruce, who heads the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office’s Special Operations Division.

“We’ve had some where they’ve been so emotionally overwhelmed that we’ve had to call EMS because they’ll pass out or have chest pains,” Bruce said.

Denial of the situation is another common reaction, as is a tendency to want to fight the officer who delivers the bad news.

Officers never leave the family member alone, instead calling another family member, neighbor or someone else to be there in a time of need.

That’s the standard way of delivering a death notice — but everything doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes, officers are forced to make death notifications at the scene of a crime or accident when a family member shows up and asks questions.

Other times, Knox said, the Highway Patrol might have to coordinate several death notifications at different homes — such as when  high school friends are killed in a crash.

“Because when one person knows, everyone knows,” Knox said.

When Knox talks to teenagers about drinking and driving, he tells them stories about having to the break bad news to parents.

Each case is different and takes its toll on the officer, who can turn to his or her family, agency-provided peer groups or counselors for solace.

Jim Albright, a retired Highway Patrol trooper, said many fatal accidents stick with him even after being off the force for more than 20 years. 

In 1979, while working in Sanford, a 74-year-old man died when his tractor overturned and crushed him across the street from his home.

Albright had to tell the man’s only nearby relative, his 92-year-old mother,  that her son was dead.

“She had seen the commotion across the street, and I told her he was fatally injured,” Albright said. “She didn’t understand and asked, 'How bad is he hurt?’ I just remember the emotion and feeling her hurt.”

In another case, Albright investigated the crash that killed a teenage girl who was leaving church on a rainy Sunday night in 1980. 
Her car slid off an embankment and rolled over. At first glance, the girl looked to be uninjured, but her window was slightly rolled down and her head hit a tree in the rollover.

“It was a bump on her head, and it killed her,” Albright said. He said the girl was scheduled to have new tires put on her car the next morning.

“It was in a small community and just about the whole community was there at the hospital,’’ he said. “Her family went berserk. They were poor and looked up to her as being the future for their family.”

Law enforcement officers agree that no matter how many death notifications they are forced to make, it never gets any easier.

“I’ve gotten to the point to where my phone would ring and (making a death notification) would be the first thing I would think about,” said Butler, a Greensboro police officer who previously worked as a crash investigator.

 “It’s not having to get up and get dressed at 2 o’clock in the morning and go out in the cold. It was: 'I’m going to have to go out and tell a family member that someone is dead.’ ”

Contact Ryan Seals at 373-7077 or ryan.seals@news-record.com