Chris Baumann (NYPD) and Anne Marie Baumann, Lindenhurst
Chris Baumann, a former New York City police officer, had been blind for about two months when he attempted suicide. He simply walked out of his Lindenhurst home, in the middle of the day, made his way to Sunrise Highway—not far from his house, maybe a block and a half total—and walked into traffic. He walked across Sunrise Highway, blind, hoping to be hit by a car, hoping to die.
“I heard people screeching,” he says today. “I heard my name called, [heard] words I’d never even heard before.”
But he made it across—from the south side of the street to the north side—unscathed. So he turned around and did it again. And again, even though he could not see, even though he wanted to be hit, he made it back.
“And I was like, ‘I just crossed twice, middle of the day, as quick as I could. I guess today is not my day,’” says Chris. “So I came back around and came home.”
The suicide attempt came as a result of depression; the depression a result of the blindness; the blindness a result of jet fuel and other chemicals that got in his eyes when he was on the scene at Ground Zero as the second plane hit the South Tower.
The morning of Sept. 11, Chris was doing a mail run for his precincts: He had just dropped off the previous day’s criminal court summonses and was heading down Broadway to headquarters, listening to the radio. It was pleasant and sunny, Chris remembers, when he stopped at a light at the corner of Chambers and Centre streets. There, he looked out the window of his car, looked around and, “Everybody was staring,” he says. “Everybody was frozen on the street, staring up. I looked up and I saw the tower on fire. I parked my car and ran to the tower to see what I could do.”
Chris was clearing people out of the way as firemen were pulling up at the scene. Debris was falling, everywhere.
“Some of the stuff I saw falling was people,” says Chris. “I heard a roar. I looked up and I saw the second plane coming. Then it hit.”
Chris stayed on the scene till he was called out at 6 p.m. He suffered a back injury while at Ground Zero, and he was sent to Jamaica, Queens the next day at 7 a.m. to see the department doctor, who confirmed his ailment. He came home, took a nap, and woke up later that day totally blind.
Photo Credit: Joel Cairo/Long Island Press
“Black,” he says. “I saw black.”
Chris’ wife Anne Marie was with him at the hospital. “She was helping the doctor pull debris out of my eyes for weeks,” he says. “She would sit there and hold my eyelids open and pull strings [of a gooey gray substance] out of my eyes.”
“It was horrible,” says Anne Marie, from the pastel-hued dining room of their Lindenhurst home.
Anne Marie and Chris are a cute couple: Anne Marie has a bottomless warmth, a welcoming laugh, a gravy-rich South Shore accent and a sarcastic tone that lends levity to some pretty ugly stories. Chris has gray hair and a thin moustache; he has the look of a retired cop, the matter-of-fact exasperation of a man who spends much of his life in suspicious disbelief and frustration.
To see them together—so nicely matched, so balanced—it can be hard to accept some of the stories they share. For instance, Chris recalls that after 9/11, he would physically hurt his wife while she slept.
“I was having dreams where I was down there and the ground would open up and arms would grab me and they’d be saying, ‘You were supposed to die that day. You belong with us.’ I’d be fighting them and I would attack her in my sleep. She actually had to see a specialist, I hit her so hard in the eye one time. Damaged her eye.”
“Survivor’s guilt,” Anne Marie calls it. “It’s common. A lot of wives get pretty roughed up at night and [their husbands] are literally sleeping and they don’t wake up from it. They go into a trance.”
Chris and Anne Marie have two kids: Courtney, now 18, and Christopher, now 16. Both parents remember their own struggles putting tremendous strain on the children. Anne Marie says she “made a joke of it,” to help her kids deal with the stress, but that did not always work: One day, on the playground at school, Courtney started yelling to her classmates, “Hit the ground. There’s a plane coming, everybody get down.” Christopher formulated a suicide plan of his own (which he did not carry out).
Through her own networking, her searches for help, Anne Marie met John Feal, with whom she formed an instant connection. The two worked together to advocate and network; today, she is vice president of the Feal Good Foundation.
“I deal with a lot of [suicide] attempts,” she says of what she does as VP. “I deal with phone calls at 2 in the morning, 4 in the morning, from a responder or their wives: ‘He’s missing; he busted up the house; he seems to have taken too many pills.’” Anne Marie notes that a lot of children of responders suffer from depression and try to kill themselves. “It’s like a domino effect,” she says. “Your whole family structure just goes smash.”
With the anniversary coming, says Anne Marie, the tension gets worse and worse: “[Responders] don’t want to get out of bed,” she says. “They’re very verbally abusive; the tension wipes them out even after nine years.”
Photo Credit: Joel Cairo/Long Island Press
Chris and Anne Marie say that 90 percent of their social circle today is made up of responders. Family and old friends have fallen off.
“They don’t know how to deal with illness,” says Anne Marie.
“They back away and you don’t see them—they’re gone,” says Chris.
“They leave,” says Anne Marie. “But that’s [true of] every responder. Every responder took a heavy hit on friendship and family. They just backed away.”
Like so many responders, Chris and Anne Marie have fought to see the passage of the Zadroga Bill. Anne Marie believes it will finally pass this year. “I’m filled with hope,” she says. “I have hope, I have faith, and if I fall, I’m just going to get back up.”
Chris is not so optimistic.
“I’ve given up hope,” he says. “Why hope for something and be shot down? When I joined the police force, I thought the police force was a family; they were going to take care of you if you got shot or something… If you have hope, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.”
For Chris’ part, even therapy provides little consolation.
“What I told my therapist was, ‘You went eight years, 10 years, 12 years to college? That’s great. You didn’t have someone die in your arms. You didn’t see body parts lying around. You didn’t have somebody fall a hundred stories and hit the ground right in front of you… You have no freaking clue until someone dies in your arms, until someone splatters in front of you, until you’re walking on squishy stuff, and you know what that squishy stuff is under the dust…spending hours and hours with screams and bodies and body parts…’ You could sit there and say you read 30 books on disasters—that’s great. Give me somebody who’s been through a disaster and can say, ‘I know that smell that you smell; I know the feelings you felt.’”
Even if the Zadroga Bill passes, Anne Marie knows it will only provide a measure of closure.
“I don’t think it will ever be done and over with,” she says. “Because when a plane flies over my house and he turns sheet-white…or when I’m out on vacation and we’re walking in the street and some odor comes—like a cooking odor or a car smell—and he gets sick and nauseous and pasty…or when fire engines come down the block… It’s never going to be over.”
