Twenty-five years of first responder experience couldn’t prepare Jim Schmidt for the devastating moment when he had to identify his stepdaughter Gabby Petito’s body in Wyoming. The veteran firefighter, EMT, and 911 dispatcher thought his decades of training had equipped him for anything. He was wrong.
Schmidt’s story reveals a dangerous blind spot in first responder training.
He operated under the oversimplified approach his first ambulance partner taught him. “The winner goes with the cops. The loser goes in the back of the ambulance. It’s not for us to figure out.”
This knowledge gap has deadly consequences. Schmidt now realizes he “unintentionally failed victims in the past by not knowing how to respond, not knowing how to provide resources, how to use trauma informed care towards them.” One case haunts him particularly. A woman who called frequently was dismissed as having mental health or substance abuse issues. “We just wrote it off,” Schmidt said. “Until the last time, and that was when her ex took her life.”
The problem runs deeper than individual training deficiencies. First responders operate in dangerous silos when domestic violence requires coordinated response across all disciplines. 911 dispatchers need to understand what they’re hearing beyond the obvious call details. EMTs and firefighters must recognize injury patterns and behavioral cues that don’t match the reported story. Police need to know that 50 percent of perpetrators who kill law enforcement officers have documented histories of strangulation.
Strangulation represents a particularly lethal form of abuse that first responders routinely miss.
When dispatchers hear “choking,” they need to dig deeper. When EMTs see a walking, talking patient, they can’t assume everything is fine underneath.
The current reactive approach fails victims at every level. Schmidt describes the typical mindset as “your house is on fire, call 911. You’re having a medical emergency, call 911. You’re in an abusive relationship, call a shelter.” This thinking ignores prevention and education opportunities that could reduce demand on emergency services entirely.
Through the Gabby Petito Foundation, Schmidt now trains first responders to recognize domestic violence dynamics they were never taught to see. His “Unseen Advocates” program brings together 911 dispatchers, EMTs, firefighters, police, and hospital staff for coordinated training. The goal is breaking down silos so everyone receives the same education on trauma-informed response.
The training covers recognizing when victims look at someone else before answering questions, when someone answers for them, or when their injury story doesn’t align with what responders observe. It teaches the importance of creating safe spaces, like moving victims to the back of an ambulance where they can speak freely. Most critically, it emphasizes that how you treat someone matters as much as the medical care you provide.
Schmidt’s approach acknowledges an uncomfortable truth about first responder culture. The job reprograms your brain the same way abuse reprograms a victim’s brain. Compassion fatigue and repeated trauma exposure create barriers to empathetic response. Recognizing this allows responders to take the self-assessment needed to provide better care.
The foundation’s ultimate goal is ambitious but necessary. “We’re working every single day to be put out of business,” Schmidt said.
Every first responder will encounter domestic violence victims, whether they recognize them or not. The question is whether they’ll have the training to help or inadvertently cause more harm. Schmidt’s painful experience offers a roadmap for closing this fatal gap before more families endure what his did.
To hear the full conversation, listen to the complete episode of The Safety Gap from RapidSOS.