Crisis team traverses L.A. to comfort 'surviving victims'

The woman won't look away from the dark huddle of uniforms standing behind a yellow police tape barrier that flaps back and forth in an occasional breeze. There, on the other side of this South Los Angeles parking lot, her brother is lying, still.

Two men in suits approach her. Their expressions signal bad news. Their words confirm it: Earlier in the night, her brother was shot in the head and killed.

Barbara de Lima, a grandmotherly figure with curly white hair, stands beside the family as they talk to the detectives. When a family member begins to cry, de Lima gives her a water bottle along with soothing words of comfort. The woman falls onto her, and de Lima cradles her head on her shoulder, calling her "honey."

In her blue polo shirt bearing the crest of the city of Los Angeles, de Lima is part of a team of 250 Angelenos who are dispatched alongside police and firefighters to the site of almost every death in the city: shootings, car accidents, suicides, fires and natural deaths.

And they do it all — drive across the city in the middle of the night, linger at dangerous homicide scenes — for free.
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