By Rubén Rosario, St Paul Pioneer Press

There is a ton of bad as well as good public servant stories out there. This is one of the really good ones.

Ramsey County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Casey briefly considered following the routine when 15-year-old Jani Ray of Shoreview was reported as a runaway: Question the parents or legal caretakers. Jot down the basics. File the report. Resume patrol.

Instead, he took the time on an early spring day this year to read a computerized field note, known as an “FI,” that informed him about the runaway youth’s bipolar disorder, depression and other mental afflictions.

It confirmed his gut instinct. Routine just would not do this night.

He found her MySpace account. In it, he read disturbing writings — words that hinted at thoughts of suicide. He combed through her cluttered bedroom with her mother’s permission and found journals her mother never knew existed, journals that expressed similar, dark thoughts.

He spent much of that unusually slow Saturday night looking for her.

On Wednesday, Casey and Jani Ray saw each other for the first time since the runaway episode. Along with her mother, Nancy Ray, the youth presented Casey with a St. Michael the Archangel medallion. St. Michael is the patron saint of cops.

“I would like to see him in person and would love to thank him face to face,” Jani Ray told me a few days before the reunion. “If he wouldn’t have come and got me that night, I don’t even think that I would be alive right now. I owe him my life.” A recap is in order.

Nancy Ray, who works as a financial officer for Ramsey County’s Human Services Department, approached Ramsey County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Kent Mueller, who works in the same government building in downtown St. Paul.

Ray’s daughter was refusing to take her medication, she told the deputy. She was abusing drugs and alcohol. Ray feared the girl would likely run away again. She wondered if there was anything proactive she could do to alert authorities in the event Jani ran away or had a run-in with the law.

Mueller, trained in crisis intervention, serves on the board of the Barbara Schneider Foundation. The nonprofit is named after a Minneapolis woman who was fatally shot by police during a confrontation in her home in 2000. Although two officers were cleared of criminal wrongdoing in the shooting, Minneapolis established a special police crisis unit to respond to calls involving people with mental illness. The group trains first responders, from cops and emergency room staff to homeless and school officials, on how to de-escalate and deal with a mental-health crisis. It had just conducted a three-hour seminar for all Ramsey County sworn personnel.

Mueller suggested writing up a field note with information on Jani Ray’s condition and state of mind. As predicted, Jani Ray ran away several days later.

“It was an option for me,” Ray said now of her writings about suicide. “I truly felt alone. I felt like I had no one. I was willing to go the full hundred yards and end my life because I was very unhappy.”

GETTING HELP

When Casey responded to the runaway call, Nancy Ray suggested he look up the field note on her daughter. Casey pulled it up in his squad car’s computer. He tapped into Jani Ray’s MySpace account and then went back into the home, where he found the journals and a list of cell phone numbers for several of the runaway teen’s friends. He spent roughly two hours calling numbers, pretending to be “Mike,” a friend. He learned that Jani Ray was expected to show up that night at a backyard house party in Shoreview. The girl having the party was a friend of Jani Ray, and she and her father agreed to help lure Ray to the home. When the runaway teen arrived, Casey and a female officer approached her. Playing tough cop at first, he grabbed her arm and told her she was coming with him. “She was very subdued, but she was in a dazed state,” Casey said.

“I’m not going to arrest you. I’m going to take you home. We’re going to get you some help,” he remembered telling the teenager as she sat in the back seat of his car.

Jani Ray’s admission that she had not taken her medication gave Casey the authority to take the teen to a medical facility and place a 72-hour hold on her. But he allowed Nancy Ray as the parent to do that. Jani Ray attended two intensive-treatment facilities from late spring until late August, when she was released in time for the start of classes at Mounds View High School. She confided to schoolmates for the first time about her situation.

“I was completely honest with them, and my peers have been unbelievably supportive of me,” Ray told me during our chat inside the apartment she shares with her mother. “They want for me to be with them, to have a normal high school experience like them.”

GOAL: SHARING INFO

Mueller believes field notes — which are not incident or full-fledged police reports — could be used by the law enforcement community to store critical information provided by relatives or others about the mental state or condition of someone they might come into contact with on the streets. Mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for persons ages 15 to 44, according to the National Institute for Mental health. Roughly one out of four Americans age 18 or older — close to 58 million people — suffers from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year.

“Knowledge is power,” said Mueller, who is in the preliminary stages of finding out whether area police agencies are willing to share such information. Right now, Mueller said, such field notes cannot be shared because of different and incompatible police data computer systems.

Mueller envisions the day when every police agency in the state, if not the country, shares field notes. But the reality is that few police agencies have compatible computer systems to tap and view such data right now. Casey, meanwhile, had no clue about the impact he had that night until I gave him a jingle.

“Wow,” he said. “It sounds cheesy, but I just simply wanted to find her and get her home, just for mom’s sake.” Jani Ray is willing to share her struggles publicly to help lift the stigma of mental illness among youths as well as hopefully to encourage troubled teens to seek help.

“I understand now that I was not alone, that there are caring people out there, my mother and others, who love and support me and that I can go talk to,”” Jani Ray said. “I needed to let this officer know just how much he means to me. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about what he did.”

“She can count on me if she ever needs to talk to someone,” Casey said. The guardian angel medallion sounds like an appropriate gift after all.