Dispatcher From West Central Dispatch, Which Covers Creve Coeur, Was Remembered After Sudden Death

On the morning of Friday July 22, a memorial service was held for Lisa O’Brien, the  Dispatcher turned communications specialist for  who unexpectedly passed at the age of 31 on July 18. The center covers Creve Coeur.

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The entire staff of the Town and Country Police Department was in attendance, a neighboring department volunteered to cover patrols.

The entire 30+ staff coming to pay their respects was no surprise, the unanimous feeling among the Town and Country Police Department is that Lisa was more like a member of their family than just a coworker.

“A lot of us treated Lisa and thought of Lisa like a little sister or even a daughter,” Corporal Dave Laughlin said. “We cared about her and watched over her but the real thing is that the whole time when she was working and we were out on the road, she was watching over us. We might have felt like she was a little sister but she was really watching over us and she did a great job at that. ”

Police Clerk Ashley McNamara, who says Lisa was one of her best friends, says that her favorite way to describe Lisa was to say that “to love her you had to have invested in sun glasses and ear plugs because she was the brightest person in any room and the loudest woo-hooer. She would work nights and just randomly burst into song...even if you didn’t want her to make you feel better about something she was going to make you try.”

McNamara, who typically worked days opposite Lisa’s night shift, says every morning she would sit down at her desk and find quarters taped to it, soda machine money left there by O’Brien. The two women particularly bonded over the fact that both of them married Irish men. McNamara says that Lisa took her surname seriously, often quipping that “being Irish isn’t a heritage it’s a lifestyle.” Lisa also adopted kelly green as her hands-down favorite color when she married Kevin O’Brien and began signing notes “IP” for Irish Princess. At the close of her funeral every one in attendance released a helium-filled kelly green balloon.

McNamara, who joined the Town and Country Police Department as a police clerk not long after turning 19, says that O’Brien helped her tremendously through her nervous first days on the job. Lisa knew something about working in law enforcement at a young age, she herself became a dispatcher for Town and Country at just 21.

Laughlin said that despite her young age, Lisa was a great dispatcher from the start.   

“For somebody to walk into that job without any prior experience, to pick it up like she did and to do the job that she did, if you ask me that’s just unbelievable,” Laughlin said. “I’ve been doing this job for 22 years and there’s been dispatchers that have been around for a long time that come no where near her.”

Not only was Lisa stellar at her job, her fellow dispatchers say that she made them better at their jobs as well.

“She made it easy, she made it a relaxed situation,” said WCDC Dispatcher Adron Long. Long joined Town and Country Dispatch in 2004 and trained under Lisa. The two of them worked through the transition together earlier this year when Town and Country Dispatch was .

“For us all to go from one job to starting a new one together, it was a little bit of a bothersome time being in between the two...but she kept a sense of humor, she never showed that she was weary or it bothered her and that made it easier for you to come to work and deal with everything,” Long said.

“Lisa represented joyfulness,” WCDC Supervisor Jill Wiggins said. “She knew when it was time to get serious and she knew when it was ok to have fun. She knew how to walk that line between the two and she had no problem walking it. She was always professional.”

Wiggins says that losing Lisa isn’t something that has fully set in among the other dispatchers but that it will be a loss felt for “many many many years.”

Even though her coworkers give accolades about her performance and professionalism, they are also adamant that Lisa’s real passion was for her two children, Aidan, 5 and Maddie, 8 months.

“She loved everybody but she lived for those kids...Everything was about her kids,” McNamara said. “I hope that anyone thinks of me as half the mother she was, and I have two kids myself.”

In Lisa’s memory, the officers and staff members of the Town and Country Police Department have created the Town and Country Police Charity Fund and are accepting donations to go towards covering the O’Brien’s immediate expenses.

“I think that’s part of our job as the Town and Country police and as 'family'...to make sure they can get along with life,” said Town and Country Officer Kent Berry. “And if you ask any of the thirty officers here, we all have the same attitude.”

In addition to creating the fund, many of Lisa’s coworkers are insistent about remaining involved in the lives of the O’Brien’s. Lisa was part of their family, they say, and her family will always be part of theirs.

“Maddie who is only 7 months old will never know how ridiculously amazing her mom was,” said McNamara. “Something I said to Kevin was that when all this settles down I want to be a part of making sure Maddie hears all these crazy stories about her mom and knows why she is the way she is and where that came from. That’s the hardest part for me, her kids were everything and they don’t get to know her like I did.”   

Donations to the Town and Country Police Charity Fund can be sent care of Captain Gary Hoelzer or Captain Patrick Kranz, to 1011 Municipal Center Drive, Town and Country, MO 63131.