Nassau detective inspires young women as a female in the force

RVC resident honored for responding to scene of serious accident on Southern State

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Nassau County Police Officer Leigh Teta was in front of West Hempstead’s Cornwell Avenue Elementary School with her partner one evening last November when an advanced medical transport was dispatched to the scene of an accident on the Southern State Parkway.

A few minutes later, the two were alerted that more units were needed, and Teta and her partner, Officer Joseph D’Ercole, who were just moments away from the accident, arrived to find that a man had been pinned between two cars.

“That was my first trauma and it was a big trauma,” said Teta, a Rockville Centre resident, recalling that the man’s injuries were more serious than she had expected. “Just the openness of the wounds and you’re looking at bone and you’re looking at soft tissue. You have to kind of put that out of your mind.”

The man, Leslie Leroy, was visiting Long Island from Texas, and was involved in a collision while traveling eastbound near exit 17. After getting out and standing behind his car to assess the situation, Leroy was struck by another car, severing his left leg and fracturing his right one in multiple places. Police medics had pulled him free of where he was stuck and applied a tourniquet by the time Teta and D’Ercole arrived. The two helped the medics get Leroy into the ambulance, and Teta led the escort to South Nassau Communities Hospital, where he arrived in about 15 minutes, she said.

“I don’t really think anything prepares you for it no matter how many pictures you look at in the police academy,” Teta said of the serious injuries, “…but it’s something that you need to just put out of your mind and just get on with your job and do the best that you can to render the aid.”

Teta and D’Ercole, along with Police Officer Cody Parker, Police Medics Gabrielle Graffeo and Athanasios Metskas — all in the 5th Precinct — as well as doctors, nurses and other staff at SNCH, were honored at the hospital on June 14 for their part in assisting Leroy, whose life was spared, and is now back in his hometown, where he is working with physical therapists to resume an independent life.

“It was extremely overwhelming,” Teta said of being awarded. “I work with fantastic people and I would trust any of these people with my life. …To be able to be honored for saving somebody’s life is probably the biggest honor you could get.”

The recognition came just a few years into Teta’s young policing career. After teaching special education for 10 years, Teta, 37, who grew up in Lynbrook, left her job at Bethpage High School after receiving word from NCPD — she had taken the test to become a police officer in 2007 — and in 2014, she was sworn in.

“It was the best decision that I could have made,” Teta said. “I’m excited to go to work everyday. It’s not the same thing day in and day out. Anything can happen, and that’s exciting to me.”

After being sworn in and completing her training, Teta, along with her sister, Jami DeProspo, a Nassau police officer who Teta called a role model for her, became the first sisters to ever enter the department. Teta was named a detective in January, shortly after helping save Leroy’s life, and serves in the 5th Precinct’s Fifth Squad. The precinct covers areas including Elmont, Valley Stream, Franklin Square, West Hempstead and Lakeview.

“There were two cops in the house, then there was a cop and a detective in the house,” said Teta’s husband, David, a detective in the New York Police Department, as he started to chuckle. “Now there’s two detectives in the house, and she’s already outshining me.”

The couple has gone to Career Day at a BOCES school in Seaford for a few years, where they tell children about law enforcement, and David said that the girls especially become more engaged when his wife is introduced as being in the police force.

“I try and be a mentor for not just young girls but also young men that they can pursue this field…but I think young girls, they’re afraid of it, because it’s such a male-dominated field,” Teta said. “There’s really nothing to be afraid of. You just work with a lot of men.”

There are currently five female detectives in the Fifth Squad out of about 18 total, which Teta said is unusually high. She said she enjoys helping people through community policing, and added that she thinks a more gender-balanced police force is beneficial when dealing with a variety of different people and situations.

Teta, according to her husband, is a role model in more ways than one to her 14-year-old stepdaughter, as well as to complete strangers. David, who has been in the NYPD for 13 years, started a soccer training program for girls out of his Rockville Centre home called Play Like A Girl. All of the trainers, including Teta, who played college soccer at C.W. Post, are female.

“Between my sister-in-law and my wife, I think they have a great chance to really get across and prove you can do anything a guy can do, from sports, all the way through your career,” David said. “And you can do it just as well, if not better.”