Liberty County Sheriff’s Patrol Coordinator Lela Holley is the Employee of the Month for October 2018.
“As always, this honor goes to a sheriff’s employee who has demonstrated outstanding qualities and an expertise in his or her work assignment, and this month’s selection could not have been more on target,” said Capt. Ken DeFoor, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office.
According to DeFoor, Holley has a varied and wide range of public service and first responder assignment. She started out as a first responder with a local volunteer fire department, which gave her the opportunity to move on later as a paramedic for an ambulance service.
“As any EMS technician will tell you, after a few years of the strenuous job of lifting people on stretchers into the back of ambulances, it will take a toll on one’s back. Even with all the past medical training to her credit, Holley felt it was time to move on to another calling of becoming a dispatcher with the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office,” he said.
Now a veteran with the sheriff’s office with over 13 years of part-time and full-time dispatcher’s experience where she completed many different classes such as her Masters Communication Certificate, Crisis Communications class and many other such schools, she recently took on a very complex assignment as the Patrol Coordinator and is working out of the Liberty County Annex in Cleveland.
With over 1,000 hours of specialized training, she helps maintain, among other assignments, records for the agency’s environmental deputy as well and records for the LCSO’s gun range coordinator.
In her personal life after raising her two adult children, she is enjoying her off-duty full-time job of raising her young grandson.
“Being able to relate to young children so well was, perhaps, what helped led to Holley getting a great deal of recognition recently when she was a dispatcher and received a 911 call from a young girl who reported that her mother was on the floor and unresponsive. Acting as a cool-headed dispatcher, Holley kept the little girl on the telephone and calming her while deputies searched for the correct location of her home,” DeFoor said. “Holley’s calm demeanor and calmness under pressure ended in a life-saving manner when deputies and Liberty County EMS located the correct home and assisted the unresponsive mother to a full and healthy recovery. This event found Holley appearing on a Houston television show and meeting the little girl and her mother who she helped in their time of very serious medical needs.”