By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times

TAMPA — At first glance, it’s a typical office with more than a dozen cubicles under florescent lights. The operators wear headsets and stare into computer screens, some tinkering with handheld toys, others browsing Facebook or chatting with colleagues when the phones go quiet. The faint sound of tapping keyboards is nearly constant.

Then a burst of classical music plays — loudly — and the energy in the room goes still.

Along the cubicles, their eyes shift to one another until someone speaks up.

“I got it,” says Taylor Turosz.

The musical ringtone carries a particular urgency — that a call from the National Suicide Prevention Hotline has been routed here, to the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay. The center also handles a half-dozen other hotlines dealing with sexual assault, veterans issues and substance abuse, among other topics, but suicide calls take priority.

Suddenly, Turosz is talking to a man who says he’s holding a loaded gun. His sister just died; now he wants to die too.

Turosz pulls her knees up to her chest in the rolling office chair. She tucks a long strand of red hair behind her ear. The rings on her fingers clink against the keys as she takes notes, the letters on the screen spelling trouble on the other end of the line.

He felt like people are better off without him. He’s very distraught.

“Where are you now?” Turosz asks him more than once.

She speaks softly, calmly, maternally. But most of the time, Turosz, a 27-year-old University of South Florida student, just listens.

“I can hear that you’re really upset,” she tells him. “I want to understand what’s going on around you.”

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