"He was visibly upset, and he was crying a lot," Garcia said. "I just knew that I needed to be very personable."
Garcia and another deputy used crisis intervention training, or CIT, to help stop the teenager from dying by suicide.
The incident is one of many that Garcia said he's experienced in Wake County over the past few years.
In North Carolina, state data shows one child dies by suicide every week. Nearly half of the children had experienced a recent crisis.
"A lot of people have anxiety and some challenges that they're dealing with in their personal life, and that can manifest in a lot of different ways," Roosevelt Richard said.
Richard is a crisis intervention trainer with Alliance Health. He trains first responders in Wake County.
He said there have been a significant number of calls for service from young people that prompted the creation of an additional program specialized in safely responding to young people experiencing a behavioral health crisis.
"We want to give a voice to these young people who are in that type of pain that they can go and reach out to an adult to try to help them get connected to whatever resource is available to them," Richard said.
For Garcia, he said the training helped and encouraged more mental health resources to be offered.
"This was the first time I've really been in a position where I'm the only one there, and I had to act quickly," Garcia said. "We really just have to take all of this out of the picture and just be as personable as possible, and talk to them, and offer them the resources that they need and just be there for them in that moment."
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