Trey R. Barker – Official Website and Blog

CopStories: “…might not be here.”

“Dispatch.”

“Go ahead, 30.”

“Traffic stop. We’re on Route 6, headed west. “  I remember pausing and waiting for the car to pull over.  “Hmmm, not really sure where we’re going to pull over.  Hang on.”

I had noticed her just a few minutes earlier when I realized her car was on the wrong side of the road.  I turned on my camera, thinking I might have a DUI, and began to follow.  She came back to her lane and stayed there, though she was bouncing off the fog line and center line.  So I lit her up to see what the problem was.

She never stopped.

“30?”

“Not yet, dispatch,” I answered.

After more than a mile – at a terrifically slow speed – I blasted her with my air horn.

Nothing.

So then I hit the siren horn.  A short honk.

Nothing.

“30?”

“Hang on, dispatch.”

With lights going, I cranked up my siren and just let it go until, another mile down the road, she noticed me.  She pulled over immediately and I told dispatch where I was.

When I got to the car, she looked at me with eyes marked by endless mileage.  She stared at me hard, though not unkindly.  Mostly, she just looked tired.

“Oh, Officer, what did I do?  I was thinking about something else and…I just…what did I do?”  Her voice broke a little as she looked away.

“Well, ma’am, you were in the other lane a little.  I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

When she looked back, her eyes were full of gratitude.  “Thank you so much.  I just -  Thank you.  My legs.  It’s – ”

It was then I noticed how red her left eye was.  Not red from crying, not red from rubbing, but a deep, bloody red inside her eye.

“Ma’am?” I said, shocked.  “Are you okay?”

She sighed and the intensity of it shook her entire car.  “No.  I have some problems.  I have surgery Tuesday.  On my legs.  It’s -   No.”

We talked a little about surgery and I pointed out the giant scar running the right side of my neck.  Her eyes got pretty big as I traced the length of the thing from the top of my ear to the middle of my neck.

“But you are okay?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t think I will be.”  When she looked at me this time, there were tears standing in her eyes.  “I don’t think I’ll make it.  I might not be here.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be – ”

She shook her head.  “No, I won’t make it.”

I was stunned. What could I say?  What is there to say when someone is that absolutely convinced of a mortality that isn’t some abstract construct years in the future?  It’s not a matter of facing death at the end of a lifetime.  This woman was at the end of that life, being 86 years old.  It wasn’t abstract or theoretical for her.  It was next week.  It was a week away and all I could think about was how she was counting it.

By the week?  Her last week?

By the days, maybe?  Seven days…six days?

Or maybe something more odd.  Maybe she was counting hours at 168 left.

Unable to say anything remotely approaching intelligent, I asked her about getting home and told her I’d be glad to give her a ride if she needed.  Smiling, but with tears staining her cheeks, she shook her head and said she was fine.

I wished her well and immediately felt like an ass for doing it, and let her go.  I watched her drive away as my Lieutenant, who’d been in the area, arrived.

“Thought we might have a pursuit,” he said.  “I’ve got some stop sticks.”

I don’t remember what I said to him, I’m sure it was something stupid because I couldn’t get my mind off that woman. She was heading home, maybe to family but maybe not, and she’d wait for the next seven days.  Then she’d go into surgery and know, when the fucking anesthetist put that goddamned mask over her face that that could well be the last sight she’d see.  Not family, not friends, not an old lover who made her tingle, but a face hidden behind a mask.

I found myself hoping they gave her something before she went into the OR.  Grind it up in her Wheaties or her prune juice.  Just let her fall peacefully asleep looking out the window or talking to her daughter or husband or best friend.  Just don’t let it be someone behind a mask.

Death is the big piss off for me.  I hate everything about it.  I am not convinced there is anything afterward so it just seems like a big damn waste to me.  Worse, we know it’s coming.  Because we are sentient (most of us, anyway), we live with death hanging over every moment and it drives me bugfuck.

But worse than the concept is the reality.  I don’t want to know it’s coming someday and I sure as hell don’t want to know it’s coming now.

Fuck that.

That woman, who I pulled over because she wasn’t driving particularly well, was facing my greatest fear: to know it’s coming.

Look, maybe she’s wrong.  Maybe she’ll get through the surgery just fine.  But she knows she’s elderly and it’s an invasive surgery and the elderly don’t always do so well, at the time or in the immediate afterward.

Either way, she was facing a nasty possibility with entirely more grace than I’ll be able to muster if I find myself in that same situation.  Yes, she was crying.  Yes, she was distracted. But I’d be raging and howling like a low-rent Allen Ginsberg.

She, on the other hand, had simply nodded, given my hand a slow squeeze, smiled as well as she could, and driven away.

That was that.  She was in my life, she was out of my life.

Random Thoughts: Notice the shoes….

Way back in the old days, I was part of the band that backed up my high school choir’s ‘pop’ group.  The band was called Origin and one of the guitar players recently dug up a picture of us from Prom in 1983.  Yeah, this was the same prom where the administrators let us play ‘Cocaine,’ but wouldn’t let us sing ‘Cocaine.’  So as a giant middle finger to said administrators, we played our 20 minute blues-jam version of it.  Now, you know the song…imagine it twenty minutes long…with no vocals.  Yeah, exactly.  What the hell were we thinking.

Anyway, enjoy the picture (I’m da one with the drumstix and already trying to work the semi-combover)

…uh…what?

“Does your head get cold when it’s shiny?”

I was stunned silent, Dr Pepper in one hand, donut (I swear it really was a donut) in the other.

“My cousin told me if it’s shiny, it doesn’t get as cold.”

– a random man in a convenience store today, while I was on-duty.

* * *

“Hell, if I’d known he had a warrant, I wouldn’t'a been speeding.”

- a driver I stopped for speeding.  One of his passengers had an arrest warrant out of another county.

CopStories: Mr. Sun, I’d like to introduce Deputy Barker

And so I’m done with nights.

Twenty months and beginning tomorrow morning, I’m back on days.  Back to seeing the sunshine and daytime traffic and people moving about and businesses open and all the rest of it…the rest of it being cow calls.  So many cow calls….  Part of going to nights was the  the excitement of knowing I was going to trade cows for drunks.

Not so much.  I traded cows for…mostly nothing, which drove me batty.

Don’t get me wrong.  I enjoyed much of my time on nights.  I learned quite a lot, proved a point to a couple of people, tried to  prove a point to a couple of other people who weren’t paying attention, and got a few DUIs.  It was fun.

But it was also tough.  I have a newfound respect for those men and women who work nights long-term.  Some do it because it works best for their marriage (either staying away from, or getting together with, spouses), some do it because that’s what works best for babysitting their kids.

Some do it because they love nights.

Yeah, piss on that.

I worked 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and I’m not the kind of guy who can sleep all day.  So I’d get home, put in a couple hours sleep, then get up, try and muddle through a few hours of getting chores and homework done, then collapse back into bed for two or three hours before getting up to go to work.

I’ve spent the better part of 20 months lethargic.

Ooooh, great, just what you want from a man carrying a gun for a living.

So now I’m back to seeing the sun but there are things I’ll never forget about my time on nights.

First and foremost, fighting with a PCP drunk for control of my gun.  And being amazed later when I realized it had been his mother who took him – in the wee hours of the morning – to his former girlfriend’s house because she thought the two needed to talk.  Okay, your kid is drunk, he’s high on PCP, he’s angry that she broke up with him, it’s early in the morning…what in hell makes you think this is a good idea?  Actually, I can’t prove Mama drove baby boy to the squeeze’s house because through the entire case, she refused to speak.

I won’t soon forget the man speeding down an icy highway at better than 80 miles an hour.  Two sons in the car, said he was late for a basketball game, and that the roads weren’t that bad.  Less than two hours later, there was a major accident at the EXACT spot where I’d stopped him.  So violent was the accident that one of the drivers had to be LifeFlighted immediately to Peoria.

And what about the college graduate who was so lost and so anxious about it she was throwing up?  Following a GPS that had all the roads, but not all the road construction.  She’d gotten lost in a loop of three different highways and just kept going around and around and around, sort of like an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  She had just finished school but had never been beyond her home state of South Dakota and so, apparently, had no idea what to do if lost…or that the world didn’t always conform to her GPS.

But maybe the biggest eye opening I had on nights was a DUI I got early on.  Had I known at the time that the arrestee was part of the rich and powerful set, who knows how I would have handled it.  As it was, I didn’t know she was ’somebody’ until later so I treated her like I treat everyone.

The problem was, she wasn’t everyone and didn’t believe she should be treated that way.  She believed she should be left alone.  As soon as she bonded out of jail (bailed by an attorney who showed up drunk to get her) she allegedly started making phone calls to the tall end of the food chain.  Everything after that was about getting her out of the trouble.

She took her suspension, then fought it, then took it.  Then she was going to plead guilty, then decided to go to trial, then argued illegal stop when, in fact, I had never made a traffic stop (I made contact with her on her front porch).  At trial, she had her drunk husband, as well as another well known local drunk, and the bartender (whose wife she’d just hired at her bank two weeks before) all testify for her.

What struck me most about the entire case was how badly no one wanted to touch it, but couldn’t do anything else. To have dropped it completely would have meant admitting there are at least two classes of justice in the county.  So it had to go to trial and everyone had to play the stage drama of searching for ‘justice.’

If there had been real justice, then the witnesses who lied for her on the stand would have gotten hammered.  Their lies contradicted the other witnesses and her husband (buzzed on the stand) contradicted himself four or five times within his own testimony and no one – defense attorney, prosecuting attorney, judge – said dick about it.

But I don’t think I’m overly bitter about it.  After all, she had to live with the six month suspense and who knows how many thousands it cost her to buy the attorney.  Petty victory, I know, but it’s all I got out of that one.

There were other things: the fire department that refused to put out the fire, the homeless guy who tried to ‘mistakenly’ steal my duty jacket, the Cook County deputies who refused to let me pick up a prisoner in spite of my marked squad car and uniform.

But mostly there was boredom.  Night after night, two hundred miles a night of empty roads and quiet towns and closed businesses.  Entire nights would crawl by and I would have nothing: no traffic, no calls, no fights, no accidents.

And for that entire twenty months? Only a single cow call.

Welcome back to days, Deputy, bring on the cows.

Random Thoughts

“Stop touching me or I’ll tell Daddy.  Stop touching me!  Daddy, he won’t stop touching me!”

“Well, what do you want me to do about that?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t know.  Uh…I don’t know.”

CopStories: Giving Bad Paper

So I’m out the other night serving papers.  It’s part of what Sheriff’s Offices do: serve official court papers.  Warrants and body attachments and summonses(es)(es) and various official whatnot.

Sometimes those papers are divorce papers and sometimes those papers are summons’ for paternity tests.

Knockknockknock

Guy comes to the door.  “Yeah?’

“Good evening, I’m looking for James B – ”

He stares at me and I can see the wheels turning.  He’s thinking, should I lie?  Should I tell this copper he ain’t here?

Quickly, I say, “I just need to give him this paper.  No biggie.”

When I see people edging into panic, I’ll let them know there’s nothing to panic about.  I try to diffuse the situation with a joke or a shrug and snarky comment about too many court papers.  It usually does the trick.

“Oh,” he says.  “That’s my brother.  Hang on, let me get him.”

“Good enough,” I say.

And then I wait.  It’s dark and cold but the wind’s not bad.  And then I wait some more and I’m thinking: the house ain’t that big.  It’s not like you had to go to the North Forty to get him.  And I wait some more, and now I’m listening for voices around the side of the house.  Maybe he thinks I’m lying and he’s slipping out the backway or something.

Then an attractive woman comes to the door, trailed by a sweet-looking five or six year old.

“Hi,” she says, “I’m James B’s wife.  Can I help you.”

I almost choked.

See, the paper I had wasn’t an arrest warrant or court summons or notice of a lawsuit.

Can we say ‘P-a-t-e-r-n-i-t-y?’

Not for child support, but a paternity test.  To decide if James B – was actually the father of a kid born last May.  See, the mother, according to the court papers, wasn’t sure if the babby daddy was James B – or some other dude.

Ouch.

But not fatal.  I’ve dealt with stuff like this before and it’s been awkward but not terrible because the wives/girlfriends/current baby mama had gotten the paper in the mail and knew what was up.

Uh…yeah…not this time.

As I was getting her information for the court worksheet, she read the first page.

I have to give her credit, she kept her composure pretty well.  Her breathing sped up, her eyes grew, her hand clenched the paper. She didn’t yell, didn’t scream, didn’t blast into the bedroom with a butcher knife, ready to Bobbit him.  But when the little daughter asked a question about Sponge Bob Square Pants or some shit, Mama did almost come unglued.

It was pretty obvious Mama didn’t know there might be another Mama.

And while it was sort of humorous, it was also painful.  I could, through the expressions and micro-expressions on her face, see her entire marriage begin to crumble.  She hadn’t been expecting anything like this.  Even if she’d had suspicions that her husband was flinging his seed elsewhere, she probably didn’t let it crowd the front of her brain.  Now this thing was shoving its way into her life…and at the hands of a deputy, no less.

“Is there anything else?” she asks, her voice only barely controlled.

“No, ma’am, that’s all I need.”

“Thank you.”  Her grin was more gritted teeth than anything, but again, I’ll give her credit for trying.

“Thank you.  Have a good – uh…bye.”

And I was gone.

I called the local PD and told a friend of mine to watch the address for a while because I was pretty sure there was going to be a domestic  of some sort.  It was funny and we joked about the wake-up call he was going to get and everything was fine, but it was still tough.

There was still that hurt wife and a little girl who was going to have no idea what the hell was going on.

Interestingly enough, there actually was a domestic a few doors down from that address just a couple hours later.  But I never heard a peep out of that address.

So either he took the ass-chewing he probably deserved, or she straight up killed him and we won’t find him for a while.

Either way….

Off-Duty CopStories: It’s the Mirror

The mirror was the main thing.

I’d been asleep about an hour when LuAnn got a panicked call from a relative.  Her son, Harry S, was missing.  He’s a late 20’s man and so that wasn’t necessarily a problem.

But the gun was.  And the talk of suicide.  And shooting up his apartment.

I called three different police agencies to try and find him.  And to let them know he was depressed, off his meds, and he might not listen to their instructions to put down the weapon.

But I didn’ t think the cops would find him.  In my darkest moments, I thought we’d find him, along with the brother and father he didn’t get along with so well, in a bloodbath at the farm.

Saturday night he’d shot up his apartment.  Killed the TV and the mirror while his roommate stood by stunned.  But Harry S hadn’t attempted to kill himself.  Though he’d said he wanted to, he hadn’t put the gun against his head, hadn’t pulled the trigger, hadn’t thought – while the bullet was whistling through the barrel – that he shouldn’t have done it.

Sunday morning, he raced to his father’s farm, snatched his father’s gun, and tried to wake the man up to get the bullets.  His father – no doubt sleeping off a booze blast from the night before – later said Harry S had absolutely been suicidal.

Sunday night, Harry S slept in his car in the machine shed at the farm.  His brother and father slept in the house and this is what makes me absolutely purple with rage.  They knew he was suicidal so they let him sleep in the goddamned barn.  Didn’t call anyone to ask about crisis intervention, didn’t think to let his mother know what was up.

Monday morning, his mother was out of her mind with worry because who knows where her son is and she’s beginning to hear there was some sort of problem Saturday night.  She calls us and we go to work trying to find him.

Eventually the cops found him at his apartment and he was safe.  They charged with a few misdemeanor counts related to the gun, but refused to leave him at the apartment.  The Lt. I talked to said, “He has some issues, Trey.  I couldn’t leave him alone.”

Then we started looking for treatment centers.  He suffers from depression, I think, but also a bit too much of the beer, as well as physiological problems related to a head injury from a motorcycle crash a few years ago.  Welcome to the American Health Care System.  He had no insurance so he got most basic treatment after the crash.  Put him back together and shove him out the door.

No follow up, no long term care, nothing.  Yeah, he couldn’t afford it, I get that, but now he’s a much larger drain on society because three separate police agencies, a State’s Attorney’s Office, a Public Defender’s Office, a Victim’s Advocate’s Office, a Judge and his staff, the circuit court system, and a treatment center are all spending time and money on his case.

Seems like it would have been easier to fix him right the first time.

I managed to see him for a few minutes at my jail.  He came out of the holding cell bleary-eyed and looking confused and embarrassed.  He turned away from me at first, then seemed to emotionally cling to me.

“You okay?”

He shrugged.  “I guess.”

“You wanna go home?”

I asked not to be a smart ass, which is my usual mode, but because I genuinely wasn’t sure where he wanted to go or where his head was.  I believed it possible he’d rather stay in jail where he was at least safe from shooting himself and might get a little medical attention.

“Yeah, I think I do.”

I nodded and gave him a terrorist fist jab.  “All right, then. LuAnn will be here in a while.”

He nodded, a relieved look on his face, and stumbled back to the holding cell.

Then I went across the street and talked to the State’s Attorney.   I explained what had happened and how we were getting him into treatment for his problems and how he’d never had a legal problem before and on and on.  I did not – and will not – ask for any special treatment.  But I have no problem at all asking for first time offender treatment.  He committed the crimes and should be popped for them, especially for firing a gun in an apartment.  But Al Capone he ain’t.

The State’s Attorney told me to me keep him posted and we’d see what happened.  As vague as it was, that was about the best I could hope for.

He stayed at our house that night and slept better than he had in weeks and the next morning, his mother took him to treatment.  They admitted him, said instantly they could tell he was on the wrong meds (which sort of didn’t matter since he wasn’t taking them regularly…and was drinking when he did), and added that they wanted to do some testing of the motorcycle injury to his head.

In other words, they wanted to treat the whole problem.  For the first time in years, someone wanted to take a look at the entire mess that is Harry S and see if the can de-mess-ify him.

I have no idea if Harry S is going to be fine.  He might be dead next week.  Or he might be in school, concentrating on learning how to weld.  But simply being able to take a breath and have someone take a look is a new and different and positive step for him.

His father never lifted a fucking finger.  His father, when we called him Monday morning, couldn’t  have been less interested.  When we called him Monday night, he was actually at a party of some sort, drinking himself into oblivion.

And I never heard from his brother.

Why are LuAnn and I working our assess of to help him while his family fiddles and watches the fire?

And yet the thing I keep coming back to is the mirror. It got shot up, along with the TV, in the Saturday Night Massacre.  But it didn’t get hit accidentally.  It didn’t get sprayed with bullets while Harry S was firing and spinning around the room like a two-bit gangster.

It got hit when he was staring at it.  He shot it because he didn’t like what he saw in it.

Pack Up The UHaul, Raheem!

Part of an actual conversation about using Thomson prison in Illinois for terrorist suspects….

“Well, it’ll get ugly when the families start moving here,” he said.

“What families?” I asked.

“Of them…of the guys.”

“Of the detainees?”

“It’s happened before,” he said.

“The families of the Gitmo detainees will move…from Pakistan…to Thomson?” I asked, incredulous.

“You’ll see.”

This was his entire argument.  Nary a thought that most Pakistani families, terrorist related or not, can’t afford indoor plumbing, much less the cost of a 7,000 mile move, or that families of anyone considered a terrorist and held at Gitmo are probably on a list somewhere and thus banned from entering the U.S.  This is why terrorist suspects can’t be moved to Illinois…because the families will start moving in.  Damn them!  As a clever cover, they’ll buy houses and go to school and trim the lawns in the summer.  And three times a week, they’ll go to the little ol’ prison at the end of the street to visit their family member…and plot to blow our shit up!

Look, there might well be legitimate arguments for not bringing Gitmo detainees to the U.S., but this heaping, steaming pile of crap ain’t it.

…uh…what?

“Mark is cool…Standard is ghetto.”

Said by a local ER nurse.

Okay, it’s probably not funny to the 99% of you who have no idea that Mark and Standard are tiny, tiny, tiny, did I mention tiny hamlets near here.  They are in a county that another ER nurse, who lives in Mark, calls ‘Hazzard County,’ which makes me laugh my ass off.  Mark and Standard are both the kinds of places that have a population of about 24…counting all major cats and dogs, and the kind of place where, when you roll in, you hear the Deliverance banjos.  So to differientiate by saying one is ghetto is hilarious…at least to me.

Random Tantrum

Waaaaaa!  Waaaaaaahhaaaaaaa!

It’s my chair!  Mine mine mine!  You can’t sit there – waaaaaaa!  It’s mine mine mine.

Waaaaaa – huh?  Oh, I’m so sleepy.  It’s time for my nap.