Archive for May, 2005
Sunday, May 29th, 2005
There is another dead one.
This one I do remember. Heavy-set, close-cropped hair, vaguely befuddled. He was sentenced to my jail for ten weekends, convicted of possession of controlled substance. I believe his drug of choice was heroin, I don’t remember for sure.
He played me like a cheap xylophone. Seemed like a decent guy. A guy who’d made a mistake, but who realized it, who wanted to get it behind him, get on to the next thing. Worked for a medical service and it was a good job. Decent pay, good benefits. The man was a veteran of the Iraqi war, a medic in the desert, patching together military and civilian alike, anyone who bled and hurt.
I guess he couldn’t find that same help for himself. Or maybe he got lost while looking for it. Or maybe he thought the skag was the help.
Ten weekends and on the ninth, he got nailed. Fourteen and a half pills secreted in his shoes. He swore the pills weren’t for him, that they were for the other inmates, that the other inmates had pressured him into the smuggle. That could be the truth. That could be part of the truth.
Could be bullshit. Like I said, he played me but good.
Said all the right things, did all the right things. Never caused any problems while he was incarcerated. Never gave me grief over the millions of details most inmates give me grief over (food…plumbing…mattresses…jail uniforms…heating…cooling…phones…commissary…innocence…guilt)
The day he got popped for smuggling contraband, he got charged. Went from nearly done with a relatively minor charge to the beginning of a charge that would — no question — land him in prison for at least years. He finished his ninth weekend but couldn’t leave because of the new charge. A day later, he managed to bond out, $100,000 or ten percent cash. His girlfriend brought a bundle of cash to the jail and he went home. A few days later, he was back for his final weekend, no longer saying the right things to me. In fact, no longer talking to me much at all.
Then he was gone, waiting for trial.
A few days ago, he OD’d. I don’t know on what, toxicology hasn’t yet come back from his autopsy. Maybe heroin. Maybe sleeping pills or pain pills.
Two dead now. The man who killed himself after beating an officer into the hospital, and the smuggler. For thirteen months, my first thirteen working at the Sheriff’s Office, nothing like this happened. Now, suddenly, two former inmates are dead in less than a month.
I won’t even try to answer their deaths mean, I have no idea. I’m not even sure what the question actually is. All I know is that these two guys, these two mopes or shitbags or perps or lost souls, whatever you want to call them, are dead and I keep on truckin,’ jailing people, releasing people, warehousing people.
It’s my job.
Posted in Random Thoughts, Weird Things | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005
I can’t remember the man.
I’ve looked at the picture maybe a thousand times. Thick-necked, short-cropped hair. Brown. Eyes too far away to tell the color, and cast sideways anyway. Head slightly down, as though somehow embarrassed to be in this particular picture.
It’s a mug shot.
I didn’t book the man into the jail, but I did deal with him for two days before he made bail, and I can’t remember anything about him. Not his voice, not his smell, nothing. I didn’t even remember what he’d been arrested for.
When I looked up those charges, Saturday’s affair made a bit more sense. Arrested in early March for domestic battery and violating an order of protection.
Two Saturday’s ago, he got arrested again. Driving under the influence. He managed to make bail on the charge before he ever even got to the county jail. A few hours after that, he got arrested again. Violation of an order of protection.
Less than an hour after that, he lay dead, a bullet to the head, his own finger on the trigger.
But before he killed himself, before the Illinois State Police called out their SWAT team and their helicopter, before all the K-9 units in the county came out, before damn near every police officer in Bureau County raced to Spring Valley, before all of that, I heard the scream.
Short, less than a second. Garbled. I couldn’t understand any of it. But somehow as clear as the mythical summer days when I was a kid.
The dispatcher at the Spring Valley police station screamed into the radio, desperately calling for help. At the Sheriff’s Office, we heard that call. More to the point, our dispatcher understood it and immediately ratched up a response.
“10-33,” she radioed to every cop in the county. “Officer down.”
The man, whose face and picture and stay in my jail I can’t remember, had attacked the arresting officer, had savagely beaten him, and then battered his way out of the holding cell. He also managed to snatch the officer’s gun.
He fired once.
We didn’t know until later it was a suicide. At the time, with the single officer at the station covered in blood, with the dispatcher screaming for help, all we knew was there had been a shot.
Bureau County is a small county, only 35,000 people. Spring Valley is our second largest town at about 5,500 people. We are not Chicago or L.A. We are not New York or Miami or even my hometown of Midland, Texas. Our last killing was more than a year ago. Before that, the last had been in the last century. Things like this don’t happen here.
Except they happen everywhere, all the time.
The man I can’t remember had been waiting for transport to my jail. That freaks me out pretty good. Would he have fought with me? Would he have done as much damage? More, maybe?
And yeah, the entire thing scared me…continues to scare me around the edges. Every day I’m in that jail, I do the same thing the Spring Valley officer did. I do all the things he did and he ended up in the hospital. But this is my job and in spite of that ever-present threat, I dig it.
I just wish, as I still sometimes look at his picture, I could remember him. I wish he didn’t so easily disappear into the sea of inmates’ faces.
Posted in Random Thoughts | 2 Comments »
Monday, May 2nd, 2005
White trash swamp meet? White trash flea market, maybe?
This week, in my little town of Princeton, IL, people are going through each other’s trash, pulling what they want, tossing it into their broken-down trucks, their rust-stained station wagons, and taking it home. NO doubt they are spreading it out all over their garage floors and gloating by incandescent lamp light over their treasures.
But perhaps I’m being cynical and mean-spirited. Yeah, that’s probably it.
Every spring, the city allows people to clean out ANYTHING they want: furniture, paint, old oil, tires, swing sets, clothes, whatever. Pile it by the curb, the city says, and we’ll take it away for you. It’s pretty cool, actually. A chance to completely clean out and clean up and all for free. No taking it to the dump yourself, no coughing up a few bucks per car load of crap, no feeling like you’re hurting the environment by tossing out all the shit you never should have bought in the first place.
Instead, let the city do it. Out of sight, out of mind. You’re not actually dumping it, the city is, hence not your garbage, not your environmental problem.
But what makes me laugh, and creeps me out just a little around the edges, is the garbage hunting. Cars literally drive up and down street after street, looking at everything piled in front yards, pouring over everything, every torn shirt or frayed bra, every stained mattress or scratched DVD of Alyssa Milano’s “Embrace of the Vampire.”
Last night, I couldn’t get off the block, couldn’t get past the pile-up in the middle of my block. Two cars parked on their respective sides of the street and between them, a Gremlin (I shit you not) and a Chevy truck, all four side by side, lined up waiting for Evil Knievel to blast his ass over them on that red, white, and blue motorcycle.
I don’t know what those people were looking at, what they were collecting, I simply realized I was stuck in traffic in a town of 7,500. More than that, I was stuck in traffic for TRASH!
LuAnn tells me that Aurora, the ‘burb of Denver where we lived for ten years, did the same thing except the garbage was piled in the alley. Maybe, but I don’t remember it. And I sure as hell don’t remember people staking out piles of garbage like those whack-jobs already standing in line for Star Wars Episode III tickets.
And yeah, I have thought of two, maybe three, different stories, each based on this odd ritual.
Actually, it would make a great scene in the play I’ve always wanted to write: “White Trash Parade of Homes.” Maybe, someday, when I’ve nothing else to do, I’ll write that freakin’ play. But not now, not today or tomorrow or the rest of this week. After all, I’ve got all kinds of new toys sitting on the greasy floor of my garage and I just bought a brand new incandescent bulb. I’ve got some gloating to do.
Posted in Random Thoughts, Weird Things | 12 Comments »
