Archive for the ‘CopStories’ Category
Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010
“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.
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Sunday, January 31st, 2010
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.
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Saturday, January 16th, 2010
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….
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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
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.
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Friday, December 18th, 2009
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.
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Saturday, December 12th, 2009
Dear Mr. C -
I wanted to take a moment and touch base with you to say – again – how glad I am you didn’t have a crash last night. Yes, I know, you were quite annoyed when I stopped you. It was evident from your heavy sighing, your angry glare, and the way you subtly denigrated me to your two young boys.
It was also evident from the fact that, for the first part of our little dance, you chose not to stop. While I can’t prove it, I do believe you sped up from the 83 miles an hour at which I clocked you to something closer to 90 miles an hour. Always a smart choice for night driving on a roadway dotted with ice. And while you said you never saw my flashing red and blues, the way you passed the car in front of you and then stayed close to that car was quite intriguing. Hoping I would lose your taillights in their lights, perhaps?
But, eventually, you did stop, and you were righteous in your belief that the roads weren’t that bad; that the ice you’d just driven over, along the guard rail bridge on the north edge of one of our small towns, was inconsequential.
Let me tell you a little story.
Less than two hours after you went blasting over that ice and got pissy with me for stopping you, another woman went over that same exact ice. She was headed south, exactly as you had been, and was less than a mile north of where I stopped you.
But this time, the ice wasn’t negligible. This time, in a car larger and heavier than yours, the ice caught her. She fish-tailed three or four times, then spun 180 degrees.
Directly into the path of another car.
This woman’s car hit the second car head-on. With such force that the woman’s hood was ripped away and tossed nearly 100 yards, which I didn’t realize until my entire team began to gather up the hundreds of pieces of broken car scattered along the highway and throughout the nearby yards.
She was transported to the local hospital.
The other driver, a man, wasn’t quite so lucky.
His car basically exploded on impact. Instead of gouts of fire lighting the sky, there was metal and plastic, glass, airbags, and too much blood. His car careened off the roadway and into a field. For a few minutes, I was unsure if I was handling another fatality (which would have been my second in roughly a week…that one having been caused by speed…you know, sort of like what you were doing) or just a massive personal injury accident.
In fact, I was unable to tell with any certainty until the firemen managed to cut the top off the man’s car. Have you ever seen a car top peeled back to reveal the bloody mess inside?
And yet, that wasn’t enough. To get the man out, crews had to cut the passenger door off.
He was so badly injured – though still alive – that we didn’t even bother transporting him to the hospital. We air-lifted him directly to a larger hospital in Peoria. We air-lifted him, in fact, directly from the scene. Ever seen a life-flight helicopter land at a grain elevator? Or would you have been driving too fast along that stretch of the highway to have seen it?
And let me ask you this: have you ever stood toe to toe with a wife and had to tell her that, to the best of your knowledge, her husband wasn’t dead, just quite badly fucked up? No, I’m sure you haven’t because you have been too focused on getting to your basketball games.
This woman, who had been looking forward to having her husband home for the night, was actually on the phone with him when the accident happened. She heard him talking, then screaming, then the nightmare of metal against metal.
But you’re right, the roads weren’t too bad, as least that’s what you told me in front of your two sons; as though saying that somehow magically ameliorated the fact that you were driving nearly 30 miles over the limit at night (a limit, let’s remember, designed for decent weather and clear roads…neither of which we had when I stopped you).
Oh, I almost forgot. You were going a minimum of 83 miles an hour. The eyewitness I had to the crash said the driver who lost control was going less than 40, the second driver about 50.
Hmmm…I wonder what 83 miles an hour, in a skid and then a multiple rollover, would do to young bodies such as your sons’. I wonder if there would even be anything left of them to even really have a funeral.
It is my job to save you, Mr. C -, even if that means saving you from yourself. So if I inconvenienced you by holding you up on your way to a fucking basketball game, good. If I pissed you off by writing you a ticket that’ll cost you $95, good. And if I managed to stumble on to saving you and your sons’ lives, then that’s good, too.
Sincerely,
Deputy Trey R. Barker
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Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
September 30, 2008
We keep fighting, the five of us.
Scotty tries to curl into a ball to protect the gun deep in his chest. We try to pull him open so we can get the gun. The magazine, loaded with 13 rounds, has popped out and disappeared, but still there is a round in the chamber.
I hold on as tightly as I can. If I let go, he’ll be able to turn and shoot. I imagine him climbing off his mother, shaking off his father and the girlfriend’s uncle as though they were pesky bugs. I imagine him leveling the gun and firing. I imagine that single round going not into my chest because he knows we wear vests, but elsewhere. Neck. Head. Face. Femoral artery.
So I hang on to his back, my hands on that gun. At one point, he starts banging his head backward, trying to head butt me. I tuck down tighter so he can’t get to me.
And I hang on.
Fucking forever.
And I’ll go longer than that if I need to. If stalemate is the best I can do until help arrives, then that’s what I’ll do.
Then, almost magically, the gun squirts out. It clatters along the floor and I’m not sure anyone realizes what’s happened. A second later, the girlfriend’s uncle snatches the gun up and runs outside. I don’t know until half an hour later he locked the gun in his truck and then came back to keep fighting.
At that moment, I don’t care. At that moment, with the Glock 21 danger gone, I have a new focus. Now I have to fight him like I’ve been trained. Now I have to get him into cuffs.
But now he can fight back.
I immediately tag him with the OC spray. The entire can. It has no effect, unable to cut through the PCP and booze haze. At one point, Scotty plays at eating the gel, and laughing, while I spray him.
I use the baton. A three foot chunk of metal. Against soft tissue – thighs and biceps and ass. I hit and hit and still he fights.
I punch and punch and still he fights.
I twist and yank and kick and gouge and still he fights.
And then, quietly and anticlimactically, he stops.
He stares at me, his face stained orange from the OC spray.
“I’m done, Trey.”
Months Later
In the months after, the cops all talk about it again, but now they’re angry and righteous.
Scotty has been offered a deal.
If he pleads guilty, he’ll only have to suck down seven years.
That’s it. Seven years for two counts of domestic battery, one count of disarming a peace officer, one count of aggravated battery of a peace officer, and one count of resisting.
He’s eligible for better than 20 years.
He’s offered seven.
I’d spent quite a few hours talking with the victim’s advocate. Not because I considered myself a victim, though the advocate did, but because she let me rant and rave as long as I needed. I ranted about everything. I questioned whether or not law enforcement was for me. I wondered how I could have handled the call better…a different approach to the house? A different response in the house? More hands on deck before I even get to the house? (This question burned me because my partner had specifically asked if I wanted help and I’d said no.) More force? Less force? I hollered on and on about his mother, who had driven him to the girlfriend’s house. I squealed like stuck pig about my radio not working.
But mostly I ranted about the defenses Scotty’s attorney kept throwing up.
The first was involuntary intoxication. In other words, he didn’t know the cigarettes he smoked had been doused with either PCP or formaldehyde. Problem with that was he’d been smoking marijuana cigarettes and if you’re illegally intoxicating yourself, then you can’t really argue someone did something illegal to you.
Then there was general intoxication. He was so drunk he didn’t know what he was doing. The problem is that drunk ain’t no defense. In fact, in front of the right judge, it can be aggravation rather than mitigation.
Then there was what I like to think of as the ‘Good Samaritan’ defense. What happened, see, was that the officer, see, dropped his gun, and I – Scotty – was simply helping him pick it back up. See? Of course, that doesn’t answer why he fought for twelve minutes, including four or five minutes after he dropped the gun. Doesn’t explain why he didn’t just drop the gun on the floor when he realized what was happening.
Then there was the final defense in which he said he was too mentally unstable to appreciate or understand his actions. The problem here is that this county’s judicial system has been dealing with him for better than ten years. He’s not crazy, he’s a fucking idiot, and everyone knows it. It’s why his mother works so hard to blame someone else. Also, this defense stumbled after Scotty answered fairly complex legal questions perfectly when asked by the judge.
Then it was time for trial, which he was prepared to face until I went back to a retirement home, more than a year after the incident, and talked to some witnesses.
“He was drunk,” they all said. “And he was threatening people.”
September 30, 2008
Before the former girlfriend’s parent’s house, there is the retirement home. The former girlfriend works there and an angry Scotty needs to talk to her. He walks in, though it’s supposed to be a secure facility. He demands to see her, though she’s already fled because he’s called a number of times earlier and said he was coming for her. He wanders the halls until just before the local police show up. When they arrive, he’s gone. A couple of hours later, he arrives at the former girlfriend’s house.
After I get him cuffed, he offers a few more kicks but they’re half-hearted. His mother is on me immediately, telling me he’s only drunk, not stoned. Telling me he doesn’t need jail, he needs help. Telling me he thought I was going to kill him.
When I ask her how she knows all this, because I’ve been with him since the fight started and she’s not talked to him at all, she withdraws and spends the rest of the night staring at me with daggers.
My partner arrives. He takes custody of Scotty. Scotty says, “Trey, don’t let him take me, he hates me.”
Later, my partner tells me my response is, “I don’t give a fuck.”
I don’t remember. I remember very little of the after. I remember standing in front of my sergeant, my hands shaking and trying not to throw up on his boots and asking him over and over where my gun was and him continually pointing out it was in my holster.
I remember yelling at him that Scotty should be dead.
I remember him pulling me away from the house and telling me to quit talking and just breathe.
I remember one of the officers on scene, who I don’t know, finding the knife. It was a four inch paring knife, partially broken, and not even in the kitchen. Scotty had never touched it while I was at the house.
In other words, Scotty had never had deadly force while I’d been with him.
I remember laughing hysterically over that fucking knife. Staring at this tiny, little, broken, dull knife and realizing I’d almost killed a man because of it.
One Year Later
Finally, it’s all over. It’s a closed case so now I can write about it.
Scotty took a deal for ten years rather than go to trial.
I’m good with that. Should have been longer but could have been shorter so I’ll take the split.
I was in Indianapolis when I heard, attending a writers’ convention. In fact, I was with an investigator for the Florida Department of Investigations, both of us being tourists at the Indianapolis Speedway when I got a text message about Scotty’s sentence.
He’ll be inside for four of the ten years, which means out in three since he’s already done a year in county.
Seems like not very much time for what he did to those people but what do I know, I’m not an attorney or a judge. But I can promise this: when he’s free, he’ll get stoned and drunk again and he’ll hurt someone.
He’s had twenty five years of listening to his mother tell him his troubles are someone else’s fault, usually law enforcement. He knows nothing else and so lives his life under that guiding principle: that whatever he does is okay because if it goes south, it ain’t his fault.
He’s escalating. Not like a serial killer, but like a repeat loser with zero prospects in life. Every time law enforcement deals with him, he’s slightly more violent. On the street or in custody, it doesn’t matter. More violent. More violent.
It will continue this way until he kills himself or until someone else – cop or victim – kills him.
The question is how many people will he kill before he’s done and will Mama still say it was someone else’s fault?
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Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Days Later
We’re still talking about it, the deputies and I.
They ask me the logistics of what happened and they wonder if it’s too soon for bad jokes. I’m good with the jokes. It helps cover my anger.
Their talk is my therapy.
My partner and I, together with my dispatcher, try to piece together exactly how long the fight lasted. At the Academy, they tell recruits most fights last less than 30 seconds. Bad fights go two or three minutes. Terrible fights go upwards of five minutes.
We figure out, in the days afterward, that my fight with Scotty lasted the better part of twelve minutes.
September 30, 2008
He’s on the far side of the kitchen. Then he’s directly in front of me. The stink of booze is large and foul on his breath and his eyes are hard on mine. I realize then why he didn’t recognize me.
He’s not there.
His body comes at me but no one is home. Utterly vacant.
“Scotty? No, no. Stay back, stay back.”
As he’s coming, his mother screaming at him to stop, he raises his hands and my finger slips into the trigger guard.
I’m sure I’m going to see the flash of a hunting knife.
So this, then, is what I’m going to do. I’m going to shoot him in the chest twice…maybe three times…until he’s no longer a threat. I can’t let him kill us. I can’t let him stab me and take my gun. If he gets it, he’ll kill everyone. Me first and then the girlfriend’s parents and uncle. Then his parents. Then he’ll torture the girlfriend with rantings about how much he loves her and just wants to be with her and why did she have to break up with him. Then he’ll kill their kids, maybe doing them first in order to terrorize her, maybe doing her first and then cleaning up the loose ends.
Then he’ll kill himself and when my back up arrives, they’ll find ten bodies.
I’m raising the Glock 21 and I’m ready to go. This is what I have to do. Deadly force with deadly force.
But in the moment before he reaches me across that yellowed kitchen floor, I realize his hands are empty.
There is no knife. At least not here, not now.
I start to reholster.
Scotty slams into me and then we’re falling to the floor and my Glock is not in my holster and it’s not in my hand.
We hit the kitchen floor and his mother is beneath him, trying to squeeze him tightly to her chest. Trying to keep him from moving, I realize. Scotty’s father is trying to hold one of his arms. The girlfriend’s uncle is trying to hold the other.
And I’m on top, my cheek pressed to his back, trying like hell to get my hands between him and his mother.
I’m trying to get my Glock 21 back.
Scotty has taken it from me and has one hand wrapped around the butt, one hand around the barrel. He’s having a hard time manipulating it because his mother is hanging on to him so terribly tightly.
I get my hands on the weapon and try to yank him free of it. But when I pull his right hand, I realize his finger is wrapped around the trigger. If I yank too hard, he’ll squeeze off a round and someone will die.
So I try to turn the gun. I try to get the barrel pointed as much as I can toward Scotty. If that goddamned thing goes off, I want Scotty to be the only one dead.
Weeks Later
Everyone has given statements.
Except Scotty and his parents. They refuse to talk and I understand. His mother doesn’t want to make it worse for her son.
But she did speak to me in the moments immediately after, when I was coming off the adrenaline dump, confused and shaking and boiling in my own anger. She said, “He’s not on drugs, he’s just drunk,” and “He doesn’t need jail, he needs help.”
Even then, it feels like Mama is prepping Scotty’s defense.
The other deputies and I don’t talk about the incident so much in the weeks after. Thus is law enforcement. Something else comes along and becomes the newest item of discussion.
But I want to talk about it. I want to talk about the white-hot acid anger burning me from the inside out. I’m enraged at Scotty for putting me in that position. I’m enraged that his mother drove her intoxicated son to his former girlfriend’s house at 3 in the morning and thought it a good idea.
If I can talk to someone, I can bleed out some of that anger.
But also I can decide whether or not I did the right thing. That’s the thought that plagues me for weeks after.
Should I have fired? Should I have fought? Did I fight the best way? Did I use the right training and tactics? Or was it a street fight with no fucking rules because he had my gun and that trumps everything?
Some deputies say straight up I should have killed him, that there was more than enough justification to shoot. Others refuse to take a stand because they weren’t there and say they don’t know what I was facing.
It’s pretty simple, really. I faced nothing but fear.
And a drunk man high on PCP (allegedly, though Scotty has never admitted it ‘officially’).
Nothing but the worst fear of my entire life. There was a drop in my belly and white noise in my head and my vision was nothing but Scotty even as my knees went weak and my own bile choked me.
But when he slammed into me and took my gun and we fell to the floor, I had only one thought: get that gun back. Whatever it takes, get that gun back.
Most deputies don’t want to talk about what happened, though one came to my house within hours to make sure I was okay. The entire incident scared some deputies while others were bored with it and one or two were jealous it happened to me and not them.
But in the weeks after, my dispatcher, my partner, and I still talk about it. We talk about the girlfriend’s phone call.
A few minutes into the fight, when the magazine had popped out of the scrum and suddenly I was worried about one bullet rather than fourteen, the girlfriend, yelling, asked what to do.
“Call 911,” I yelled. “Tell them he has my gun.”
She didn’t call 911. She looked up the number for the Sheriff’s Office in the phone book, then called that. But she told them the right thing.
My dispatcher told me she screamed at my partner, “Scotty has Trey’s gun!” and my partner was gone in the blast of a burning engine and smoking tires.
That was the first moment, six or seven minutes into the fight, that anyone outside that house knew anything was wrong.
*****
Conclusion Wednesday
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Monday, November 16th, 2009
Hours Later
We didn’t hear you, my dispatcher says.
When I used my portable radio to call the Sheriff’s Office, to tell them Scotty had a knife, that he’d gotten violent, that I needed some help…they hadn’t heard me. Maybe the weather interfered. Or maybe I hadn’t charged the battery enough.
Either way, my dispatcher says no one heard my call for help.
I hadn’t known that. When I drew my weapon and went inside, I thought my partner was on the way; I thought someone had heard and was sending help.
But it didn’t matter, I realized. When I got inside and saw Scotty’s absolutely empty eyes, I knew help wouldn’t matter because it wasn’t going to arrive fast enough.
September 30, 2008
The weapon is a Glock 21. It’s a big son of a bitch. A .45 caliber with a fat, slow slug that can do all kinds of damage if needed.
I draw the weapon, take a deep breath, and go inside.
The girlfriend’s father is there, a bit of blood on his head. The mother is behind me. The girlfriend is protecting her young kids in a back bedroom.
Scotty is in the far corner of the kitchen. His father is in front of him, his mother to the side.
The fuck are they doing here, I wonder.
“Scotty,” I shout. “Let me see your hands.”
Scotty’s head turns my way and his eyes touch me but there is no recognition. His father is yapping and yapping and his mother is pleading and pleading and I see their jaws move but I don’t hear anything.
All I hear is my heart pounding hell out of my chest.
My grip tightens on my weapon and I try to catch sight of Scotty’s hands. Does he still have a knife? Does he still have deadly force?
“Scotty? You okay? I need to call an ambulance?”
Dead silence except his parents talking and talking and talking and if they’d just shut up, I might be able to get through to Scotty.
I’m about thirty feet from him and I can’t see shit. I have no idea where the knife is. So I move forward, weapon still at my side. I don’t want to raise it, to escalate this whole nightmare, just yet.
At twenty feet away, I stop. “Scotty, let me see your hands. Where’s the knife?”
Again, silence. He looks at his father, then his mother. Then again at me.
“Scotty, it’s me…Trey…what’s going on? You okay?”
My throat is like the fucking desert I grew up in: dry and hot, and my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. Still I can’t see his hands. I raise my weapon halfway, what’s called ‘the hunt’ position. Not all the way up and ready to shoot, but closer.
It’s a small escalation but I believe Scotty recognizes it.
I move forward slowly. While I’m watching Scotty, I try to scan everyone else. Are they wounded? Are there other weapons?
I’m ten or twelve feet from him now. He’s in the back corner of the kitchen. I’m at the doorway. Between us is an ocean of bad linoleum.
Again I ask to see his hands. Again he either doesn’t understand or doesn’t give a shit.
But he looks at me and I know, at that very instant, even before he rockets across that linoleum, everything has changed and the worst is yet to come.
*****
Part 3 Tuesday
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Sunday, November 15th, 2009
September 30, 2008
“Want some help?” my partner asks.
I decline. “It’s Scotty. I’ve dealt with him a million times. I’ll be fine.”
Scotty is in his ex-girlfriend’s parents’ front yard. He’s drunk. They want him removed. Scotty is always drunk. Or high. He’s done jail time for all kinds of penny-ante bullshit behind being drunk or stoned.
But he also had a four year prison drop for burglary.
He’s not even 25 years old.
The call is in one of our smallest towns. It’s less a town than a collection of houses built around a tavern and a railroad junction. It’s eight or ten miles from the jail and I’m in no great hurry. When I arrive Scotty will be, as he so often is, unconscious from booze or heroin or ganja. I’ll get him into my car, call his mother – who has enabled his alcohol and drug use for most of the previous ten years by saying law enforcement is out to get him – and get him home. I’ll write a report, finish the last few minutes of my shift, and go to bed.
I park and approach the house. I don’t see him but think he’s probably in a bush. Or under a car. Or curled up on the back porch.
When I’m twenty or thirty feet from the door, the girlfriend’s mother bursts out. She’s crying. “He’s in the house! He beat up my husband!”
I swallow and radio for back up.
“He’s got a knife. He’s threatening to kill everybody.”
*****
Part 2 Monday
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