Archive for the ‘CopStories’ Category
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
She was there. Instantly.
I yelped.
There had been nothing. As I crested the hill on one of our back roads, the road had been empty.
It’s a long road, eight or nine miles with no turns and no stop signs. Lots of hills and a good speed can give the sensation of a roller coaster.
I was patrolling. Listening to tunes, windows open, fresh air, my arm hanging out the window.
On those back roads, I tend to stay all the way right. I assume, especially during this time of year, there will be some farmer’s big-ass tractor coming up the other side. I’ve worked too many wrecks and the car always loses.
(It’s the Lug Nut Rule: the driver with the most lug nuts always win the smash up.)
Then, as I crested, suddenly, explosively, there she was.
I yanked the wheel right, my throat suddenly as dry as my beloved west Texas desert. I jerked my left hand back inside, convinced I was going to lose it.
My squad went into the grass while the other car somehow slid past me without taking my mirror or grabbing bumper.
I don’t know, even now, how fast they were going. At the time, the machine was more bullet than car. A smear of dark metal that growled and winked as it passed.
It laughed, too.
Yeah, it might have been tires on hot asphalt or the wind, but it damn sure sounded like a laugh.
And it kept laughing. The car disappeared over the hill, down the far side, into the distance, and still it fucking laughed.
It still laughs sometimes. Late at night sometimes. Sometimes when I’m coming over another hill.
Even dreamed about it once.
Laughing and laughing and all I want to do is shoot that fucking car until it’s not just dead but completely dead.
I cranked my ass over that hill and I was so angry. I yelled and screamed in my squad car. It drowned out my tunes – and that’s going some volume, let me tell you – because the driver had scared me so badly.
I’ve discovered, in this job, I don’t do well when I get scared. Maybe it’s my need to be in control. Maybe it’s my need to feel in control if not actually be in control. But when something scares me, and it happens less and less the more experience I get under my Bat Belt, I get angry.
My reaction is to lash out.
Not violently. Not even verbally too often. But in my head and heart. In my soul.
In the reactions I want to give, rather than the reactions I do give.
So I came over the hill, ready to yank a traffic stop and write her some tickets.
But the road – for at least the mile I could see – was completely, utterly empty.
“Son of a bitch.”
Either the car was going much faster than I’d realized or it had ducked into a driveway to hide.
But what about those skid marks?
The road was a riot of skid marks.
They traveled from deep in the right side ditch, across the road with four distinct marks visible (means the car was yawing sideways in a broad slide) and into the ditch on the left.
And through the ditch into the tress and bushes.
Which were torn to pieces.
My heart sank. I’ve worked those kinds of wrecks before and if they don’t end by calling the coroner, they damn sure end with gouts of blood and ambulances flying to the nearest hospital and ashen-faced doctors.
The car was deep off the road.
Totaled.
And upside down.
I slid to a stop and jumped on the radio.
“Dispatch, I was almost head-on’d. The car’s in the ditch. Roll-over, dispatch, roll over. Send me everything.”
“BU 30, repeat your traffic?”
“I got a roll-over, dispatch. Send me everything. Ambo and fire. Now!”
I had no idea what was what, who was dead or not, who was injured or not.
Except these kids were getting out of the car.
I was stunned.
One kid. Two kids. Walking around, obviously freaked out. But walking away from that mangled car.
Three kids.
I jumped out of my squad and ran to them, yelling at them to get out. The day before I’d had a teen-ager kit a utility pole and her car exploded. She’d barely gotten out before it was an inferno. I was scared I’d see another car fire and it wouldn’t end as well.
Four kids.
“Out out,” I yelled at the fifth kid. She was crawling around inside the car.
“I’m getting my cell phone,” she said.
“The hell you are. Get out. Right now.”
Then I grabbed her and half-dragged her out. When I got her standing, she was covered in blood. Her entire face, hairline to neck. Blood everywhere.
Blood that smelled like…strawberries.
“Where are you hurt?” I started checking her for injuries.
“It’s soda,” her boyfriend said, a hysterical laugh bubbling out of his throat. “She was drinking soda.”
None of them, five kids, were hurt. Three ambulances showed up and all the kids – or their parents – refused treatment. Other than one minor cut, there were no injuries at all.
WTF?
None? That might have freaked me out even more than the near accident itself. I had expected, if not five bodies, then certainly five transports to hospitals.
By this time, I was getting myself under control. It was like I’d compartmentalized the two incidents. One was the near-miss involving me. The second was their accident. Didn’t matter that their accident was because of their near-miss.
The accident happened because they were going too fast and were so inexperienced that they overcorrected and went too far right, then overcorrected against and slid across the road into the trees, which then flipped the car over.
Ultimately, I called a supervisor, who came out and then called the accident reconstructionist. I didn’t handle the accident (duh…conflict of interest, anyone?) but I did look at the skid marks and the hot tar we’d both driven through.
That soft tar laid it all out. She was nearly a foot over centerline, though the tar hadn’t a clue how fast she’d been going. The sheer amount of skid marks proved to the driver’s mother she’d been going entirely too fast.
But I’d have done the same thing. Being 17, a car full of friends, listening to tunes, talking and laughing, I’d have been driving too fast, too. And I’d probably have been too far over the center line.
How neither of us ended up dead or in a coma is still beyond me.
And though I’m over it now, there are still days when I hear that car’s fucking laugh.
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Saturday, July 31st, 2010
“I had a leg cramp.”
“Really? Must have been a bad one.”
“What?”
“Well, you were going 91 miles an hour.”
“Oh.”
“In a 55.”
“Oh.”
“And I’ve been chasing you for nearly six miles.”
“That’s bad.”
“With lights and siren.”
“That’s pretty bad.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sign right here.”
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Monday, July 12th, 2010
“My teeth were flapping.”
“Excuse me,” I said.
It was a motorcycle rider. He grinned. “My bottom teeth? They were flapping. I gotta get to the store and get some glue.”
Then, I swear to all that’s holy, he flicked his tongue once or twice, and those son of a bitchin’ teeth started flapping.
Right at me. Almost looked like they were waving!
One of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen.
And they clicked. Like somebody was banging on his teeth with drumsticks.
“Uh…,” I said. “Well, yes sir, have a nice day.”
And off he went.
I mean, come on, how you gonna write a guy whose teeth are flapping? That’s just a bad day, man.
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
“I was singing to Toby Keith.”
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Thursday, May 13th, 2010
So I’m driving down a gravel road.
In another county.
At 80 miles an hour.
And I’m not really particularly certain where I am.
But I know the bad guy – and cop chasing him – are somewhere south and east of me. I know the bad guy is a wanted felon. I know the cop, who works a small town, has no clue what country road he’s on. I know they’re banging around in my county, then out of my county, then in my county, etc., etc.
And I know my squad car won’t go fast enough.
I got to the county line and stopped because I wasn’t sure where they were. Illinois State Police – whose radio frequency most agencies use when they’re in pursuit – constantly asked me when I was going to get there and I had no idea where ‘there’ was.
Calm down, Trey, I thought. Have a little impulse control.
I, in turn, got on my dispatcher’s ass to google up a damned map and figure out how the neighboring county’s roads correlated to ours so I could begin to understand where I needed to go.
And then I see it. It was beautiful and relieving and like an answered prayer. Coming toward me, lights and siren on fire, gravel spitting out from the back end, was a county cop actually from the county where I was.
We jammed on the brakes and slid past each other at probably 50 miles an hour. Damned lucky we didn’t fishtail into each other.
“That way,” he said, pointing back the way I had come: north.
Man knows his county so off we go.
A couple miles down, we get to an intersection and he stops for just a second, takes a look at his map. Ain’t no problem, I figure, I look at my map all the time. And off we go again. Now headed west.
At the next intersection, with the state trooper dispatcher still yelling at me to hurry up, he stopped a looked at his map again. This left me…uh…what’s the word…concerned?
As opposed to freaked out, which I was when he got out of his squad car and came over to mine…map in hand.
Hands it to me and says, “Yeah, I don’t know where we are.”
And in the background, the state dispatcher calling and calling and calling.
Calm down calm down…impulse control.
I could barely breathe. My hands shook. My throat tightened up. And a tiny little icepick began poking at the front of my head.
I snatch the map and start looking from where I had been in my county. And this dumbass promptly snatches the map back…and turns it around until north on the map is actually north in real life. Now, he says, I can see it better.
At this very moment, just before I can jump outta my squad and beat him about the head and shoulders with a hefty piece of wood -
- calm calm calm -
- I realize we’re right beneath two road markers.
Now we’re well and truly flying! We know where we are, the chase has ended in a crash and is now a foot pursuit but the state dispatcher knows exactly where everyone is. We are getting this done…taken care of.
I follow the county deputy, knowing we’ve got about three miles to go (headed south and east, by the way) when he suddenly turns south sooner than I’d expected. I’m banging my hand on the steering wheel, yelling, “Yeah! A fucking short cut!”
We are on the move.
I’m going probably 70 when I notice the giant roadsign.
“Road Closed.”
Yeah. Absolutely true no shit freakin’ closed. And still this guy keeps going. I figure this is his county and he knows his short cuts and the icepick is banging a little harder now and maybe the road has a turn before it closes and a mile down the road, we come to a screeching stop because…well…the road is CLOSED!
And the icepick commences to gouge out my brain.
“You stupid son of a bitch how can you not know where you’re going THIS IS YOUR DAMNED COUNTY YOU CAN’T BE THIS LAME!!!”
I’m sorry…what was that about impulse control? Yeah, gone. Absolutely disappeared. I’m screaming and howling like a banshee and pummeling my steering wheel. Luckily the squad window was up so no one heard anything…I think.
None of which solved the immediate problem of backing up this other cop. So I whip around and go back to the blacktop we’d been on. I head east, then a mile or so south and boom, easy-peasy, I’m at the crash sight.
The cop who’d been screaming for help has the bad guy in custody, the ambulance is on the way, and everyone’s pulse is back down to normal.
Except mine. ‘Cause now I’m furious. I’m crazed that the county deputy had no clue where he was or where he was going. I’m beyond infuriated that I gave him that one extra chance to prove to me what a great cop he was…that I’d followed him like a cheap lemming down a closed road.
And I’m more than a little peeved that I didn’t get in on the chase…excuse me, pursuit.
So I stay for a few minutes, until the original cop’s partners and supervisor show up. I make sure he doesn’t need anything, apologize again for not being there for him, and leave. I’m at the scene maybe ten minutes.
And as I’m leaving? The county cop comes meandering down the road, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He parks nearly a quarter mile beyond the crash site, and wanders up toward us.
Remember, I’ve been there ten minutes. So from the time I left him on the closed road, it was just about another twelve minutes before he arrived at the scene of a vehicle pursuit, a vehicle crash, and a foot pursuit…in his own damned county!
I think my eyes crossed I was so angry at him. I almost – but didn’t – told him don’t bother trying to back me up ’cause I’d be long dead by the time you got there.
That’s when my impulse control comes back? Bad timing, I guess….
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Thursday, April 15th, 2010
I’ve smelled it before.
Too often, in fact.
But it had been a while, at least at this intensity.
I was in one of our small towns last week, attempting to serve an official court paper. I pulled up to the public housing apartment complex and got out. I’d been there before. Fights, drunks, sexual assaults, eviction notices, divorce decrees.
The door was standing wide open and I was still about 50 feet away when I got the first whiff.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
The Roto-Rooter guy looked at me as he came out. “No, shit. It’s bad in here.”
It was the apartment I was headed for, of course. I stopped. “Are they dead?”
He stared, his eyes wide. “What?”
“The smell.”
“Well, they’re not dead downstairs, I can tell you that.”
I nodded and went to the porch. “Where’s maintenence?”
“Next door. We’re trying to figure out where the main line is getting plugged.” When he realized what he was saying, coupled with my question, his face bled color until he was solid white. “Shit.”
“No,” I said, trying to ease up the tension. “If it was a body, you’d know it.”
“That ain’t funny.”
I shook my head. “Ain’t supposed to be. Would you grab maintenence, please?”
I took a deep breath and stepped inside.
A couple years ago, I went to a possible death on the far side of the county. The house was crammed with garbage. Books strewn everywhere, empty food containers, full and rotted food containers, cat and dog feces, hundreds if not thousands of dead insects and others feasting on those.
And the smell. That thick, ammonia odor that stings the inside of your nose even as it burns your eyes and makes your throat close.
This was exactly the same.
But worse.
Then, the resident, a woman in her mid 50s, was in a chair nearly dead.
Now, there was no one in any chair. The chairs were, in fact, broken.
The house was just as strewn with garbage and soiled clothes, food, broken ceramics, congealed pizza boxes. Except for a slim walkway through to the kitchen, the nastiness was ankle deep…everywhere. In the kitchen, every surface was covered with rotted food and insects. There were fingers of what appeared to be grease reaching down from the counter toward the floor, seemingly permanently frozen in that reach. There was a fly long since dead and stuck in what looked like it had once been a slice of cheese pizza.
The cat feces, rather than being randomly found as in the other house, was nicely piled. It was near the litter box, but not quite in the litter box. In the corner, piled probably ten inches deep.
And the smell. That cat-piss smell that always struck me as less a need to clean than a need to put something other than despair in someone’s soul. I’ve smelled that stench countless times while working for the Sheriff’s Office and sometimes it’s just people being nasty and contemptuous of keeping their lives clean. But many times, I think it’s people being lost and maybe dazed by the mountain range of hurt that traps them.
Upstairs, in one of two bedrooms, was a mattress. It sat on the floor, surrounded by clothes that had human feces smeared on them. Not every bit of clothing, but enough that seemed less an accident than a particular method of living.
Horrified, I called the local town police chief. He came out and said he’d been at this apartment before. The woman who lived here with her son was a military veteran, born in 1939, and the place was much cleaner than it had been on his previous visit.
“You gotta call the Department of Aging,” I said. “This could be elder abuse.”
A woman more than 70 years old, kept in this nightmare by her son? Seemed to fairly scream elder abuse to me.
“They came out last time. She said was personally clean so there was nothing they could do.”
I blinked, unable to say anything. It was worse last time and the department thought there was nothing they could do? For days after, I was unable to even understand what that meant. Nothing they could do?
“Can we at least track her down? Find out why they left the apartment so fast? All their stuff is still here.”
“Maybe she died,” he said.
And God help me I didn’t want to think it, but some tiny part of me realized that might be the best thing for her. If this was how she lived at the end of a long life, maybe it was time to be done.
Then the Chief’s jaw began to grind. “And he’d be just the type of fuck to keep getting her benefit checks. I’ll call the VA, find out where the checks are going. Don’t worry, we’ll find her.”
The son, I learned, had a bit of a problem behind the herb. Maybe Mama had died and he saw her VA check as a great way to keep his local ganja salesman well cashed.
As I was leaving, I noticed the table above the cat feces. Rickety and small, like a table for a broken vase of dead flowers. On top wasn’t flowers, but five or six toys of American military tanks. And on the wall above that were some service commendations.
And around it all was that smell.
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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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