Archive for the ‘CopStories’ Category
Monday, November 1st, 2010
My phone woke me up.
“What we have here…is a failure to communicate.”
From ‘Cool Hand Luke.’ It’s my text alert because I think that’s funny.
It’s a picture.
Lots of inky black smoke rising over I don’t even know what. I think, ‘Okay….’ Can’t fathom why one of my co-workers would have sent it to me.
So I go back to sleep.
What I didn’t know was that by that time, 8:30 on a Saturday morning, the fire had been raging for better than two hours.
An hour later, my phone rang and within 45 minutes, I was manning a traffic barrier, turning cars away from a chemical fire that was pouring massive amounts of black, toxic smoke into the sky above me.
The chemical plant in the western part of my county had exploded about 6 that morning. By 10, our unified command post – a recreational vehicle outfitted with communications gear that has the ability to manage any small scale disaster or border incursion or counterinsurgency in relative comfort – was on the scene.
As were something like 29 volunteer fire departments, a handful of ambulance crews, Illinois Department of Transportation, and a veritable alphabet soup of local, state, and Federal agencies.
And lil ol’ me.
Our officers closed down roads as far as two miles away, tried to keep traffic moving, tried not to get run over, and tried to keep an eye on exactly which way the thick cloud of toxic smoke was drifting.
Within a half hour of our arrival, another officer brought us some water. Within an hour or so of our arrival, officers brought us some food.
And that was that. After that, the chaos left us on our own.
Directing traffic is a terrible job to have. If you’re doing it for a few minutes, or even half an hour, that’s one thing. But for hours on end with no breaks, it’s physically and mentally demanding.
The problem, even in bright neon-yellow vests, is that no one sees you. Ask any officer and they will reel out endless stories of being nearly hit, or hit, by someone more interested in what the officer is blocking traffic from than in actually driving.
One of my first vehicles that day was a man hauling a boat. He, of course, was so intent on the smoke that he had no idea where in the road I was. Honestly, I’m not even sure he knew I was there at all.
And thus ran over my toes.
I yelled at him to stop. That did absolutely nothing.
So I punched his boat.
Hard.
That got his attention. He stopped and took exactly two angry steps toward me. Then he raised his hands, apologized, and asked which direction he needed to go.
I never said a word.
Perhaps the message was in my eyes.
My partner and I were there for the better part of eight hours. And had it not been for the kindness of a couple of fellow patrol officers and one local fireman and his wife, we would never have had food, water, bathroom breaks, or even a chance to catch our breath…which was by that time, exceedingly ragged.
We swamped ourselves in sun screen and yet became more and more pink as the hours rolled past.
Eventually, when that day was done, we went to he command post only to find?
The volunteer firemen.
These were the men who got called out at 6 a.m. and were still there twelve hours later. That’s a long day…a regular shift for us…and most were obviously tired. Some had inhaled fumes and been exposed to a much more raw version of the chemicals than we had been.
Some of them were getting transported to hospitals and some were being treated on the spot and I felt for them. I don’t think most volunteer firemen ever think they’re going to deal with something of the magnitude of that fire. Unlike their suburban or urban counterparts, I can’t believe they wake up in the morning thinking about chemical fires. Most of them are farmers so I suspect, at this time of year, they wake up thinking about getting those crops in.
However, not all of the firemen were being treated.
Early on in this nightmare, the EPA told the firemen to stop fighting the fire; that the best course of action was to let it burn itself out.
So most of those guys were on site with absolutely nothing to do.
But they were tired anyway.
It’s tough business to spend the day drinking from an endless supply of ice-cold bottled water, exhausting to have to lift, repeatedly, slices of pizza.
So they had to take a day-long break…in lawn chairs.
I was furious. I suspect that none of these guys, with the exception of the fireman and his wife who I’ve already mentioned, had one thought for the men keeping traffic away from their fire scene.
The next day, when my partner and I came back (yes, we got overtime, but these were our days off and we thought we were helping to keep people…volunteer firemen…safe from distractions) it was worse.
We blocked the roads and dealt with angry people who simply did not want to take a detour; confused people who didn’t understand the detour; semi-rigs that couldn’t easily take the detour; and plain idiots who just came out to “get a look at that fire.”
Everything was better organized that second day, there wasn’t the tension or sense of uncertainty that there had been the day before.
Which made our job much easier.
But later in the day, nearly two hours after we were told lunch was being delivered, I was ordered to go get lunch for my partner and I.
While making that drive, I discovered the oasis that was the volunteer fire fighter haven. I found at least one Red Cross truck, a couple of portable bathrooms, and at least one hundred fire fighters.
All being amply fed by the Red Cross. All pulling ice-cold sodas and water from ice chests scattered all over the tranquil scene. And all getting regular bathroom breaks that didn’t involve slinking into the brush when there was a dearth of cars to detour.
And many of them were – again – sitting in lawn chairs.
Notice at least two of them giving me the stink-eye.
That’s because when I drove by the first time, on the way to sandwich fixin’s that had sat in the sun for who knows how long, I was visibly angry.
On my way back to traffic control with one hastily-made sandwich each for myself and my partner, I slowed down enough to snap a picture.
A major chemical fire, one that involved days’ worth of major road closures, God alone knows how many agencies, huge plumes of black toxic smoke visible, allegedly, from nearly 50 miles away.
And they’re hanging out in lawn chairs.
Ain’t that great.
Later, just as icing on the cake, there was a field fire near one of our small towns. A brush truck from a local department came screaming through, lights and siren. It came so close to hitting me as it came around our barrier signs that the woman to whom I was giving directions actually yelped and yanked me closer to her car.
This asshole’s outside mirrors were less than a foot from me.
Scary enough, right?
Here’s the thing: he was running lights and siren.
On a closed road.
What the fuck?
You’re going to run lights and siren to a non-threatening brush fire through three miles worth of CLOSED road?
There was no other traffic, dude. No vehicles, no pedestrians, not even any damn birds or deer.
Lights and siren?
Tell me, sir, who exactly, on this stretch of completely closed road, are you trying to warn with your lights and siren?
I understand the EPA ordered all the agencies to not fight the fire. I understand that some firemen had to be kept on scene in case anything happened. I have no problem with any of that.
But when I’m standing in the sun for a total of 20+ hours, when I’m being run over by civilians and nearly run over by the volunteer firemen I’m out there to protect, maybe you wanna think about not sitting in a law chair for hours on end while you eat and tell jokes and listen to the radio.
It is not a social gathering. Don’t treat it like one while there are other men and women out there working and sweating and slowly getting sun-crisped to make sure you’re safe.
Ultimately, the fire took three or four days to burn out, the building was demolished, and the handful of jobs at that plant are probably not coming back.
What I try to spend my time thinking about, rather than the handle-bar mustached moron who almost killed me, are the fellow deputies and volunteer fireman and his wife who kept us hydrated and kept us updated to keep us going during a tough couple of days.
Thank you so much.
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
I pulled her over for running a stop sign.
“I stopped.”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Yes, I did, but I’m not going to argue about it.”
“Can I see your license and insurance, please?”
“Here. I stopped. I absolutely stopped.”
“Ma’am, you were right in front of me.”
“I’m not going to argue about it, but I stopped.”
“Ma’am, do you understand the definition of not arguing?”
“Well, I just have lots of things on my mind. My husband’s in Iraq.”
Soooo…first you didn’t do it, then you did but only because your husband is in Iraq. And why, exactly, does a man being in the desert cause you to run a stop sign?
And, oh by the way, why are you using your husband’s military service as an excuse for anything?
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Thursday, October 21st, 2010
“I just bought some meat.”
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Wednesday, October 13th, 2010
It’s become a standard call.
“30,” dispatch says. “Subject with dementia. Refusing to go to the hospital.”
I’ve handled that a million times. An elderly person, terrified and lost inside their own heads, unable to recognize what had once been so familiar and so comfortable. They do fight, and it is physical. But I believe it has less to do with not wanting to go to the hospital than fighting desperately to go back to a time when they didn’t need a hospital.
When I get close to the address, I frown. This is starting to feel like deja vu.
When I pull up in front of the house, I know I’ve been there before. But I can’t remember why. Sadly, it happens that way sometimes. A cop will remember the address, or the face, or the vehicle, but not really know why. Eventually, there is always a cue, some bit of conversation or a smell or color, that reminds.
This day, a man came out of the house.
“Haven’t I been here before?” I ask.
He nods, a somber look on his face. “Yeah. My mother.”
[I had a direct link here to the original post. Apparently, Word Press is smarter than I am so do this: type Cop Stories, with a space, in the search box on the right side and then go back a few pages until you get to Sunday, July 8, 2007. Then read that entry.]
This was the same house and I immediately tightened up.
I didn’t ask how she was. I didn’t need to. How he’d answered the question let me know. Mom was dead, probably had been for three years.
With a grim nod, I walked past the ambulance and into the house. His father – the woman’s husband – sat in a chair, a slightly angry look on his face. This was his house and it didn’t matter what the two EMTs said to him. He wasn’t leaving.
Because it wasn’t just his house, it was his life. He and his dead wife had been there, according to the son, for something like 50 years. This was the only house he’d ever known in his adult life. Everything had been centered in this house. He and his wife, his children, his grandchildren, his farming and hunting, his taxes and holidays and birdhouse building and yapping dogs and meowing cats.
And now they wanted to take him away.
It didn’t matter that we just wanted him to check in with his doctors, that we’d have him back before the afternoon was out, that it was still his house and still filled with the memories through which he tried to swim everyday.
From where he sat, we wanted him gone and he was having none of it.
“Fuck you, asshole.”
But I talked and talked, I cajoled and joked, I coaxed and threatened. I talked harder than I’ve talked in a while. Eventually, the EMT and I got him to agree to go see his doctor. He stood him up and walked him to the ambulance.
During that walk, when he was friendly and joking again, I said, “I was sorry to hear about your wife.”
He looked at me, the smile gone from his face, and said, “Who?”
“Your wife? I was here a couple of years ago. We had a nice conversation. Do you remember that?”
Anger suffused him. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a baby. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
I looked at the man’s son, whose face broke while he listened to his father.
“I’ve never been married.”
What could I say? In his head, there had been no wife, though he seemed to recognize that he had children. In my limited experience, patients usually had fairly good recall of the old memories, but had trouble with the new ones.
But for this one man, in this one moment, there was no wife. She’d been erased as cleanly as if she’d never been there.
And what does that do, metaphysically? Does his lack of memory for her mean she didn’t really exist? The son remembers, the daughter remembers. But the grandchildren are too young to remember a woman who died three years ago.
And none of them remember what made that woman his wife and their mother. What are those details? Were her eyes were puffy in the mornings? Did she whistle ‘You Are My Sunshine’ while making pancakes or mow the gigantic yard from north to south while her husband did it east to west? Did she wear a particular pair of shoes because her children thought she looked beautiful in them even though they ruined her feet?
If the only person who remembers those things suddenly doesn’t anymore, what does that mean?
Is the nature of our being how we perceive ourselves? Or how others perceive us?
We loaded the man into the ambulance and I lingered, taking too long to cinch that gurney belt or close that door, checking with the driver where they were going, checking with the man one last time.
I was stretching out his departure as long as I could. I knew I was doing that.
And I knew why.
Because I wanted that Hollywood ending. I wanted to see him perk up, his eyes alight, and tell me to have his wife lock the house up. Or ask me to have her bring his best brown worsted suit to the hospital.
I wanted some spark of memory to flash in his eyes.
It never happened.
The ambulance left, the son in a car behind, and I went to my next call.
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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, June 10th, 2010
A few days ago, I stopped a guy for speeding. Usually, while doing my small talk thing, I try to find out why they were speeding. A medical problem? Accelerator stuck? Car actually standing still but Earth rotating too fast? Whatever it might be.
This was the best answer I’ve ever gotten (even better than when Dad said his son was sick and at that precise moment, sonny-boy threw up from the backseat all the way to the windshield five feet away).
“So…any reason you’re driving so fast?”
“Huh?”
“Just wondering why you’re moving so quickly today.”
“Oh. Well…I’m a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.”
“And?”
“I’m just not very smart.”
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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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