On the morning my son was born, my wife insisted that the doctor hand our newborn baby to me first despite the arduous and painful labor she had been through. Impressed and deeply moved by her unselfish gesture, I was reluctant to argue, and I gladly received my new offspring with open arms. Holding him for the first time, I was struck suddenly by the memory of another baby I had held not too long before, under far more tragic circumstances.

It was early in the morning, my graveyard shift as platoon sergeant almost at its end, when a call came in for a baby not breathing. Half of my platoon started for the location, a typical response to calls of this type. Several cars were already there by the time I arrived, the ambulance already pulling out of the driveway, lights and sirens on. I watched as they barreled down the road, the child’s mother and one of my officers accompanying the crew in the back of the ambulance. Stepping inside the modest ranch house, I spoke to another officer who had remained behind at the scene with the baby’s father, who sat weeping softly on a couch in the living room. 

I quickly learned that the father had gotten up with his baby for a three am feeding, using pumped breast milk they had prepared in bottles stored in the refrigerator. After the feeding, dad, exhausted in a way that only new parents can understand, had fallen asleep on the sofa while holding his son in the crook of his arm. Awakening an hour or so later, he had realized that the baby was not breathing, starting CPR immediately as he screamed for his wife to call 911. My officers arrived only minutes later, well ahead of the ambulance. They had directly taken over lifesaving measures until the arrival of paramedics. 

Arranging for one of my officers to follow the father to the hospital, I began a deliberate inspection of the residence, accompanied by my shift commander, a lieutenant several years my senior. A father himself, he was noticeably distraught, as were most of my platoon, many of whom were fathers as well. Walking through the small, well-kept house, we noted nothing in disarray, no indications of anything but a loving home recently prepared for the arrival of a newborn baby. Greeting cards lined the fireplace mantle, and gifts of baby clothes, toys, and diapers were stacked on a table in the small dining room. The smell of fresh paint was still dimly evident in the nursery, the walls adorned with animals, the ceiling painted with stars. Moving to the kitchen, I opened the refrigerator to find numerous breast milk bottles, lovingly placed there for midnight feedings. “They have to come home to all of this,” my lieutenant whispered to himself under his breath. Though it seemed he was not even speaking to me, I nodded in agreement and left for the hospital, hoping that the baby had been revived by some miracle.

Arriving at the emergency room a short time later, I was met at the door by one of my most senior men, a father of five children, at 6’00” and 300 pounds; he was an imposing man, to say the least, and not predisposed to emotional displays. He wept quietly as he told me that the baby had not survived. I would later learn that he had arrived first and had performed CPR until the arrival of the ambulance crew. An autopsy would later reveal that the baby had smothered to death after the father fell asleep, the weight of his father’s arm simply too heavy to allow him to breathe. A hospital social worker soon approached me, who told me that the parents were being given some time alone with their baby before custody of the body would be turned over to law enforcement and the medical examiner. As this was now a death investigation, many protocols would need to be followed, and I dreaded the task I was now facing.

After what I hoped was a reasonable waiting period, I quietly entered the room. The silence was interrupted periodically by the mother’s anguished sobs as she sat holding her baby, her husband sitting in stunned silence by her side. Speaking to her by name, I quietly told her that there were some things we needed to do. Assuring her that she would see her baby again, I asked for her help handing him to me. Her arms went limp as she cried, not fighting me but unable to bring herself to give me her child. As gently as I could, I took the little boy from her arms, his limp body still warm from her embrace. Accompanied by a crime scene technician, I took the infant to an unoccupied room down the hall, where we performed the sad task of photographing the child’s body in detail before turning him over to the medical examiner. Numbed by the immensity of the tragedy I was bearing witness to, I went about my responsibilities with grim resolve, determined to maintain control of my emotions. I ended my shift an hour later after completing the notifies required for unattended or suspicious deaths. After reviewing the reports, I headed home at the end of my tour, set on putting the incident behind me and out of my mind, the only way I knew to preserve my sanity.

But try as we might, it really isn’t possible to tell ourselves to forget something. Life has a way of circling back on you, most often at a time and place not of your choosing. Holding my newborn son on that beautiful summer morning, I found myself blindsided by the vivid memory of that other little boy I’d had in my arms only a few years earlier. His life started out in much the same way, with hope, and promise, and of course, love. Looking into my son’s eyes, I felt gripped by a fear I had never known before, a fear of a loss so significant I might not be able to bear it. Holding his sturdy little body, I reflected for a moment on that little boy who did not make it, and I wondered how his father felt on the day he first held him. 

When I first shared the news of my wife’s pregnancy with my co-workers, the dual nature of police work was put on full display for me. Addressing my roll call that night, I told my platoon of the impending arrival. Without missing a beat, a crusty veteran officer in the back of the room cheerfully called out, “Hey, congratulations, Sarge, who’s the father?” His comment was met with an uproar of laughter, mine included. A short few hours later, I met for coffee with my shift lieutenant, a deeply religious man with two children of his own. Upon hearing the news, he had solemnly extended his hand, saying, “Congratulations, now you get to find out what love really is.” It was this statement that I reflected on in that instant as I first held my son. I once read a quote that said, “When you love someone, you surrender a hostage to fortune.” We all make this choice when we choose to have children. In those first moments with my son, I decided to strive to turn my back on my fears. In the years that followed, I would attempt to focus instead on the tremendous gifts and opportunities that lay before me. Faced with the reality of life as it often presents itself to first responders, maintaining this focus has been one of the significant challenges of my life. 

I was seventeen years old when I met the best friend I would ever have. It was September, the first week of my senior year of high school, and I was sitting with my girlfriend in the cafeteria before the start of class. A longtime friend stopped by the table, accompanied by a tall, severe-looking young man with an intense, thoughtful gaze. My friend pointed to his companion and exclaimed, “you have to meet this guy. He just transferred here. He’s like your twin.” “Conor,” the young man said, extending his hand to me. In return, I raised my own hand, and my future was forever altered. It’s a shame we can’t always know the moments in our lives that will truly change us, those that will stay with us until we die. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the course of my young life was being shifted, and from it, a new person would one day emerge.

It wasn’t long before the two of us became inseparable, our shared interests in guns and all things military helping to form an instant bond. I’d already seen him in the halls, of course. At 6’5″ and well over 200 pounds, he was hard to miss. But it wasn’t just his striking physical presence that caught the attention of my classmates and me. He wore combat boots and an old US Army fatigue jacket to school, at times completing the ensemble with a pair of camouflage pants. He appeared as a spot of olive drab adrift in a sea of pastel Izod shirts, Levis jeans, and Docksider’s, the de rigueur uniform of my preppy, wealth-obsessed school. He strode through the halls, utterly unconcerned with the stares and whispers of his new classmates. Getting to know one another over the ensuing weeks, I quickly learned that he hated the suburbs of Western New York, much preferring his former home outside Newark, New Jersey. He would tell tales of taking the train with his friends to New York City on Saturdays, riding the subways all day, prowling the mean streets of Manhattan at a time when I was barely allowed out in my own tame suburban neighborhood past 10 pm. His casual sophistication and total disdain for the so-called popular kids of my senior class was intoxicating, especially to me, never a member of my school’s elite crowd. 

On most weekends, when I was not with my girlfriend, we would cruise the streets of our quiet town in his car, a Pontiac Bonneville station wagon somehow blessed with a 454 V8 motor. Anything from a trip to the Mall to a stop at McDonald’s could become an adventure, his larger-than-life personality and ebullient sense of humor charging the air with an energy I had never experienced before in another person. My own home life was a constant stream of stress and discord, and I came to love spending time at his house, which he shared with his parents and two younger sisters. I quickly noted how his family seemed to revolve around him, his outsized energy working its same magic on them. Their love for him was palpable, and I spent as much time there as my schedule would allow, astonished at the free flow of affection that ran between all of them, most notably between father and son. I marveled at the effortless communication and mutual respect he shared with his dad, which stood in stark contrast to the fractured relationship I had with my own father.

I would soon learn that holidays were of paramount importance to Conor. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Eve each was to be celebrated as if it were your last. Birthdays were also treated with special reverence. Conor was one of the most generous people I had ever met, and gifts large and small were an essential part of every holiday. A few days before that first Halloween, I walked into his kitchen, his Golden Retriever Murphy padding over to greet me, to find him seated at his kitchen table, hacking away at a pumpkin with an enormous Bowie knife. I hadn’t carved a jack-o-lantern since grade school, and I marveled at the somewhat childlike wonder Conor brought to nearly every encounter with the world. All of the following holidays would be met with a festive zeal I have yet to see matched in my life. 

Still very much a virgin, I would listen in quiet awe as he regaled me with tales of his sexual conquests at his former high school. My initial doubts quickly dispelled as I watched the girls of my class timidly enter his orbit. It would not be long before my newfound friend would begin to command the attention of the young women of our senior class, his disinterested attitude towards them seeming to draw them to him. Girls who had barely spoken to me in years would ask me about him as if he were some sort of celebrity, afraid to approach him despite their fascination. I watched in wonder as he turned one after another down, eventually setting his sights on a less popular senior girl who had caught his eye. Tall and willowy, she made a perfect complement to his enormous frame, and they made a striking couple as they walked the halls. Soon after that, we began double dating, and our friendship was cemented even further. 

As our high school careers approached their end, my classmates and I began the process of deciding where we would be spending the next several years of our lives. I had been accepted to SUNY Syracuse College of Environmental Science and Forestry, with the eventual goal of becoming a conservation officer. Conor, who had spent his Spring semester as a police explorer, had set his sights on more traditional police work. His tales of ride alongs and the larger-than-life personalities of the deputies he met from our local sheriff’s office intrigued me so much that I began to question my own path. I eventually elected to attend community college to pursue a degree in Criminal Justice with the eventual goal of working as a police officer. Our lives soon became focused entirely on achieving this as we entered college together that following Fall, our sights set on joining the ranks of law enforcement. 

College was a mix of classes, part-time security jobs, and nights spent bar hopping and testing our tolerance for alcohol. As he grew older, Conor’s wild, almost uncontrollable energy seemed only to grow in force, his eagerness to experience everything that life had to offer at times almost terrifying in its intensity. On one memorable evening, while out celebrating my 20th birthday, we fled successfully from the police after Conor passed a traffic cop running radar on the expressway, his speedometer pinned at 120 mph as we somehow managed to elude the officer. We learned to box in the college’s police education gym class, pitted against one another by our humorless instructor, who only saw the two largest boys in the class and not best friends. We circled one another for a bit, poking halfhearted jabs at each other until the instructor screamed at us that we would keep going for the duration of the class if we didn’t fight. Conor, by now almost 275 pounds, shrugged his shoulders and nodded at me as if to say, “let’s just get it over with.” I surprised myself by knocking him down with a hard right to the chin, and the last thing I saw as he rose was his enormous gloved fist filling my vision. I awakened a moment later to our instructor laughing as he helped me to my feet. I would not be able to touch my nose for a week. Leaving class, we both laughed about it as we examined each other’s bruises. Our conversations now centered around what we would do with our lives, the significant cases we would be involved in, how wonderful it would be to wear the badge and enter the world of the men we have come to so admire.

Our lives continued on this way until a summer morning in 1986. I was awakened from sleep at 8 am on my day off by my phone ringing. I answered, hoping I was not being called into work, and heard the voice of a mutual friend, a parole officer Conor and I often worked part-time security jobs with. “We lost him'” he said, his voice breaking. “We lost Conor.” Unable to process this information, I sputtered out something incoherent. My friend continued to describe the 4 am accident, Conor a passenger in a car driven by another friend, a recent graduate of the police academy. They had been coming back from a night on the town, having celebrated our friend’s completion of the field training portion of the police academy. The accident had been a rollover, the car crushed like a beer can. The driver had escaped with only a few broken ribs. Conor had been killed instantly, his large frame a liability in the crumpled confines of the relatively small SUV. Within an hour, I was at Conor’s house, where I sat with his stunned family in their grief. The next four days would be a blur of calling hours and sad first meetings, several of his New Jersey friends making the trip to Western New York to honor him. I remember standing with the funeral director as we prepared to enter the church with his casket as a pallbearer. “Be careful fellas, he’s really heavy,” he said, my friend’s colossal size following him even into death. That night Conor’s many friends would gather at his grave where we buried Matchbox police cars, pizza slices, and beers under the newly laid sod. I do not remember much of the rest of that summer, but I remember the promise I made that day to myself and to him that I would wear a badge one day and make both of us proud. Two years later, I would be sworn in as a police officer, and each day of my life since, I have thought of Conor. Each milestone, plainclothes assignments, SWAT, and my eventual promotion to Sergeant were silently dedicated to his memory.

There are times when I mention Conor, and my wife or my son will ask me to try again to describe him so that they can really see and feel what he was like as a person. I am often at a loss for words during these moments, but the story that most often comes to my mind is from our first semester together at community college. We were sitting in our Psych 101 class, participating in a discussion about love led by our professor, an amiable old hippie with a striking resemblance to Burl Ives. As the students sat in a large circle, the professor pointed to Conor and said, “What does the word love mean to you.” My friend sat back for a moment in his chair, then looked around the room, his gaze settling first on Sara, his girlfriend seated to his right. “Well, I love my girlfriend,” he said, smiling as he pulled her close with an enormous arm. He then turned his gaze to me, seated to his left. “And I love my buddy,” he said, wrapping his other arm around my shoulder and pulling me close. I have never forgotten that moment, steeped as we all were in the attitudes of the early 1980s, and the arcane beliefs of our parents, unable, unwilling, or perhaps just afraid to show anything but romantic love. With that single unselfconscious gesture, my friend told us all everything we ever needed to know about life. Love has many definitions and many faces. All of them are to be celebrated and cherished, for nothing, nothing lasts forever. Sometimes the people who enter our lives are like the North Star, steady and constant. But there are others, their flames too beautiful to last, who blaze through our timeline like shooting stars, their magnificent energy simply too great to remain for more than a brief instant. 

She was outside the battered duplex home when I arrived, her thin arms hugging her shoulders as she ran to my patrol car. Wide-eyed and crying, she pointed towards the road. “He drove off that way,” she said through tears. I had been sent for an attempted rape report at a rental house behind a well-known restaurant, with minimal information given to me by dispatch. Quickly exiting my car, I asked if she was hurt in any way, looking her over for injuries as I did so. She was a young woman of about sixteen, petite and stunningly beautiful. Other than her tears, I noticed no physical sign of anything amiss as I spoke to her. As gently as I could, I told her she was safe now and asked her what had happened. In a halting voice, she recounted her story, and a picture of quiet strength emerged that I would not be able to forget. Hers was a tale of courage and grit that has never left me.

She told me how she had returned home from school that afternoon, entering the house through the rear door by the kitchen. A few minutes later, as she sat at the dining room table doing homework, she heard a noise coming from the kitchen and realized she had not locked the door behind her after entering the house. Looking up from her books, she saw a man step through the kitchen doorway into the dining room. She quickly recognized him as one of the carpet installers who had been working in the other half of the duplex. He was large, almost six feet tall and thickly built, over 230 pounds, and easily twice her size. In his right hand, she saw a large pair of carpet shears, which he now brandished, saying, “don’t scream, and I won’t kill you.” She told me of her paralyzing fear as he roughly grabbed her from her chair, pushing her to the floor of the dining room as he held the shears to her throat. On her back now, she lay frozen in terror as he began fumbling with the front of his pants. Painfully aware of what was to transpire, she began to blaze with anger at what was happening to her, a plan forming in her suddenly clear mind.

Waiting for the man to shift his weight as he fumbled to remove both his pants and hers, she thrust her knee violently up into his exposed groin, causing him to cry out in pain. Angered, he raised the shears over his head as he prepared to stab her. Despite no formal training in self-defense and with a weight disadvantage of perhaps 100 pounds, she calmly reached up with one hand, grasping his wrist and stopping the downward thrust of the shears at its apex. Then, with a technique that could have easily been taught in a martial arts class, she reached over his wrist with her other hand and ripped the shears from his grasp. Fumbling for an instant with her grip on the shears, she then buried them up to the handle in his lower back, over his left kidney. Her assailant stiffened in pain, crying out as he rolled off of her. Up to this point in her tale, I remained mostly silent, but I could no longer hold my tongue. “You…you stabbed him?” I asked, staring at this tiny girl in awe. She proudly nodded, her tears subsiding now. For just a moment, I lost all of my professional demeanor, making a quick fist pump in the air before regaining control of myself and continuing to take her account of her ordeal.

We walked carefully through the crime scene then as she continued to recount her remarkable tale of survival. We followed the wounded man’s blood trail into the parking lot as she told me of her escape to the restaurant at the front of the lot. Seeing her distress, a cook who knew her had taken her inside and called 911. A few minutes before I arrived, the suspect had fled in his work van, and I quickly put out a multi-county bulletin with the vehicle description. Soon after, the girl’s mother arrived home. She was a disheveled-looking woman in her late thirties, with the dead eyes of a drug addict. Our investigation would later reveal that she had been partying with the carpet installers the previous day, smoking crack cocaine and drinking throughout the afternoon. Her daughter’s assailant, a paroled rapist, had spotted the daughter and formed his plot to return the next day.

We would find our suspect later that night, parked off the road in a neighboring county. Near-death from blood loss, the result of both of his stab wounds and several self-inflicted cuts to his wrists, he survived and was later convicted of attempted rape. He would serve seven years in prison before being released yet again to prey upon the women of our community. Within weeks of being paroled, similarly armed with a pair of carpet shears, he sexually assaulted a woman in broad daylight at a local health club. On this occasion, his crime was interrupted by an off-duty probation officer who happened to be in the area. He was eventually arrested and convicted, and he remains in prison as I write this.

I hesitated at first in telling this story, as I would never wish to imply that anyone who does not violently resist sexual assault or any other crime is somehow complicit or blameworthy in any way for what they have suffered. In any criminal act, the burden of guilt and responsibility lies solely on the perpetrator. I have investigated enough sexual assaults and other violent crimes to understand that there are times when one’s survival requires compliance, either for one’s own physical safety or for the protection of others. The tragic aftermath of any sexual assault is nothing to be taken lightly, and I remember every one of the cases I investigated. Nonetheless, I have always regarded this young woman and her story with a mixture of admiration and awe. Her quiet resolve in defending herself and her life stayed with me throughout my career.

In Africa and parts of Asia, there is an animal called a honey badger, a compact, ferocious mammal similar in appearance to a weasel. Small and lethal, these beautiful creatures are well known to outdoorsmen and biologists for their feisty temperament, often backing down animals such as lions and hyenas in their fight for survival. I came to think of this young woman, probably middle-aged now but forever sixteen in my mind, like a honey badger, fearless, beautiful, and indomitable in the face of terrible odds. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, especially if you are willing to pay attention. She was, and is, a hero to me. I remember her whenever I drive by that address, and I hope her fiery spirit has continued to carry her forward as she has faced life’s many adversities.

It is Thanksgiving Day, 1982. I am seventeen years old and a senior in high school. My mother, a gourmet cook, has been working in the kitchen since early that morning. She is preparing for an event that has not happened in many years; my father is coming to Thanksgiving dinner. My parents have been separated since I was nine and officially divorced since the summer after I turned twelve. My childhood, spent navigating the trenches and minefields of their fractious and turbulent marriage, has revolved chiefly around placating one parent or the other, all while reading the tea leaves and scattered chicken bones of their unpredictable moods. It has been several years since I have seen my mother and father in the same room. My sister and I tidy up the downstairs and glance nervously at the clock. The house vibrates with tension as we await my father’s arrival.

My earliest recollection of my father is a fond one. It is 1968, and we are visiting with my cousins at my grandparent’s summer home in Southold, Long Island. My father, dressed in overalls and a large straw hat, has taken on the persona of “Shacknasty Jim,” a character of his own invention. He hides in a broken-down shed on the property as various cousins attempt to stealthily approach, running and squealing with delight as he emerges in mock outrage. Shaking his fist as he chases us about, he shouts at us, telling us to get off of his land. I am breathless with exhilaration. This will be one of the most pleasant and unspoiled memories I have of my father. Less than a year later, he will move my family from our home in Connecticut to Rochester, New York, where he has taken a higher-paying job with Xerox. It is here that the rapid unraveling of my young life would begin.

The decade that followed would be spent watching my father descend rapidly into the alcoholism that would eventually overtake every aspect of his life. My mother, insecure, isolated, and woefully unequipped to deal with the shame and unpredictability of my father’s drinking, often unleashes her mercurial temper on my sister and me, and our home becomes a place filled with tension and anger. On one memorable summer night when I am five, my mother rouses me from bed after a loud and physical argument with my dad in the kitchen below where I sleep. There was no need to wake me, as I was already awake and rigid with terror as I listened to the chaos below. “Get up,” she commands, and I do so without hesitation, already well trained in survival. Quickly we move to my sister’s room, where she is also roused from bed. My mother then engaged in a brief standoff with my father as he attempted to block our path. We run down the stairs and into the garage, where the family station wagon is parked. My mother attempts her escape, slowly backing out of the garage. Suddenly my father, hideously drunk, mounts the car’s hood in an attempt to prevent our departure. We exit the car and run down the street to a sympathetic neighbor’s as my father stands shouting in the driveway, unable to pursue on legs made unsteady by copious amounts of gin. I am breathless now, too, my fear of my father as pure as a blue flame. The next day, we return to the house, with no mention made of what had occurred. It is as if the night has simply never happened. But I refuse to forget.

The years that follow are a blur of the same sad play, repeated in countless acts, repetitive and predictable. My father, who I would later learn had been an alcoholic since the age of fourteen, maintains his high-level executive job for over a decade as his alcoholism grows worse and worse. There are DWI arrests, bitter fights, and more midnight runs down our quiet suburban street. And worst of all, there is secrecy. My mother, paralyzed by the fear that others will know the shame of what happens behind the closed doors of our home, reminds my sister and me frequently that we must never, ever tell anyone of what goes on inside the walls of our house. I live the first twelve years of my life unaware that anyone else in the world lives the way I do, envious of the families I see on TV sitcoms and in the movies. There are no family gatherings, no overnight guests. I spend the vast portion of my time in the fields and woods behind our house or hiding in my room, escaping into books. One memorable Christmas when I am seven, my father is entirely and inexplicably absent from our home. My mother offers no explanation for his disappearance, only telling my sister and me that he will not be home for Christmas. He will not return until late spring, living in a room at the YMCA in downtown Rochester. Years later, when I become a police officer, I will learn that he had been in jail following a felony DWI arrest, and my mother, fed up with his antics, had refused to bail him out. Their separation comes soon after, followed by a bitter, acrimonious divorce.

In late 1981, my father lost his job with Xerox, and his alcoholism rapidly entered the acute stage. From this point forward, he is largely absent from my life, so deeply buried in his own shame that he cannot bear to spend time with his children. I will learn to shave, tie a tie, and all the rest of the small passages a boy makes into manhood on my own. I come to dread my father’s occasional phone calls, able now to gauge his level of intoxication from just his first few words. Often, he simply passes out on the phone, and I quietly hang up, feeling both sorrow and relief. Panicked by the loss of income, my mother will regularly tell my sister and me that we will have to move, that I will have to start my senior year in a new school, that my sister will have to drop out of the college she has come to love. I go to class each day wondering where I will finish high school. Once content with the occasional Sunday movie visit, my father is a minimal presence in my life by the beginning of my senior year, but for some odd reason, the hope that my parents could somehow reconcile still lives inside me. There is some of this hope mixed in with the fear I feel inside as we await his visit that Thanksgiving day.

He arrives promptly at 4pm, our family’s customary time to start Thanksgiving dinner. As he enters the house, I notice that he has lost weight. His clothes hang off of his frame, and his paper-white skin seems to stretch over his skull. Years of hard-won experience tell me that he is dreadfully hungover. As we all sit down to dinner, my mother says grace, and the young child still alive within me allows the hope of a new beginning to burn for just a moment. But new beginnings are not my family’s stock in trade. My father takes a tiny bite of the turkey my mother has spent hours preparing, then bolts to the small powder room off the hallway from our dining room.
We listen in silence as he vomits over and over, the sound of his retching roiling my stomach. My mother begins to cry softly. I ask her to go upstairs to her bedroom, and she wordlessly complies. My father, unsteady on his feet and shaking, reenters the dining room, unable to meet the gaze of his children. I tell him to leave, and he does so without a word of protest or explanation. We finish our dinner without any discussion of what has occurred. It is the last holiday I will spend with my father. Two years later, his brothers will manage to get him admitted to a rehab facility in New Jersey. He will have a short period of sobriety before his slow death from a brain tumor a few years later, our tentative reconciliation having barely begun.

I have heard people, mostly fellow cops, laugh and joke about my “soft” upbringing in a wealthy suburb throughout my adult life. I would mostly laugh it off, but deep down, I always knew the truth. Green lawns, stylish clothes, and nice cars don’t mean a thing. Behind those polished wood doors and neatly drawn shades hides a world unspoken and unseen. I never lost sight of this as I entered my chosen profession, and I brought the baggage of my own experiences into all of the sad homes I visited. A favorite quote of mine has always been this one by Socrates; “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” You can never really know what someone has been through, what tragedy hides behind their eyes. If you had, or have created, the type of life that many can only dream of, give thanks, today and every day, for that minor miracle. Remember that possessions mean little, and that love is the only essential thing in life. And always, always be kind.

As I pulled up to the laundromat, located at the back of a small strip mall, I saw her standing outside by the door, a frail, grey-haired woman of about 70. The call was for simple larceny, with no real details provided, and I wasn’t expecting much more than a quick report. As I walked towards her, metal clipboard in hand, I could see that she was crying. “What’s going on, dear,” I asked as I stepped up from the curb and followed her into the small, cramped business. She spoke through short sobs, telling me that her life savings, around $800, had been stolen some time overnight from a coffee can she kept in her back room. Concerned that this was a burglary, I asked if anyone had access to the business when she was not there. She began to cry harder as she told me she had recently taken in two homeless young men, both about twenty years old, who had shown up looking for work a few days earlier. She went on to tell me that she had allowed the two to stay in her stock room at night, even going so far as to bring them food and some spare clothes left behind by customers at the laundromat. When she had returned to work that morning, she had found their sleeping bags and belongings gone, along with the stolen money, which represented the entire month’s proceeds from her meager business. Despite her predicament, as I left, the woman begged me not to arrest the men if I found them, asking only for her money to be returned. I assured her that I would respect her wishes and left to begin my search.

It didn’t take Dick Tracy to recognize who my suspects were, and I quickly got to work attempting to locate them. The woman had been able to provide a small amount of information about the men’s identities, and in a short amount of time I had located an acquaintance of theirs who lived in a trailer park near the laundromat. At first, I appealed to his sense of fairness and decency, then to his basic need to maintain a positive relationship with his local police. Pressing him for their probable whereabouts, I assured him that I would under no circumstances tell his friends how I came by the information. After a short period of hesitation, he relented, telling me that the two were laying low at a small mechanic’s garage just over the line into a neighboring county. Assuring him of full confidentiality, I hopped in my patrol car and headed off, anxious to catch up to the two drifters before they disappeared for good into the wind.

In my department, any time an investigation took you out of your patrol area, it was our procedure to call and obtain permission from a sergeant to leave your district. Given that this was in a neighboring county, the rule was even more strictly interpreted, and I knew it was unlikely I would receive permission. With this in mind, I elected to leave the sergeant out of it altogether, letting my fellow district cars know of my intentions. They agreed to cover for me, and off I went, happily in search of my prey.

Pulling into the dilapidated garage parking lot about 20 minutes later, I saw no sign of the men at first. Peering through the dirty glass windows, I observed a thin, sallow young man of about 16 seated by the cash register, eying me nervously as I entered the business. Certain by his description that he was neither of my suspects, I decided to be direct, saying, “I’m not here for you,” before asking in a low voice, “where are they.” Without speaking, he darted his eyes several times toward the garage area adjacent to the office. I nodded and stepped into the garage, the smell of oil and grease in my nose as my eyes slowly adjusted to the dim light. Looking to the rear of the garage, I saw the two of them crouched behind the bumper of a decrepit, rusted pickup truck. I called out to them, telling them to show me their hands and step out into the light. Both men grudgingly did so, their eyes moving from me to the doorway behind me. One was over 6 feet tall, with a stocky build; the other, closer to me, was thin, smaller in build, and clearly nervous, his rapid breathing audible in the quiet of the cramped space. I stepped in and pushed the one closest to me into the side of the pickup, telling the other one to sit down with his hands on his head. After searching him quickly, I had the men trade places and searched the stocky one before switching again, taking the thin one with me to the front of the garage, out of earshot of his partner in crime. Speaking softy, I advised him that I would be leaving there that day with the old woman’s money; how that would be accomplished would be up to him and his partner. He protested at first, then quickly caved, whispering to me that the entire sum was concealed in his accomplice’s underwear. I thanked him for his honesty and proceeded back to where his friend sullenly waited on the oil-stained concrete floor.

“Get up'” I shouted, startling him from his quiet reverie. He stood slowly, glaring at me as he rose. About my size, his scarred hands and rough features told a story of a hard life, but I had no room in my heart for sympathy as I thought of the weeping old woman, her rent and grocery money currently stuffed down this young man’s pants. “Where’s the money,” I commanded, making a “give it here” gesture with my hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spat. Leaning in close, I cheerfully advised him that I had no intention of taking either of them to jail but would happily bounce both of them off of every wall in that garage until I obtained what I had come there for. My bluff hung in the air for a moment as we stared at one another, his eyes revealing the tallying up of past decisions, both good and bad. Without a word, he opened his pants and reached inside, pulling out a tightly wrapped wad of bills still in the sandwich bag they had been in when he had lifted it from the old woman’s coffee can. “There’s about $15 missing,” he said, eyes now averting my gaze. “We got some food.” Taking the money, I assured him that the old woman would surely be amenable to calling it even. I left them standing there in the dirty garage, anxious to return to my district before my supervisor discovered my absence.

Both large and small moments stand out in any cop’s career, some good, many awful. Over the years, I would discover and rediscover how painfully rare it is that any true justice is delivered to most who suffer from the indignity of a crime. Black eyes and broken bones heal, but scars and nightmares remain. Stolen property is rarely recovered, and often there is no resolution, no “closure” at all for the countless victims we interact with each day. I can still see that woman’s face as I handed her back her money, and I can still hear her thanking me as I got in my car to drive away. Throughout my career, I would return to this moment, small as it was, as a way to sustain me in the face of so much random pain and injustice. Every now and then, the good guys do win.

When I first became a supervisor, one of the new responsibilities I dreaded most was performing death notifies. In most police departments, any death notification must be handled by someone the rank of sergeant or above. Though I encountered exceptions to this rule before my promotion, I had scant experience with the unpleasant job. There is some training, of course, perhaps four hours, conducted during a month-long supervisor’s school and augmented during the field training that follows. Still, the unfortunate reality for any new sergeant is that the first death notify performed in the field will in all likelihood be your first. Protocol dictates that a second officer be brought along as a safety precaution. Those receiving the terrible message we deliver often react in unpredictable ways, sometimes lashing out at the bearer of bad news. Still, it is generally left to the sergeant to do all of the talking.

     In all my years in patrol, mostly spent on the midnight shift, I completed more notifies than I care to remember, many of which were to parents, roused from sleep in the dead of night to the bitter news that a beloved child would never again be coming home. As the years passed, I came to feel at times as if I were some sort of awful drone, guided in by fate through the quiet night to lay waste to the life of yet another family. Regrettably, I was already familiar with sudden death in a profoundly personal way before even starting my police career. When I was 21, I was awakened one summer day by a phone call telling me that my best friend in the world had been killed early that morning in a DWI crash, his sudden passing my first taste of the random and transient nature of our existence here on earth. I spent the rest of that day and many days after that at his family’s side, observing their unimaginable grief as it progressed and changed over the months and years. The remarkable depth of their pain never left me, and I carried my lost friend’s memory and the legacy of his parent’s anguished grief into each of the homes I entered. 

   In training, they tell you to be quick, that there is no sense in taking a long way around to telling the awful truth of your presence in the homes you visit. I have worked with supervisors who were seemingly unable to do this, and the minutes it took for them to stutter out the horrible message being delivered seemed to stretch into hours. In my experience, all of the parents I pulled from bed over the years seemed to know the purpose of my visit before I even spoke, their eyes telling me of their terror. Keeping this in mind, I tried to get as quickly to the point as I could without seeming callous in any way. Over the years, I found that it was crucial to be very specific in my language. Phrases like “he did not make it” seemed insufficient, parents often clinging to the slimmest hopes that they misunderstood my message, desperate to believe that their child was not dead. I learned too that I had to be prepared to answer any number of tough questions, often in excruciating detail, as those left behind are frequently intensely curious about the exact circumstances surrounding their loved one’s death.

   As the years went by and I grew more experienced, I learned to take some pride in what I eventually came to see as a sacred duty to the people I served. Eventually, becoming a parent myself added a layer of understanding to the magnitude of the loss I carried to their front door, though it also added to the already significant challenge of controlling my own emotions as I did my job. Strangers at answering the doorbell, our lives would soon be forever intertwined, my visit now emblazoned on their memories. I sought most to give as much immediate assistance as possible, without any false notions of providing any absolute comfort in their most awful hours. 

   One of the last notifies I did was the summer before I retired. I had responded as the on-duty supervisor to the scene of a fatal motorcycle crash. The victim, who had been killed instantly, was well known to the night shift, a “frequent flier” with a litany of minor arrests, primarily for traffic. After the medical examiner’s arrival, I left the scene to locate his mother and stepfather to deliver the terrible news of their son’s death. The young man’s stepfather, also no stranger to the local police, answered the door but refused to admit me into the house until I told him the purpose of my visit. Left with no other recourse, I spoke quietly through the rusted screen door, describing to him as gently as I could the sad details of how their son had been killed. Wordlessly he disappeared into the darkened residence. Standing in the driveway now, I heard hushed voices from somewhere inside the house, then after perhaps a minute, a woman in a bathrobe burst through the door, running towards me screaming her son’s name. Upon reaching me, she began weeping uncontrollably as she flung her arms around my neck, burying her face into my chest. I held her there in the driveway as the warm summer breeze rushed through the trees, quietly competing with the sound of her anguished sobs. She remained there for several minutes, never uttering a word, her tears soaking the front of my uniform. We were so close that I could smell the scent of her shampoo. The intimacy of that moment, so intensely personal, was almost too much for me to bear. I remember looking helplessly at her husband as he stared impassively at us, unable or unwilling to intervene. After a few more minutes passed, she silently withdrew, and without saying a word, turned and walked back into her house, her husband following her as she slammed the door behind her. My lieutenant and I padded back to our cars, our shift now almost over. 

   Whenever I see a news story about a fatal car crash, an accidental death, or a murder, I think first of the victim and the families and loved ones they leave behind. But eventually, my thoughts turn to the policemen tasked with bringing the sad news to these people. We carry a little bit of each of these tragedies with us as we find our way through our careers, and through our lives. 

     I was parked at the ambulance base when the dispatcher’s voice came over the radio, breaking the silence of what had been a remarkably slow Sunday shift. “For the violent family trouble, male choking the female, son is punching the father trying to intervene, sister is the caller, she is staying on the line.” We were in the middle of a blizzard, and the air had been remarkably quiet, even for a Sunday evening. Checking the address as I acknowledged the call I realized I was only a few minutes away, even allowing for the snow covered roads. My backup car chimed in, advising dispatch that he was quite a ways out. I felt the familiar rush of adrenaline and tension, exacerbated by the fact that I would almost certainly be solo for at least a portion of the call. Domestic violence calls are well known for their potential for risk, and this one was being dispatched as an in progress fight, but in those days it was considered bad form to wait for backup on almost any call, and anything but an immediate response was out of the question. 

     Minutes later I arrived at the house, a spacious suburban home in an upscale new housing tract. I parked down the street as I had been trained to do years before and waded through knee high drifts up to the house, cautiously looking through the windows as I approached. Standing to the side of the door frame, I listened for a moment. Hearing nothing, I rang the bell and waited. Seconds later a young woman about 19 years old  answered the door, excitedly waving me inside. “Where is he,” I asked, glancing around the interior. “Upstairs in his office,” she replied, looking nervously toward the stairs. “He went up there when I called 911.” After being assured that there were no firearms in the house, I walked through the foyer to the kitchen where I saw a middle aged woman weeping quietly at the table. Beside her was a teenaged boy, also crying. Glancing at the woman’s neck I saw the bright red handprints. In a rasping voice she recounted the argument with her husband, her hands unconsciously traveling to her throat as she described him choking her as he held her against the front door. The violence contained in her narrative seemed incongruous with the tidy, stylish home, but I knew better than to make any assumptions. The quiet, manicured facade of suburban America hides a multitude of sins. After she finished recounting the night’s events, her son asked in a halting voice if he was going to be in trouble for hitting his father. I told him not to worry, then headed for the stairs, no longer content to wait for another car. 

     Reaching the second floor, I saw him sitting in a leather chair facing the doorway of his well appointed office. He was a large man in his late forties, over six feet tall and heavyset, his face flushed from drinking. He was well dressed in a white button down shirt and khaki pants, his feet in leather boat shoes. Surrounding him were the trappings of an upper middle class life; golf trophies, fishing gear, smiling family photos. Various awards from a large, well known local corporation adorned the walls alongside diplomas from a prestigious college. I winced for a moment thinking of my own small city home and community college degree. He looked at me and sneered “get out of my house,” his words thick with whiskey. Stepping into the room, I decided that my best option was aggression. I quickly moved towards him and said in a loud voice, “Get up and turn around, you’re under arrest.” Without moving to get up, he began to stutter out a response which I cut off with “get up or your going to get hurt.” Glaring at me, he rose unsteadily from his chair, a man obviously unaccustomed to being told what to do. I spun him around quickly, pushing him into a wall and handcuffing him before he could consider any other course of action. Like many abusive men I had arrested, he was unaccustomed to dealing with opponents capable of defending themselves, and seemed unsure and off balance in the face of my aggression. After calling dispatch to report that the suspect was in custody, I walked him downstairs and out the front door into the cold night air, his family watching in stunned silence from the kitchen doorway. As I exited the house my backup officer arrived, his car caked in snow. Apologizing profusely for the delay, he volunteered to secure my prisoner in his car while I completed my report inside. After placing the man in his back seat, I returned to the house to get the necessary paperwork signed by the victim and her two children. 

     As I reentered the kitchen I noticed all three staring at me as if I had two heads. “What’s wrong,” I asked, looking around at the three of them and setting my clipboard down on the table. “The cops have been here at least ten times, and nobody has ever done anything,” the man’s daughter stammered. “You just walked in and arrested him.” My face reddened with embarrassment at my coworkers negligence. Having grown up in a similarly turbulent home environment, I knew well the fear and shame that accompany the violence that happens behind closed doors, and I never missed an opportunity to intervene in these situations. I never understood the reluctance on the part of some of my fellow officers to simply do their job when an arrest was warranted. After complimenting the man’s son for his courage in defending his mother, I apologized to the three of them for the past failures of my department and went about the business of completing the arrest and preparing my prisoner for arraignment.

     Later, after a judge had set bail and remanded him to jail, I began our slow trip downtown on the snow covered streets. On the way to lockup, my prisoner began asking me what booking would be like, and if he would be in a big cell with a lot of other people like he had seen on television. He was clearly frightened, and it gave me no small amount of joy to see this abusive bully reduced to a fearful little man on the verge of tears. As we entered booking, he begged me to tell the deputies that he had fought with me, in the apparent hope that he would gain some status with the other inmates and thus be saved from whatever fate television had taught him was in store. Telling him to shut his mouth, I continued into the booking area. 

     As we came through the door, now in full view of the holding cells packed with the weekend’s city arrestees awaiting Monday morning arraignment, our noses were assaulted by the unmistakable aroma of a big city jail, a mix of unwashed bodies, Pine Sol, and urine, combined with the stink of fear. Inmates stood 20 deep in the holding cells, catcalling and laughing as we walked by. “What he in here for, embezzlement?””Put white boy in with us, we won’t hurt him.” I felt his body tense up and he suddenly shouted “get the fuck off of me, pig,” as he halfheartedly shoved me sideways with his body. Amused by his rather pathetic performance, I laughed and pushed him forward, forgetting for the moment that the deputies in booking, bored on a slow winter night, were unaware of his plan. No less than six of them, all large men intimately familiar with violence, poured over the counter in a waterfall of blue uniforms and ran to us, roughly snatching my prisoner from me before I could say a word and dragging him to “the alley,” a row of single cells at the rear of the booking area where recalcitrant prisoners were brought to be unceremoniously strip searched. Wordlessly, I handed my arrest paperwork over to the booking deputy and made my way back to my car, his aggrieved shouts growing fainter as the heavy door closed behind me. Feeling slightly guilty at how pleased I was with how things had turned out, I returned to my district to finish my shift.

I never saw him again after that night, but I did see his wife. It was summertime, about six months later, and I had been called to return to the home for another domestic report. As I walked up the driveway, she met me in the garage, smiling broadly and waving as she recognized me. I asked with some concern if he had been abusing her again. “Oh no,” she laughed. “We’re getting a divorce, today he was arguing with me about money. He hasn’t laid a hand on me or the kids since you came here that night. I don’t know what you guys did to him, but whatever it was, it scared him pretty bad.” I completed a report for her to document the verbal argument and went on my way, her grateful thank you’s echoing in my head. Police don’t often get to see the positive impact our interventions can have on the people we serve, and this call stayed with me. I’ve often reflected on that night, that family, and how the small things that we do, both good and bad, can change the lives of others in ways we simply cannot imagine.

     Her name was Carol, and she was the first person I’d ever seen die. I was 23, and I had been a police officer for about a year. She certainly wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen, that number was already in the teens by the end of my first year on the job. Cops see a lot of dead people, mostly from natural causes, elderly people who died on the toilet at 4am, middle aged men felled by heart attacks while cutting their grass, the loners whose neighbors call when the mail piles up and the grass gets too high. Throw in the occasional car accident or drowning, the even more rare homicide, and of course, the suicides. One memorable week I went to four of them; two gunshots, a hanging, and a drug overdose. White suburbia, where I spent a good portion of my career, is a fertile breeding ground for suicide. 

     But this call was different. A trim and attractive woman in her fifties, she was still buckled into her seat when I arrived as first car on scene of a car crash. It was a bitterly cold day in early February, and the bright afternoon sun did nothing to blunt the sharp edge of the frigid air. I’d been right down the street finishing up a domestic abuse report, when I heard the unmistakable sound of metal on metal up the road from the driveway where I was parked. I’d quickly stashed my report in my metal clipboard and raced up the street, several motorists already out of their cars and frantically waving me over. She was a passenger in a small sedan that had been struck broadside by another car, the vehicle she was riding in propelled 50 feet into a nearby ditch, her side of the car completely crushed. Her husband, who had been the driver, sat dazed in the snow next to the vehicle, holding his right arm in a manner to suggest it might be broken.

     I ran to the vehicle, expecting the worst, the sickly sweet smell of burning antifreeze overpowering in my nose. At first glance, she appeared uninjured, but as I attempted to open her car door I heard a sound issuing from her throat that I would, much later and with many more such incidents under my belt, come to think of as a death rattle. A more seasoned officer had showed up shortly after I did, and now his bulky frame and creaking leather jacket filled the shattered and mangled space where the passenger door had been. He was a twenty year veteran, the skin of his face leathery and red from years of hard drinking. Hearing the sound he shook his head sadly and said “better call the Sarge, this one’s a fatal,” which was department lingo for a traffic related fatality requiring a supervisor, before trudging back to his car where he began removing road flares from the trunk to divert oncoming traffic.

     Minutes later, the scene was filled with emergency equipment, and I stood back at a safe distance as the fire department worked furiously to cut her from the car. Once extracted, she was quickly placed on a backboard, then taken on a gurney to a waiting ambulance. I rode in the back of the rig with her to the emergency room, the paramedics calling ahead with all sorts of vital signs and medical terms that I did not understand. We drove at breakneck speeds through the suburbs and into the city as they worked, mostly in silence. Within minutes we arrived at the closest emergency room, where I watched in awe as two surgeons and a team of nurses cut into her chest in order to perform open heart massage in a vain attempt to save her life. After about 20 minutes of furious effort they abruptly stopped, the attending doctor stating a time of death in a flat and emotionless tone before snapping off his latex gloves and walking away from the table to attend to other tragedies. I remained behind in the now silent room, the tangy scent of blood mixed with antiseptic skin prep heavy in the air.

      I would later learn that her pulmonary vein had been torn from the top of her heart, an almost always fatal injury. I spent the rest of that day speaking to her husband, and the driver of the car who had struck them. We had to call an ambulance for the other driver, a pleasant woman in her 40’s, who collapsed upon hearing that her actions had led to another person’s death. I can’t tell you how many more deaths I saw over the ensuing 25 years, and I remember very few of their names, but I will always remember the first. Her name was Carol, and I was there when she died.