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He’s Mine. Back Off!

I had dropped off my pet at a vet near our transit police headquarters. As I was walking out back to my car I noticed a young big black man running across a schoolyard playground. He hit the chain-link fence, climbed over and ran down the street.

Two other police came up and said, “Get him! Get him!” So I went dashing down the street.

But then I realized, “Ah, I don’t see him.”

Two women hanging out their window said, “He went down there, officer.”

There was a door in the side of the street. I just go in there, walking into the dark until I came out the other side into a series of back yards. Then I began running and jump over fence after fence. I finally come to the last yard where the building rounds the bend into an L. I go running in.

There I see this poor suspect towering over me, but huffing like he was going to have a heart attack. I am just standing there as cool, as non-winded as possible. I had run track in school.

Here I am confronted with him. And I hadn’t had that much practice and I wasn’t really that tough. I’d never have made it in the regular police force. I just wasn’t that aggressive. But all I had to do was say, “OK, you’re under arrest, turn around, put your hands on your head, walk to the wall.”

And he just did everything I said. I didn’t even touch him. He was so astonished that I would show up. He was just so exhausted. After I had put him in cuffs, my two partners showed up.

Then things got interesting. I was the only white person there–black suspect, two black transit police officers.

And they were beside themselves, saying, “Hold him up. Let me hit him!” He had apparently assaulted one of our female officers on her way to work. So here I am, protecting this suspect. Once I had my suspect arrested, I lost all my anger. I thought they were pathetic at that point, because they were defenseless. You had done the worst thing you could do, which was to take away their liberty. I never understood the temptation to beat them further. Even though in the pursuit I’d be agitated, angry.

I’ll never forget that incident. People often say it’s the whites beating the blacks. But here it was two blacks wanted to beat a black suspect. And I was saying, “No, he’s mine. Back off!”

Mother’s Day Showdown

On Mother’s Day a guy decided to get back at his ex-wife by killing his son and his new girlfriend. Uniform got the call, shots fired.

They get there, open the door, look inside, see somebody on the sofa who appears to be dead. The guy slams the door and the iron door on them. Uniform called swat. We go. They start negotiation with him.

We go into that house, gassed up with our masks on, listening to him talk to negotiators for three hours with two dead bodies no more than three feet away from us, listening to this guy saying, “I don’t care who comes in, I’m going to kill them. I know you’re out there. I know they’re in my kitchen. I can hear them.”

Quiet as you want to be, you’re still going to make noise. You’re breathing through the masks. Plus the guy knows his house, the creaks and noises. Three hours, nonstop.

Finally the negotiator says, “We’re going to try a technique where we’re going to bring him down. If you confront him with a group of guys, chances are he’s going to give up.”

Well, as soon as Felix made entry into the living room, jumping over those two dead bodies, he opens up on us, firing two rounds. Felix was able to get off one shot, caught the guy in the left arm with the shotgun. I shot two rounds with my MP5 sub machine gun. I missed. The shotgun had knifed him around sideways leaving five rounds in the wall in a pattern of softball size where he had been. The guy ducked back in the bedroom.

He had a fatal wound from the shotgun blast, and was probably going to bleed out in a couple minutes, decided it wasn’t worth it, put the gun to his head and shot himself.


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