Breaking Rank (50 page)

It's a hazy Saturday afternoon, September 23, 1972. San Diego's version of fall is in the air. The beaches have thinned, the zoo is down to its post—Labor Day crowds, kids have gone back to school. Patricia, my second wife, is in her study working on her first collection of poems as I drive into the POA parking lot on West Market. I'm preoccupied with a dozen to-dos—budget, staffing, personnel evaluations, contingency plans for an upcoming antinuclear demonstration . . .

“Good, you're here,” says Ken O'Brien. “Drop everything and come with me.” He's more agitated than usual. I follow him into the patrol captain's office. “I need a lieutenant for this one.” My boss hands me a note he's just scribbled. “We got a guy out in the east end threatening to kill his wife and kid.” My adrenalin cranks up a notch. Cops live for these moments,
even us midlevel managers who spend most of our shifts buried under mounds of paper. The note, in O'Brien's customary red ink, reads,
J. Carb. Threat to kill Baby
. 2½
yrs.
O'Brien has been rounding up as many plainclothes detectives as he can find on a late weekend afternoon. As they filter in, I bolt upstairs to the supervisors' locker room. I strip out of my uniform and get back into my civvies. I make a decision, and slip my service weapon into the waistband of my chinos: I realize the damage my off-duty gun can do but at the moment the snub-nosed Chief's Special feels like a toy. If this thing turns nasty I'd rather have the six shots, and the six-inch barrel.

When we're all present, O'Brien lays it out. Nancy Carberry, twenty, has filed for divorce from her estranged husband, Joseph Anthony Carberry, twenty-three. A records check reveals four or five arrests, for burglary and assault. There's a restraining order against him but he is allowed to visit their child, two-and-a-half-year-old Joey, once a week. Carberry is allowed no contact with Nancy, so earlier that day her mother dropped the kid off at his mother's house.

A couple of hours later Carberry starts calling people. His mother-in-law, his sister-in-law. He tells them he's going to kill the kid, any cop who intervenes, his wife, his mother-in-law, then himself. O'Brien has sent a sergeant out to pick up Nancy. We'll meet her in the field, get additional details.

I assign two-man teams: Sgt. Kenny Reson and Jim Sanders to Team 1, Ron Collins and Don Wright to Team 2, Dave Kelly and Joe Varley to Team 3. Hoyle and I are Team 4. We get word that Nancy Carberry is en route to Normal Heights. I send Team 1 to meet her at Thirtieth and Monroe.

Hoyle gets the keys to the armory, hands out binoculars, portable radios, shotguns. I send Teams 2 and 3 to Morley Field, east of the zoo. O'Brien activates SWAT, tells its commander to muster his team there, too. Hoyle and I hustle out to his Ford Torino in the POA lot and he drives us to Thirtieth and Monroe. We meet Nancy, and learn more about her husband.

Joseph Anthony Carberry, Jr. White male, 5'7”, 150 pounds. Reddish auburn hair. Unemployed truck driver. Drives a '67 blue Ford Galaxie, driver's door smashed in. Father of two boys, Joey and one-year-old Jim. He's violent, unstable, Nancy tells us. Twice he's beaten up her brother as
he tried to rescue her. He's thrashed her grandfather, sending him to the ER. He's slapped Joey repeatedly, beating him with a belt, intensifying his attacks as she pleads with him to stop. He's blackened both her eyes, tied her up with speaker wire, hung her upside down in a closet.

“Does he have a gun?”

“Yes.”

“What kind?”

“A .32 pistol. It's his roommate's.” Nancy sobs and shakes as she talks. “He's called back twice since Mom phoned you guys. He keeps saying he's going to kill Joey. He's really off the deep end, totally crazy. He hasn't been eating, or sleeping. He wants me back even if he has to kill me to get me.”

It's nearing 5:30. Carberry is an hour and a half deep into a violation of a court order. He's out there somewhere, angry, confused, running scared. And acting cagey. He's been stopping, we theorize, at different pay phones, making his calls curt, untraceable. In his last one, he'd given instructions for Nancy to follow. She's to walk south on Texas from El Cajon, turn left at the next block, right at the next, left at the next. He'll be waiting for her there.

I assign the teams to north-south, east-west grids. We head out, leaving Nancy with the patrol sergeant. The last thing we want to do is use her for bait, but we have to consider it. Ideally, we spot Carberry before he gets to his next phone booth. He leaves Joey in the car, and gives us a shot at taking him down a distance from the kid.

“I keep thinking about that little boy,” says Hoyle.

“Yeah, me too.” I imagine him, from his mother's description. Tow-headed, thigh-high to a short adult. Wearing green pants, a green short-sleeve shirt, white socks, and one black shoe.
*
I picture Matthew, at Joey's age. He's in the backyard on R Avenue, running around on a hot summer day in a pair of Oshkosh B' Gosh overalls, no shirt, no shoes . . .

The radio crackles. Team 2 is on the air. They've spotted the Galaxie up ahead, though they can't tell whether there's a kid in the car. They tail
Carberry for a while, then back off as Team 1 slides into place. Carberry takes a serpentine route through the residential streets south of El Cajon Boulevard. Team 1 sloughs off, replaced by Team 3. A few blocks later, Hoyle and I take over. I see Joey's blond mop on the passenger side. I get on the radio to the other teams, “The kid's definitely in the vehicle. Repeat. The kid is in the car.” I switch over from tac to freq 3 and advise all patrol units to stay out of the area until notified. “We don't want to spook this guy.”

Carberry turns north on Texas and crosses the boulevard for the first time since we've been tailing him. He's in commercial territory now. A promising sign. The Galaxie makes it through on the yellow at Meade but we catch the red. “Bust it, Freddie.”

“You got it, Boss.”

I switch back to tac. “Stay close, guys. But don't let him spot you.” Hoyle rolls through the red light, slow, like a tourist with his head up his ass. “Nicely done, partner.”

At Madison, Carberry signals a left. The gas station: He's headed for the Mobil station on the northwest corner to make his next call. It's only a hunch, of course, but strong enough for me to instruct all detective units to converge. When traffic clears the intersection, Carberry does indeed turn in to the station. He parks in front of a row of pumps, gets out of the car, chats for a second with the attendant, then heads for the phone located just inside the service bay. We pull onto the lot like we're going for gas. “Stay with Joey,” I say to Hoyle. “I'm going after him.”

I slide out of the car, letting Carberry get as far away from the kid as possible. He stops at the phone. As soon as he lifts the receiver I badge him. “San Diego Police.” I don't shout it but say it in the firm, clear “command presence” voice I was taught in the academy. “Let's talk, Joseph.” Joseph doesn't want to talk. He drops the phone, leaving it dangling on its coiled chrome snake, and rabbits across the service bay and out an open door on the other side. I pull the .38 from my waistband and give chase. This time, I do shout. At the top of my lungs: “Stop or I'll shoot!” I won't, I know. I'd never shoot the guy in the back, even with what I know about him. But talk's cheap: maybe it'll cause him to put on the brakes. Instead, he kicks on
his afterburner and shoots past old tires and barrels of oil and solvent. He circles back to the car where Hoyle is trying to get into the locked passenger side to extract our little hostage.

Carberry beats me back to the car by three or four steps. It's at this point that the situation, not unlike dozens of similar incidents I've handled before, becomes dissimilar. I don't expect what comes next. All along, I'm thinking I'll use my mouth or my fists or my right arm to solve the problem—logically, I'd choke him out.

But Carberry takes away all but one option as he jumps into the car, grabs something from his waistband and, shielded from my view, jabs it hard and fast against Joey's head, then screams in an inhuman voice, “I'm gonna kill him! I'm gonna kill him!” He convinces me. I stick my gun into the car, point it at the back of his head, level the barrel so the slug won't follow a downward path, and pull the trigger.

A 125-grain bullet from a .38 S&W revolver leaves the muzzle at 1,025 feet per second. The bullet I put into Mr. Carberry's head traveled approximately six inches.

As I start to grab Carberry I hear a shot, and glass breaking. I jump back.
What the fuck?
Then another shot. I scream at Hoyle, “That's enough!” He'd seen Joey's head drenched in blood, was certain the kid had been shot. I pull Carberry's limp body by the back of his shirt and jerk him out of the car. He weighs no more than a pillow. I pitch him to the ground. He falls face first to the pavement. I reach in and extract the blood-and brain-soaked child. He's numb, silent. I bundle him in my arms for a moment and look into his eyes. I hold him aloft, check for holes. I stand him on his feet, long enough to see if he'll fall over. He looks down, sees his father, and begins to scream. As I lift him back into my arms I spot Kelly and Varley. They've sprung from their car and are charging toward me. Varley, a big, gregarious Portuguese from my academy class, gets there first. I pivot and lateral the kid into his arms. He hands him off to Kelly, darts back to their car, and jumps behind the wheel. The two detectives make a dash for Hillside, Joey on Kelly's lap.
This is good
, I think. Kelly, frog-voiced, gruff and cynical on the outside, is actually one of the department's most sensitive souls. And a first-aid instructor.

A few minutes later, with patrol cops and detectives swarming the lot, Kelly calls from the hospital. “The kid's okay, Norm. He's okay. No injuries.”
No injuries . . . no injuries.

Called from home, Homicide Team 1 shows up, most of them within the hour. Their sergeant is Jack Mullen, one of the best homicide dicks in SDPD history. He divides up the labor: witness interviews, scene reconstruction, measurements, diagrams, photos, identification, collection, and preservation of evidence. The gas station is closed down, taped off. Mullen sees to it that Hoyle and I are separated, our guns taken from us.

I'm standing alone, dispassionate, impressed by what I see. SDPD Homicide is doing its thing by the book.
*
They finish with us, at least at the scene. Hoyle and I, thirty feet apart, are about to be driven to headquarters, in separate cars. It's dark now. Most of the station's lights are off. Dew is collecting on Carberry's car. I feel—nothing. A patrol sergeant has been assigned to transport me to headquarters. Homicide detective Jim Sanders waves him off. “Come on over here for a second, Lieutenant.” He takes my arm, moves me away from the others. “Take a look at this.”

In the palm of his hand, wrapped in a mechanic's blue-colored rag is an invention of Sanders's creativity, and a product of his fealty to the brotherhood. It's a metal measuring tape with a black plastic-handled screwdriver jammed into its slot. “Look at it, sir.
Anybody'd
mistake this sucker for a gun. It was on the floor, right there where you pulled the body out.”

“I didn't see it, Jim.”

“You sure, sir? It was right there.”

“I didn't see it.”

“Oh. Oh, okay. Sure.” I imagine the detective struggling with how
not
to mention this find in his exhaustive inventory of the car's contents.
**

I started to walk toward my ride then turned around. “Jim?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant?”

“Thanks.”

There was no gun. The man I shot to death was unarmed.

Back at headquarters, O'Brien tosses me the keys to the patrol chief's office. “There's a lot of press around,” he says. “You won't get interrupted there.” I walk down the long, dark corridor and unlock the double doors leading into the corner pocket. The place is like a tomb. I switch on the light in Chief Bob Jauregui's office, take a seat in his executive chair, and insert a blank 153 into the Olympia typewriter sitting on a credenza behind the desk. As I start to type I notice the blood. It hadn't registered. It's cakey, rust-colored, and splattered all over my shirt and pants, and my brand-new shoes.
I'll
never
get that out of these shoes. The bastard.
Then I remember. I call Patricia.