The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage (22 page)

“I got some blips and bleeps from Adrian,” he said later. “Adrian expected the cavalry to arrive, and I really did believe that somebody would show up. Nobody showed. If that’s not an indictment of all of it, I don’t know what is.”

As he was talking, James appeared at his side and started yanking the gurney away from the nurse’s desk, yelling, “Put down the phone!” James then pulled the cord out of the receiver. Five officers grabbed him, tossed him back on the gurney, and cuffed both his hands.

Schoolcraft asked James why he couldn’t talk to his father. He said James then told the nurses, “If anyone calls here for him, don’t tell him, just tell whoever they are he’s at the 81st Precinct.” It was as if he was owned by the
New York City Police Department. This was the first Adrian had heard that he was going back to the stationhouse.

“I’m not going to the 8-1 or anywhere with you or anyone else from the 8-1!” Schoolcraft responded.

James then called a sergeant at the precinct to tell him Adrian was refusing to go and asking when she could leave. She left, apparently to make a phone call, and then returned and walked into the psychiatric emergency room, apparently to confer with doctors.

Three ESU officers arrived at the hospital, saying they were there to help him. They loosened the cuffs. He saw James and one of the ESU officers speaking with a doctor. “The ESU officer appeared to be advocating for me,” he wrote.

Up in Johnstown, Larry was calling everyone he could think of. He called PBA lawyer Stuart London, he called the FBI, he called Internal Affairs. “All of them assured me that they would respond in some way,” he said. “I was hoping that it would keep Adrian calm, because as time went on, someone in his situation, knowing he did nothing wrong, would start to get angry.”

In hindsight, Larry was upset with the PBA and with Internal Affairs, but he felt the most anger for the FBI. “I told them you need to go talk to him,” he said. “Once they know the FBI is there, they are going to knock it off. But the arrogance that I got from the FBI agent, being admonished when I expressed my concerns. He tells me that the FBI works with the NYPD every day and they are fine. I’m getting this shit from an FBI agent who is 25 years old, and he’s going to tell me everything is fine. This is not some little microcosm in Alabama. This is New York City, and it was reported to everybody. Nobody did their job.

“It would be no different than an FBI agent gets a call from his wife. She tells him that someone is in her apartment, and he calls the NYPD and asks them to respond, and the PD tells him ‘Oh, it’s fine, call Monday, and we’ll have a committee meeting and then get back to you.’ Here’s the thing: If they don’t have a duty to respond, then what are they in business for? I clearly reported a crime, and they did nothing. What probably happened is they called the NYPD, and were told bad things about Adrian, and they bought it. The thing is that if the PD lied to them, someone has to go to jail. . . . If
the FBI had come in, it would have been a totally different investigation. All we’ve seen from IAB is the illusion of an investigation.”

At the same time, Larry was trying to get information out of the hospital staff. “I want to talk to the attending physician,” he said. “It was very difficult. The nurses are extremely intimidated and careful of what they said. I did come across one nurse, she seemed to be mature and intelligent and had a grasp that something was not right. I told her what was going on, who I was, who Adrian was, and what this was about. I said they are going to try to hurt him. I said I am concerned about his safety. She told me nobody will hurt him while I’m here.”

But no one responded. No one. Schoolcraft remained in the emergency room on that gurney for
nine
hours. He was not allowed to use the phone, get water, eat, or use the bathroom, according to a notice of claim he wrote soon after.

If the police had arrested Schoolcraft, they would eventually have had to disclose the reasons for it. By “psyching” him, they bought up to 14 days. They had discredited him, and they could also decline to discuss what happened. The truth would stay hidden behind a veil of confidentiality.

“I can’t remember a time in my entire life that I ever felt so helpless,” Larry said. “When I decided not to go down right way, when I tried to do it legitimately, I felt someone would go over there and moderate this whole thing, that didn’t happen.”

Then, the police supervisors at the hospital told him that after his release, he would have to return to the 81st Precinct for questioning. Schoolcraft refused, and he claimed that refusal led to him being transferred to the psychiatric emergency room.

He was transferred from the emergency room to the emergency psychiatric room “as an emergency status patient” for “immediate observation, care and treatment.” The admission form said he could be kept up to 15 days. He was left to sleep on a gurney in the hallway of the ward.

He was then interviewed by Dr. Khin Mar Lwin, a psychiatrist, who wrote “psychotic disorder” at the top of his report, but the description that Schoolcraft gave was hardly suggestive of that. “He says this is happening because he has been reporting on his superiors. He says he knows that his supervisors are hiding robbery and assault cases to get higher positions, and
has proper documentation about this,” the doctor wrote. Of course, this was all true.

For an account of what happened, Dr. Lwin turned to Sergeant James, who had been sent by the 81st Precinct to keep an eye on Schoolcraft. She was not present at Schoolcraft’s apartment and had no firsthand knowledge of what had happened.

She told Lwin that Schoolcraft “left work early after getting agitated and cursing a supervisor.” There is a tape. He didn’t curse anyone.

She said Schoolcraft “barricaded himself and the door had to be broken to get to him.” Flat wrong.

Once he had initially agreed to go to the hospital, Schoolcraft “ran and had to be chased.” Also wrong.

Quoting James, the doctor wrote that in the medical emergency room, Schoolcraft “became agitated, uncooperative and verbally abusive over telephone use and told his treating MDs, ‘they are all against me.’ ” However, since Schoolcraft was not arrested, he still had rights. Someone with those rights might indeed get upset if he was not allowed to use the phone.

Lwin wrote that Schoolcraft was “coherent, relevant with goal-directed speech and good eye contact. He is irritable with appropriate effect. He is paranoid about his supervisors. He denies suicidal ideation, homicidal ideation at the present time. His memory and concentration are intact. He is alert and oriented. His insight and judgment are impaired.”

Despite the obvious positives in the analysis, Lwin recommended his transfer to the psychiatric emergency room and said his observation should be continued for “unpredictable behavior and escape risk.”

What these documents demonstrate is that Schoolcraft was not even remotely in crisis. Lwin did not note any kind of extreme behavior that would have justified keeping him.

Someone in the hospital appears to have simply accepted the police’s version of events as justification for holding him longer. But the ball was rolling in only one direction.

When a Sergeant Sawyer and a police officer named Miller arrived, Schoolcraft was on the phone with Larry. Sawyer told James, “I thought perps weren’t supposed to speak on the phone.”

James replied that the nurses were letting him use the phone. Sawyer cut off the call and told Schoolcraft he couldn’t use the phone because he was in handcuffs, but he gave no explanation as to why Adrian was in handcuffs in the first place. He hadn’t been arrested.

At that point, four officers roughly grabbed Schoolcraft and handcuffed him to the gurney again. Schoolcraft described excruciating pain. When Schoolcraft asked again why he had to be handcuffed, Sawyer said, “Because you’re a fucking rat,” according to Adrian’s notes.

The nurses ignored his requests for help. He asked for help from a hospital administrator. That was denied.

Miller and Sawyer wheeled him to a room where he was told to change into a backless gown. He claimed he was strip-searched. He was then wheeled into the psychiatric emergency room. He claimed that while this was happening he overheard Sawyer telling Miller, “I chose you because I can’t trust anyone else. This is a big fucking mess, everyone is going to get GO-15’d.” (GO-15, or General Order 15, is NYPD argot for an official interview done under oath.)

In the psychiatric ER, he was interviewed again, this time by a Dr. Tariq, who agreed to call Internal Affairs. Schoolcraft wanted photos taken of the bruises on his body. He spent an uncomfortable 24 hours in that ER among people who were truly in crisis, including a man who was combing his hair with feces, a woman who kept making herself vomit, a patient covered in bloody bandages, and an array of screamers. There were no clocks and no mirrors. On the television, he ruefully watched Greg Kelly, the police commissioner’s son, host a Fox morning talk show.

Unknown to him, the NYPD teletype had spit out an order from police headquarters that he had been suspended on authority of the Chief of Department, Joseph Esposito. Consider this for a moment: Schoolcraft had filed complaints with Internal Affairs and QAD, and his father had called the mayor’s office, the commissioner’s office, Internal Affairs, and the chief of department’s office. It was not like the senior bosses at police headquarters didn’t know who he was. And yet they did nothing to take his custody away from the borough command and give it to a more independent overseer.

Early the next morning, according to his notes, Schoolcraft overheard one medical staffer ask whether he would be discharged, and a second said,
“No, no, no, Schoolcraft is not going anywhere. He’s a special case.” That afternoon, he was interviewed by a social worker who was retired NYPD, who called him “manicky.” And then, finally, Internal Affairs officers from Group 1, the unit that investigates misconduct by high-ranking bosses, appeared. In a bit of a turnabout, one of the IAB officers had a digital recorder in a pocket.

At 3 p.m. on Tuesday, November 3, which happened to be election day, the day Mayor Bloomberg beat out Democrat Bill Thompson for a third term, Schoolcraft was transferred from the psychiatric ER to the regular psychiatric ward with the vague diagnosis of “psychosis not otherwise specified.” He was listed as Patient No. 130381874. He was interviewed by Christine McMahon, a social worker. In his words, she said, “Well, being a cop is sometimes hard to deal with, isn’t it, and you need help dealing with all those things . . . blah, blah, blah.”

He wrote that he replied, “I reported police supervisors committing crimes against the citizens we were sworn to protect. This isn’t me whining about the day-to-day stress of being a police officer.”

Larry arrived via Amtrak early that evening. He switched to the Long Island Rail Road, arrived in Jamaica, and took a cab right to the hospital. While he was on the train, he got the first call from anyone in authority about Adrian’s status. The call came from a case worker in the psychiatric ward, not from the police. It had taken nearly 90 hours to notify Adrian’s dad about his son’s status.

As a joke meant to amuse Adrian and reduce the tension, Larry wore a wig and a Rastafarian hat that he bought in a mall near Albany. Security searched him and then took him to a cafeteria, where they brought Adrian to see him. Adrian was still dressed in the backless hospital gown. He had no underwear. Larry brought him underwear and socks.

“He was pretty upset,” Larry said. “He sat there just ruminating, saying, ‘I just should have stayed at work,’ and I looked at him and said, ‘What are you talking about, Adrian? So now they can do whatever they want to you?’ I said just be cool. It’s tough to tell someone that. He’s looking at me like you ain’t done shit. Where’s the cavalry? I said, ‘Hey, look, be cool, it’ll come out in the wash.’ Physically he wasn’t doing well, he was
sick and pale, he wasn’t sleeping good, or eating good. It was real hot, and it was dirty. You could just smell that it was an unclean environment. It smelled tainted.”

After meeting with his son, Larry walked out into a cool evening. It was about 10 p.m. He stopped and gazed at the hospital building named after Trump. He hired a gypsy cab driver to help him find a hotel. “I saw this Iranian guy sitting in an old Lincoln, and I go up to him,” Larry said. “His name is Kamal. I tell him I’m from upstate, I don’t know my way around the city. My son’s in hospital. He takes me to the Clarion Motel, kitty-corner off the Van Wyck from the hospital, and they give me a nice room in the basement.”

Larry labored through the night. He called the
New York Times
at 1 a.m. He reached a reporter, who told him that he was working on another story but would get back to him. That reporter never responded and never answered another call from him. He left a message with a reporter at the
New York Daily News
. He didn’t hear back from that reporter until a couple of months later.

“I wanted it to get out there, I wanted to put as much pressure as I could,” Larry said. “I figured every hour they kept him, there was a chance that something else would happen to make it worse.”

Larry had no computer, but he had a cell phone and the phone numbers of every agency that might, in a perfect world, help. His fingers were sore from pressing buttons. It was here that his son could have used a rabbi, an NYPD official who would make a call for Adrian, who would bring some sense to this bizarre situation. Of course, Adrian had none. The Schoolcrafts were on their own.

“I knew he was in jeopardy, it was only a matter of time before he started acting up,” Larry said. “I knew they were trying to get him to take medication. They had tried to get him to take Risperdal [an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia]. How long would it be before they forced it?”

Larry kept dialing. He called the journalist Jimmy Breslin’s agent. He called every PBA official he could. He finally spoke with Stuart London, the PBA attorney. London suggested that Larry call Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union. Siegel advised Larry
to call a mental health lawyer. Larry and Adrian then met with Dr. Isak Isakov, the psychiatrist who had control of Adrian’s file. During the conversation, Isakov mentioned David Durk’s name without prompting. To the Schoolcrafts, this suggested that Isakov was talking to people he should not be talking to.