Trooper Down! (8 page)

The patrol also has a fleet of unmarked cars, including Ford Mustangs and modified LTD Crown Victorias.

But the Seventy-Ninth School cadets are more than happy with their cars marked “Trooper.” Each has already been assigned a permanent call number and a duty station. Within forty-eight hours, they'll shed their cadet status and be sworn in as North Carolina highway patrolmen.

It is a goal they have worked towards for five months and an occasion that none of them will ever forget.

Friday, February 21, 1987, dawns clear and bright. It is still cold, but much of the ice and snow has melted, allowing families and
friends to arrive at the school safely. Some have traveled to Raleigh from the farthest reaches of the state.

By eight-thirty that morning, people are milling around the auditorium on the training school campus, though the ceremony doesn't begin for another hour and a half. There will be standing room only, for the occasion draws not only relatives and friends of the cadets, but the commander of the highway patrol and other high-ranking officers, as well as troopers who've come to meet the rookies they are assigned to train.

“Dressing for graduation was like getting ready for a high school prom,” recalled a former cadet. “There's a lot of primping and making sure the uniform and the shoes and hat are just right. Everything has to be perfect. You feel good, and there's a lot of pride involved. But you're also a little sad at leaving your friends. These are people you've lived with and shared a bond with for the past few months.”

Shortly before 10:00
A.M. 
the cadets file in and take a seat, a solemn, polished-looking group of young rookies, far different in appearance from when they arrived on campus five months earlier.

“Your job won't be easy,” says Joseph Dean, Secretary of North Carolina Crime Control and Public Safety, addressing the forty-two graduates.

“You'll get cold, wet, tired, and frustrated. There will be drunks who'll want to fight you and people who want to give you lip. But your responsibility is to justice. Be just in the way you enforce the law. Do it fairly, to rich and poor alike, black and white, residents and nonresidents. Testify fairly in court. I've been a lawyer and the best testimony I've seen comes from highway patrolmen. Their cases are the hardest to break, their reports the most concise and factual. That's not an accident. It reflects the training you've gotten here. Do justice to it, to your fellow officers, and to the highway patrol. It is the family to which you now belong.”

Other speakers follow, whereupon the cadets stand for the oath of office. By noon, the ceremony and a welcoming tea sponsored by patrol auxiliary wives are over. The cadets, now official members of the North Carolina Highway Patrol, are free to leave. All are scheduled to report for duty within a week at various stations throughout the state.

Like hundreds of graduates before them, they are eager, earnest,
intent on applying the skills they learned, anxious to begin their careers as state troopers.

For some, it will be years before the fever wears off. Others will quickly come to see the highway patrol as just another job. A few will rise through the ranks to lead and teach their fellow officers. And a handful will never make it past the first few stages in a trooper's career.

But they are ready, as one cadet said, “for whatever happens on the road.”

“The scary times are when you chase someone for twenty minutes and you get to their house and everybody comes out cussin' and raisin' Cain and wanting to kill you. You've walked right into a hornet's nest. There were times when I wouldn't have given a plug nickel for my life.” —
A thirteen-year veteran of the patrol, now disabled from injuries sustained on the job

It doesn't take long for rookies to learn that patrolling the highways can be hazardous to their health. Working late at night, sometimes alone in counties where help is an hour or more away, a state patrolman is an easy target for people running from the law, drunken crazies, and others who use the road to escape their problems or vent their anger. As a result, nearly every officer is confronted by danger at one time or another during his years on patrol.

Few troopers welcome a fight, even when the odds are in their favor. But fewer still back off when a physical confrontation occurs. Most are prepared to take whatever action is necessary for self-protection.

The following true experiences are told in troopers' own words. In each incident involving violence or verbal abuse, the trooper maintains he was simply doing his job and the perpetrator was— well, you be the judge:

I was on duty in Murphy one night and a man's wife came up to the jail. He had beat her like a drum, so she took out a warrant for assault. Out there, the highway patrol was everything. We served more warrants out of our patrol car than any other law enforcement agency because the county officers had to buy their own vehicles. A lot of times, the deputies would just ride with us. It helped us, and it helped them too.

We set off to serve a warrant on this husband, just me and a deputy. When we got there, the guy wouldn't come to the door.

He wanted to be belligerent about it, calling us names and saying “Come on in and get me, chickenshit,” stuff like that

I told him to come outside and we'd talk. Then I went back to the patrol car to call for help. A few minutes later, I walked up to the kitchen window, raised up to look in, and saw him get a gun. I hollered back and told the deputy, “Larry, he's got a shotgun. He's going back through the house. Watch him! He just jacked the shell in the chamber.”

The guy was roaming from room to room—hunting us, I guess. I went back to another kitchen window, chinned up, and looked in—and there he stood with the gun pointed right between my eyes, less than ten feet away.

I dropped down and headed back to the car, crawling on my belly. I figured he'd kill me for sure. When I got to the car, I radioed for the sheriff to come up and bring several officers. I told them to bring some tear gas too. Nine times out of ten, that stuff sets a house on fire—when it hits the curtains and carpets and all—but we kept shooting canisters into the house anyway. We filled the whole damn valley with tear gas, till we were just sitting there crying and gasping for breath. We even had to evacuate neighboring houses—and here it was three o'clock in the morning!

Finally, he came out the back door, vomiting. He still had his weapon, but only for a minute. He was staggering around cursing, drunk. We wallowed around for a few minutes until I fell into the creek fighting with him. It was just a nasty scene.

The guy got seven years in prison for that little trick.

*

I caught a bank robber one time and I wasn't even working in the area. I had transferred reports from one county to another and heard about this bank robbery and kidnapping on the scanner. They gave out a description of the vehicle—a light blue Chevrolet Chevette.

This boy had robbed the bank, come out, jumped in his car, and instead of putting it in forward, threw it in reverse and went down an embankment. Then he got stuck. Just as one of the bank tellers was about to go to work, he came up behind her, put a gun in her ear, took her hostage, and got her car. He put her out down the road, but when we picked her up, she was so shook up she couldn't even give us a description of her own vehicle. She said
it was light blue, and it turned out to be black.

I met a line of cars and saw a black Chevy Chevette. Just on a hunch, I decided to turn around and follow it. I had already made the remark back at the station that I was gonna go out and catch this bank robber. The first sergeant had laughed and said, “If you do, be sure to give me a call.”

After I turned around, the Chevette cut down a tobacco path and I thought, “No, it can't be him.” But I went down there anyway—it was just a little narrow, dead-end road where two cars couldn't pass. I had to get off on the shoulder. He had gone on up the road and turned around. In a minute he drove right by me, threw up his hand, and waved. I threw up my hand and waved.

When he got past me, I saw the tag and knew it was him. So I wheeled around and turned the blue light on. He jumped out of the car and started to run. Then he stopped, put his hands up, and said, “I dun figured you got me. The money's on the seat.”

I never even had time to call in and tell anyone where I was. After I got him handcuffed, I looked in the car and there was money all over the place. I got him back to my vehicle and thought, “Now, before I call in, I've got to calm down. If I get on the radio right now, they'll think something bad has happened.” I just waited a couple of minutes until I settled down. When I called in, I didn't say anything except, “Is the first sergeant still in the office?”

They said yes and I said, “Well, tell him that bank robber he was talking about—I've got him right here.”

In a few minutes I heard a siren and here comes the sergeant just as fast as he could come. I called the Jacksonville police department and told them to bring a crime lab down. They interrogated the boy and told me to take him back up to the magistrate's office in Jacksonville.

This kid was only about nineteen, black, his father in the Marine Corps, a career marine. We still don't know why the boy robbed the bank.

On the way to the magistrate's office, he said, “Would you do me a favor? Before I go to jail, I want to eat one last good meal.”

I said, “Okay, what have you got in mind?”

“Pull in here to McDonald's and I'll buy us all a hamburger.” (We had a detective with us.)

“With your money or the bank's money?”

“My money!” he said. So we pulled into McDonald's and bought three Big Macs and Cokes, and ate them on the way to the Jacksonville jail.

*

Loggers and marines can be especially hard to handle. They've usually got arms on them the size of your leg. It took a while to learn about the marines. They'd come out of Camp Lejeune four or five at a time, all drunk. Most of the time they wouldn't say a word. But once in a while you'd get a mouthy one. So what you did was just grab the biggest, mouthiest one first. And when the others saw him go down they didn't say anything.

Authority—that's what they understood best.

*

I was driving an unmarked car one night and met a gray Volkswagen with a male driver. His vehicle had no headlights, so I turned around to stop him and he took off. I chased him in my patrol car to an apartment complex where he stopped and got out and ran.

As I jumped out of the car, I undid my seat belt, not realizing I had accidentally unsnapped my holster at the same time. I started running after the guy, but fell, and my gun slipped out onto the ground. Even then I still didn't realize what had happened.

This guy was big—six feet six, 240 pounds. As he ran into one of the apartments I tackled him. We both went through the screen door, then a wooden door, just busted them all to pieces. He started cussing me and telling me I wasn't gonna take him to jail. So it became a knock-down drag-out fight. At one point I threw him into a wall. About that time, a woman tapped me on the shoulder and said, “What the hell are you doin' in my house?”

I said, “Get on the phone and call for some help!” And she says, “That's my man. You leave him alone!” Then
she 
proceeds to tackle me. Her boyfriend, The Hulk, rises up to get me too, so I reach for my gun. But it's not there. I had my flashlight and my blackjack and I used them on both him and her. I had to literally knock the woman out to get her to leave me alone. I got the man handcuffed and arrested and was trying to get him out the door when he starts going crazy again. He was grabbing hold of the carpet and everything else he could get his hands on to keep me from moving him. Then I looked up and there stood my sergeant in the doorway.

“Damn, I'm glad to see you!” I said. Outside, where I'd parked, were about twenty patrol cars. Other troopers had heard me call in the chase and came to help. We went back to the car and there were about three hundred people from the neighboorhood standing around watching us. Fortunately, nobody spotted my gun in the leaves, so I found it pretty quickly.

We transported both the man and the woman to jail. He had stolen the car he was driving, had no insurance, and was an escaped felon out of Charlotte. She was charged with assault, resisting arrest, and harboring a fugitive.

After it was over, I looked down and saw blood all over my uniform. I thought I'd been hurt, but it turned out to be the guy's blood. During the scuffle, I had broken his nose in three places and knocked some of his teeth out.

That's the worst fight I've ever been in and I hope it's the last one.

*

A trooper I know stopped a car in Greensboro with a New York license plate. The officer had been notified that this same car carried an occupant who was wanted for armed robbery and murder. The trooper got the guy out of the car and looked in the man's coat.

There was a gun in the pocket. Another one on him. One in the back seat. After he got him down to the jail the trooper asked him, “Why didn't you try to shoot me?”

And the guy said, “With the reputation of the highway patrol in North Carolina, I knew if I took a shot at you and missed, you'd get me. Or if I did shoot you, I'd never make it across the state line. So I figured I'd just take my chances.”

*

I was down east near the South Carolina line and jumped a boy on Labor Day night. I started chasing him on U.S. 17. We ran all the way into the state line, weaving from one lane to another.

The sheriffs department had a bunch of warrants on him, plus the boy had wrecked two or three cars in the process of the chase. I was granted permission to proceed into South Carolina, then right through North Myrtle Beach on Ocean Drive. It was about 5:30 or 6:00
P.M.