We Are the Cops (7 page)

I get called to all kinds of death investigations – suicides, natural death investigations, homicides – so I see dead people a lot. Now it’s a matter of routine. Initially when I started, yeah, it would make me sick, it would make me have nightmares. I’d see them in my sleep, I couldn’t get it out of my mind but it’s routine now, you get used to it. You get kind of callous, it’s just another dead body, you know?

The thing that’s tough to remember, though, is that whoever that person is, they’ve got relatives. I mean, you can’t come walking into a scene and just go, ‘Ah, it’s just another dead guy.’

You’re always being watched; somebody in that family’s watching you. His wife, his girlfriend, his kids – whoever it may be – they’re there, watching. And obviously that’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened in their life – to lose their father or brother or dad or grandpa or whoever it might be. Even if it was natural causes, our way of handling it is something that we have to be really careful about.

There was a suicide at the Stratosphere Tower here in Las Vegas, where this guy jumped off the top and I think it’s about 110 storeys high. On the video, it was about seven seconds from the time he jumps off until the time he hits the ground.

We kind of have two types of suicidal persons: we have the ones that are dead set on doing it and nobody can stop them. Then we have ones that pretty much don’t want to do it but are screaming for help. This guy was the one that was going to do it
no matter what.

It kind of stands out to me as it was a very surreal experience. I was coming down Las Vegas Boulevard heading south and I was just about at the intersection of St Louis, which is one block from the Stratosphere. I remember the call came out that there was a person on top of the Stratosphere who was attempting to jump. It was a high priority call and I remember thinking that there’s no way I’m gonna be able to make it to the top of the Stratosphere in time to even talk to this guy. Just as I’m pulling up, I see a crowd and cars starting to move out of the way in front of me; there was just chaos. I saw people falling on the ground and I didn’t know what was going on. So I got my car up on the sidewalk, hit my lights and sirens and started rolling towards them and just as I’m pulling up, right in front of me was what was left of his body. He had jumped just as I was getting the call. I stepped out of my car and there was nothing left of him. He had basically exploded. I think we found parts of him two hundred and fifty feet away, in the intersection of Baltimore. It was just very graphic.

What was strange, though, was that there were people that were hit by his debris. And because of the sound of him hitting the ground and the velocity that the debris took off at, people would find pieces of him on them and they thought that they had been shot. We had two people that had actually passed out. So I pull up and I have a person laying here and another person laying there, as well as a body. Then a Japanese tour bus passes by and I remember looking up and they’re all taking pictures. I mean it was the most surreal experience I have ever seen, all the
flashbulbs going off.

So as this happens I’m trying to shut the road off and things like that and there was a guy who got out of his car and he had body matter all over the side of it. He swears, gets in his car and starts driving off.

So the very first officer that arrives, I tell them, ‘You’ve got to go stop him. I don’t know what his deal is.’

He pulls over and his thing was that it was a rental car and he was concerned that they were going to charge him for cleaning it, so he was going to find a car wash. This is the mentality of people!

It was absolutely crazy and because of the way traffic was blocked up, I was there, all alone for probably about two minutes or so, although it seemed a lot longer. It was like some strange movie. There was so much going on all at once. And it’s hard because your brain – and I don’t care who you are or how trained and experienced you are – your brain will automatically have a pre-conceived idea of what you’re getting yourself into. I was thinking how I was going to run through the casino to the elevator and take it up to the top. I’m thinking about handling this scene at the top of the Stratosphere and all of a sudden, in a split second, I’m confronted with the scene right here in front of me on the ground and a whole element that I wasn’t even ready for.

It was crazy. It was like being in a war zone. It was almost like a bomb had gone off – like a car bomb had got off – and I’ve got all these victims everywhere but actually I only had one person who was dead. I imagine a suicide bomb would probably have the same look to it.

Later that night we had to walk around with the biohazard bags and haul pieces of him off. We called out a biohazard team – they’re private contractors that come out and clean things up; crime scene cleaners – and so to help them out we had to pull parts of this poor guy off of palm trees and we’d have tourists coming up to us and say, ‘Hey, I think there’s something other here that needs your attention.’

Later that night, as the guy is being cleaned up, there was something white on the ground and the crime scene guy looks at it and he goes, ‘Oh my God! You know what that is?’ And he goes over to his car and grabs a screwdriver and he starts chiselling at the ground and pops it out.

It was a piece of vertebra that had actually embedded itself into the asphalt. It was 105 degrees that day and so the asphalt’s a little soft and a sliver about the size of a domino had embedded itself right into the asphalt. It was the craziest thing in the world.

It didn’t bother me a bit though. I guess I looked at it more from a professional standpoint of, ‘Well, someone here needs to fix this problem and I guess that’s me.’

It wasn’t any more graphic than a really serious car wreck where a body has just been shredded apart. I mean, there was a moment of, ‘Ooh! That’s different!’ – but it certainly didn’t affect me in any kind of negative way. You have to learn to really compartmentalise in this job. But at the same time you have to learn that there needs to be an outlet for that somewhere – a healthy outlet – because if you keep all that stuff inside, eventually it’s going to affect you.

People think that cops are pretty peculiar, especially as they come by a gruesome traffic accident and the cop’s standing at the side of the road eating a donut, laughing. They must think that we are monsters.

But how else do you deal with it, you know? How else do you deal with it day in, day out? You’ve got to become indifferent to it. You can’t let it get to you every day or you can’t do the job. So you’ve got to ignore it and if somebody tells you a funny story, you’re going to laugh about it. You’re certainly not laughing at the body but you’re like, ‘Hey, you should have seen what I was dealing with last night!’ It’s funny and you laugh and people come by and they see that and they think we’re monsters. But you’ve got to be indifferent to it; you can’t let it get to you.

I’ve seen some bad accidents. There’s one where I’d love to get hold of the pictures and show them to my kids and say, ‘Hey! This is why you wear a seatbelt.’

This guy was driving one of those OJ Broncos. Like an older, bigger style Bronco. You remember when OJ Simpson was driving that white Bronco when he got arrested? It was like that, only bigger. He was coming down some winding road up in North Bend, it’s a town out east, in the mountains. It was winter and it was raining and there was maybe some sleet also. It was a pretty steep hill and as he came around the corner he probably went too far into the side of the road and then he must have over-corrected or something because he rolled the Bronco onto its side, although
he didn’t roll it completely over. He over-corrected and all it did was slide onto its passenger side. But the road was so steep that it just kept going. And this was like four-thirty, five o’clock in the morning, so he was on his way to work. He wasn’t drunk or anything like that – just over-corrected and it rolled onto its side.

He obviously wasn’t wearing a seatbelt because he got thrown from the driver’s seat into the passenger seat. I don’t know what it’s called but where the top of the door and the roof connect when they’re shut, well, it bent back a little bit somehow and his head got stuck outside of it and then it was like a cheese grater all the way down the side of the road. This car probably skid a couple of hundred feet and you could see where his head first started hitting the road because you could find chunks of hair and skull and stuff like that. But that was the only mark he had on him. He was still alive when I got there but he was making those gurgling sounds – I call it the ‘death gurgle’.

Literally, if the guy had been wearing a seatbelt, when that car stopped sliding he could have hit the button on his seatbelt and fallen down on the side or braced himself before he undid his belt and crawled out. He probably would have had a sore neck at worst. He couldn’t have been going more than twenty-five or thirty miles per hour but since he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt he got thrown onto the other side and it just cheese-grated his head all the way down.

He died. He was dead before the ambulance got there. But it’s one of those where I want to show the pictures to my kids and say, ‘Listen son, listen daughter, this is why you wear a seatbelt.’

If he had been wearing his seatbelt he wouldn’t have had a fucking mark on him. He may have spilt his coffee at most, although he might have been able to hold onto that too.

I went to this accident and it was one of those where, even if they had been wearing seatbelts, they wouldn’t have done anything, they wouldn’t have helped. There were four drunk teenagers in a car that came around a corner and hit a giant oak tree that was a foot away from the road – not very far at all. They must have been hauling ass because the oak tree tore the car into several pieces and all four of them went in different directions from the car.

When we got there three of them were dead and one of them was laying there alive – it was a girl. Her guts were hanging out of her and she’s holding onto them; it’s almost as if she’s trying to put them back into her stomach. She’s laying there yelling at us to shoot her because she was in so much pain.

She was screaming, ‘Just shoot me! Just kill me!’

It was disgusting. Just nasty.

The other officer I was with ended up talking to this girl saying, ‘You’re going to be fine.’ Even though we both know that she’s not. She’s going to be dead, hopefully sooner rather than later, for her sake.

And you’re thinking, ‘Why can’t I just put her out of her misery?’ I’m not a doctor but her guts are hanging out. We all know she’s not going to make it. And I hate the fact that she is going to lay here and suffer. I can’t be honest with her and say, ‘You’re fucking dead. Just give up. Just give up.’

But I can remember her very distinctly, screaming, ‘Please, just shoot me.’

The ambulance came and they took her but I don’t think she even made it to the hospital. Then they just put sheets over the other people and we sat at either end of the road and probably played video games on our computers or something, because when we get accidents like that, we don’t even have to write anything. You have to write about a paragraph long sentence that says: I came here, this is what I saw, such-and-such detective took the lead.

So when we got done, we closed the road and the accident team – a speciality unit – came out and did all their diagrams and all the kind of crap they do for those fatality accidents. All we had to do was close the road, basically. It’s a simple report for us but it usually takes the accident unit several hours to finish their report – especially with four people.

But I’m sure we sat there and made jokes about it over our Nextel phones and stuff like that. Joking is definitely a coping mechanism for it.

But you’ve got things to do when you see those types of things, rather than just think about how nasty it is. I don’t ever really think about it. At that time I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to get some flares out on the road. I’ve got shit to do!’

But it was horrible. It was one of those times when I thought, ‘why can’t we just shoot her?’

I don’t want to shoot somebody, you know, but this girl is not going to make it. We’ll shoot a deer on the side of the road or
something like that but this girl wasn’t going to make it so why did she need to lie there and suffer? It wasn’t very long until the ambulance showed up but it’s not like she stops suffering just because they arrived. I’m sure she suffered right up until she finally died.

I was in what they call ‘free week’; after you go through the academy you go out to different precincts and ride around to get to know different areas of the county. I was riding with this officer and it was literally my first day. Nothing had happened all day. Nothing was going on. We were up in a ritzy, sleepy part of the county, in a suburb of Seattle. It was a day shift - 6am to 2pm. I don’t even remember if we’d gone on a call that day. It was just dead; it was boring, nothing going on.

As we were driving back to the precinct, the tones came on the radio – the tones beep three or four times. Usually it means that something big has just happened – something important or some kind of major incident. So, the tones go off and in that area, the precinct that I’m working in, it’s literally hundreds of square miles. It’s big. So the call could be fifty miles away from where we’re at or, as it turned out, it could literally be the next block.

So, it’s my very first day, seven-and-a-half hours into it and we’re driving back to the precinct, the tones go off and the dispatcher says, ‘A suicide has just occurred at…’ and then gave the address.

The guy that I’m riding with goes, ‘Oh shit! That’s right around the corner!’

And so I’m like, ‘Finally! Something’s going to happen.’

So then the details start coming in and it’s about a guy who had stuck a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. And his girlfriend saw him do it and she was the one who had called.