Jingle Bells

So besides being a beat cop, I have a couple collateral duties.  I am part time on the SWAT team and part time in our aviation unit.  When I fly I am an observer or what we call TFO Tactical Flight Officer.  Basically I do the law enforcement function so the pilot can focus on flying.  We Fly MD500E helicopters and we have an awesome surveillance plane as well.  Most of the time I fly in one of our helicopters and the basic duty is to monitor in a scan mode our normal 4 district channels to listen for stuff to go to as well as two other PD channels for highway patrol and other agencies as well as two aviation channels so I know when my pilot is talking on his channels so I don’t try to talk to him at the same time when he is talking to tower or other aircraft.  I run the same computer we have in a patrol car, a spotlight and a FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera which is thermal imaging which is operated with an Xbox like controller.  So you hands are full so to key the mic to talk you have two buttons on floor one to talk to the pilot and the other to talk on which ever of the 7 channels I am listening to I select.  It gets busy to say the least.  Now you fly around a have to be able to know where you are, where “they” are and describe in a clear enough manner that the bad guy gets caught.  Its serious multi tasking.  Now factor in leaning out the cockpit to look for things find flying in circles and not getting sick, it gets pretty tricky.

One night a couple years ago shortly before Christmas I was flying as TFO and we had a passenger in the back.  It’s always neat to fly around Christmas time because its fun to see all of the Christmas lights.  But since its cold we fly with the doors on, which looking through the curved Plexiglas makes things look funny so I don’t dig doors on very much.  It was my first time flying with NVG Night Vision Goggles and they were not set up for me (which I would learn later in NVG School at the local Air Force Base is a bad idea)  Within moments of taking off my inner ears let me know they were not happy to be flying.  Looking though the curved glass and flying in circles did not help the nauseous feeling in my gut. 

A few calls into it were flying circles around a house and I am keeping the spot lot on the target while officers search in side for a suspect.  My job is to notices any squirters (people who come squirting out of the building running) and start calling out their description and direction of travel and talk the ground units in to apprehend them.  My pilot asks me on the intercom (ICS)  “Hey, you ok?”  My response was something similar to Ving Rhames line from Pulp Fiction when Bruce Willis comes down to the basement of the pawn shop to free him.  “Nah, I’m pretty freaking far from okay” He could tell I was struggling to not puke.  I must have looked pretty green even in the darkness.  He says “Okay I will level out a bit, fly  a wider orbit and when we are done head back to the hangar”  and when we are done we start to head back to the hanger and another priority call came out and he does an banking S turn to change direction to head toward the call. 

For 68 minutes I had been doing everything in my power to not barf but that was too much.  I put my hand up to my mouth, moved my mic out of the way and up it came.  I didn’t want to clean it up so like a champ I swallowed down the first batch, which pretty much guaranteed a second batch which was now blocked by my hand so it took the path of least resistance, out my nose.  Yup, peas carrots and Raman noodles shooting out my nose.  I moved my mic back down and shouted “barf bag” and reached back to the lady in the back, who promptly threw a barf bag at me.  I’m retching my guts out and my pilot gets on ICS “No, no, no I’m a sympathetic puker” he looks left away from me pulls collective, shoves the cyclic forward and starts singing jingle bells to distract himself between radio transmissions to the tower. “Jingle Bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way….Falcon five are we clear for direct approach…negative on gecko approach….request direct approach…Jingle bells, jingle bell”  We came skidding in and I pulled my mic cord and jumped out to finish my business. 

After when I was done cleaning up myself and the helicopter the lady in the back and pilot were both laughing at me and she said I heard you ask for a barf bag and wave your hand like “Look bitch, hand me a barf bag now! So I threw it at you as soon as I could”.  We all laughed. I haven’t barfed again since.  I now have my NVG set up correctly and my pilot still sings jingle bells from time to time to make me laugh.  The rest of the guys made me special barf bags with my name on it and a happy little picture of me.  I still get grief about it every time I fly.  Good times to be had by all.  But I won’t eat Raman.

Stranger than Fiction

It’s an old cliché that truth is stranger than fiction.  No place is this truer than law enforcement.  Even after 5 years, I still get amazed by things I see, things people say and do.  I suppose it’s because we get called to handle the strange and unique situations that most people do not want to deal with.   I remember one situation in particular that was in fact strange.

I was called to investigate a guy pooping in the backyard of a vacant home that transients frequented.  I was actually quite interested to find the guy, not just because it would be funny or entertaining; but it’s a serious degradation of the quality of life to look out the window and see someone planting sewer pickles in the backyard of the house next to you or in the alley behind your house.  I mean really, nobody wants to see that.   I check the backyard, of the vacant home.  I am careful to avoid lawn sausages.  I was there a while back and one of the other officers stepped in a sewer pickle and it was a major hassle to get it off his boots, so I am looking to avoid that inconvenience.   The backyard was negative so I check the alley. 

I find a guy hiding in an old sofa.  It was one of the pull out sleeper kind but, it was just the frame with nothing inside except a partly nude guy.  I will call him Sammy (not his real name) is ducked down inside the sofa laying down.  I see a tube of lotion next to him and can’t see his hands.  I advise him that if he is rubbing one out we are going to have a significant problem.  I get him out as my back up is arriving.  I ask  “are you the one droppin a duce in the vacant house yard?”  he denies any felony or misdemeanor pooping.  At this point I am not inclined to use more probative investigative techniques to determine if he is in fact the pooper I am looking for.  I am more concerned with him reaching his hand down his pants and touching himself as he talks to me.  I advise him that it is offending my sensibilities that he is touching himself as he talks to me and I explain how it’s in his best interest to cease this activity. (It didn’t really sound like that, it may have had some colorful adjectives and metaphors and  possibly some veiled and not so veiled threats about what might happen to him if he didn’t stop, but that was the point I got across.)  My problem at this point is that his activity is public sexual indecency, but in this state I need a victim.  I as an officer am not allowed to be a victim of disorderly conduct and such.  It has to be an active crime against me like someone assaulting me or something like this.  So I am looking around to see if someone, anyone has seen him roughing up the suspect.  I contact the caller who called about his pooping and she didn’t actually see him she assumed what he was doing.  I don’t blame her, I would not watch for the gritty details either, but it doesn’t help my quest to put him in jail. 

So with no luck on taking him to jail we document the contact and the suspicious nature of his behavior; his outfit should have been the tell tale sign of things to come.  A white guy, (besides me, the only one in a mile any direction) wearing a derby hat, a vest from a three piece suit no shirt, snake skin vinyl pants and cowboy boots. (rule of thumb, never trust a guy in snakeskin pants and a derby hat)  We release him because he has denied us a consent search for drugs and I have no probable cause to search him and to be truthful I am not willing to find any evidence that may link him to the sewer pickle planting incident.  So after he is warned about trespassing and loitering and public sexual indecency, on his way he goes. 

The next day I was checking the ally much later in the shift to see if Sammy is back.  I stop and talk to the original caller and she tells me his is hiding in an irrigation junction box.  In this alley is a concrete bunker of sorts.  It’s like a giant T to send water in different direction, it’s about 4 feet deep, 3 feet wide and shapped like a giant T.  I leave my car on the street and quietly make my way back to this concrete box.  I shine my light inside and sure enough, Sammy is in there, surrounded by porn on ever side of the inside of this concrete junction box.  But now there is the fact that he is wearing woman’s yoga pants with the crotch cut out so the twig and berries are out and about and he is taking care of business.  I ask him what the hell he is doing.  His left hand shoots into one of the pipes that makes this den of iniquity a T.  Not knowing what he is reaching for, I draw my gun and tell him not to move.  I advise him that if his hand comes out of the pipe and into visibility with a weapon, I will in fact shoot him.  He slowly pulls his hand out with and drops a baggy of what looks like meth.  I keep him at gunpoint until I have the units I requested to meet me in the back are with me.  I get him out and realize that his tight whites are around his neck, yep, neck through one of the leg holes and the waistband and yes, his junk is in fact out and about for the world to see.  This because he chose to cut the crotch out of these woman’s pants.  I cuff him up and the female officer that was backing me up asks him why his underwear was around his neck and not covering his goodies.   His response “Pffft” with a look like “duh, why wouldn’t you”.  

The bad part of this incident, I know your thinking, what?  The other stuff wasn’t the bad part.   Nope, I had to climb down into his den of iniquity to retrieve his meth bag and meth pipe.  I asked him to tell me where his “DNA” would be found in this little pit so that I could avoid it.  I assured him that he would be rather displeased with my reaction to getting his DNA on me down there.  I took off my vest and shimmied my not so slender frame down into this hell hole and got the evidence I needed.  I will leave it at that.  I took him to jail for the drug possession.  He admitted that he was in fact the sewer pickle planter so the caper was solved and ended well.  And really, how strange is it to take a guy to jail wearing women’s yoga pants with the crotch cut out exposing his junk, wearing a derby hat with tightie whities around his neck.  Not quite as strange as the double horse rape report I took, or when the guy jumped out of the house wearing a Mexican wrestling mask and nothing else but it was a still something I could never have made up. 

Gross Warning: this will be gross

I get asked on a regular basis what is the grossest thing I have seen at work.  To me it is just shades of gray.  I see all manner of unbelievable gross things; so many, that I could never remember all of them all, some, I wish I could forget. 

As many of you know I am an odd person and I have my idiosyncratic issues that make me gross out on things that would not bother others.  For example, I  gag every time I see someone eating in jail.  The smell of the jail with all of those stinky gross people just makes it completely impossible to consume any food products.  I seriously wash my hands a few times after each trip to the jail.  I sanitize my cuffs with alcohol wipes, and then I sanitize my hands again when I get back in the car.  And this is when I was wearing gloves when I was dealing with the person.

Some memorable gross outs that I have not yet mentioned in this blog are, the 400 lb naked dead dude that purged his bowels.  On that one when it came time to roll him over for photographs it took three of us.  All of the other dead bodies I have dealt with at work I was able to roll them myself to check for trauma and let the CST take photos.  Since I was junior to the other officers they went to the head and feet, what do you think I got?  You guessed it, I got stuck with the sausage and chili in the middle.  Eeeuuuuwwww.  Then there was the drunk Native American female last night who ripped her clothes off.   With her floppy jelly belly sticking out and swaying more than her breasts, I told her “Holy crap that is disgusting, cover up.”  Or later that last night when I checked off on the air “with a bloody half naked dude” that had been hit in the head with a baseball bat.  He was a bloody mess and he had a three inch long laceration so deep his skull was exposed.  You can ask anyone, I don’t like blood.  I can’t even watch those medical shows on TV without getting completely grossed out.  However, at work it is very different.  For some reason it does not bother me, I just go down my check list of things that need to be done and get it taken care of.

However, the call that sticks out in my mind as the bloodiest and grossest was a homicide I went to in my beat last winter.  I responded to a stabbing at one of the high call for service apartments in my beat.  When I arrived I was second on scene, the first unit was a two man unit which one of them spoke Spanish.  The English speaking officer was knelt down trying to do first aid on the guy as the Spanish speaker was getting the info.  The subject was a Hispanic male lying on his back in a pool of blood.  The Spanish speaking officer told me that this occurred at a different apartments and his roommate was the suspect.  Myself and the Lieutenant that just pulled up ran across the parking lot to the other set of buildings to the victim’s apartment.  As we ran west across the lot the team of paramedics were pulling in and they slammed on the brakes as they saw us running towards them with purpose.  I motioned with my left hand for them to keep going on by to go treat the victim.  I suppose they don’t feel that it’s comfortably safe when we are running around like that.  I don’t blame them; they don’t have a vest or a gun.  There was a blood trail leading up the stairs with blood smears all over the hand railing.  We approached the door and saw that blood droplets were crossing into the apartment on the threshold.  I had gloved up while running over.  I reached down to the door and looked at the LT and he nodded.  I turned the knob and found it unlocked.  I opened the door and pushed it wide open.   I had my gun pointing in as did the LT.  He got on the radio and asked for one unit to cover the rear and at least one more unit to the front door to help us clear the apartment and check for any more victims.  Just a few moments later and FTO and his OIT arrived.  (An FTO is a senior officer that trains new officer’s fresh out of the academy; the OIT is an Officer in training that is still being evaluated)  The OIT spoke Spanish so LT had him give verbal commands for anyone inside to exit or make their presence known in English and Spanish.    We went in with me covering long (down the farthest part of the apartment as the FTO and OIT went right to clear the living room.  The LT was behind me and we moved down the hallway with me covering the kitchen now as LT covered long and the OIT went into the bathroom door to the right.  As we move down the hall to the back of the apartment I am in the front position on the stack so the next door is mine.  I peeled right to open the door and LT covers long into the last room that is right ahead of us as I open the door I see blood all over the place.  Spurts of it all over the wall in the south east corner of the room and a pool about 2 feet across on the floor.  It literally looked like a horror movie scene, but it was real.  My heart was pounding and I was starting to feel tunnel vision creep in, but I need to check the far side of the bed. I fully expected to find another victim but I didn’t.  I was glad because as pumped up as I was I probably would have shot them.    I had never seen that much human blood, that was until I went to the hospital later this same night.

We pull back out and I get tasked to go to the hospital while the crime scene gets set up and locked down so no persons in or out until we have a search warrant.  I got to the hospital and they were working hard on the victim to save his life.  I talked to the paramedics who were first on scene and they said his blood pressure was 40 over zero when they arrived.  They were stunned and in complete shock as we watched what the medical staff was  doing.  There was a crowd of about 30 people watching a dozen or so medical staff work this guy.  One of the paramedics leans over and says.  “This is crazy; I have never seen them do this out here before”.  I looked over and they were cutting the victims chest open.  The doctor was yelling for another set of chest spreaders.  I guess it’s not too common to do this in the trauma room so a nurse had to run to the OR to get the second set.  I saw the doctor spread his chest and reach in with his hands and splash out the blood as the suction was not taking it out fast enough.  I could not believe my eyes.  8 feet from me I could see this guys heart and lungs.  I saw the stab wounds in his lungs bleeding into his chest cavity.  It was like watching TV and being right there except I could smell the metallic smell of blood and tangy stink of human organs.  It was amazing to see them apply the internal paddles to his heart and watch his whole body jump as the defibrillator restarted his heart.  They did it three more times as they attempted to stabilize him to get him to surgery.  I observed them putting nearly 20 units of blood into him.  Nearly all of it poured back out onto the floor.  The pool of blood around the bed was about 12 feet in diameter.  All of the carts and machines supporting the effort were in the puddle of blood.  The doctor and all of the staff had blood up to their knees.  The hallway was covered in bloody foot prints from the nurse’s running back and forth getting more blood and supplies.  They worked him for an hour and twenty two minutes.  I approached the middle-aged grumpy lady who seemed to be the drill sergeant nurse barking orders and yelling out times and numbers.  She looked at me and said “Son, this is our crowning achievement, we have never had this much blood on the floor.” I asked her if he was going to make it to which she responded “oh heavens no.” Watching the chaos was like watching some weird sporting event that you don’t know the rules to or what is going on, kind of like cricket or some other foreign sport I know nothing about.  In the end he did not make it.  He was 17 years old.  By know a parade of ghouls (hospital workers) was walking by in to see the carnage.  I guess to people in the medical field this is a cool thing to see.  I suppose it is like when I worked in the body shop of a Cadillac dealer and the owner drove his Ferrari or Lamborghini in, we would all parade by to check out the sweet car.  Anyway, I had never seen that much blood. I hope I never do again.