NEWSLETTER

Illustration by Christy Karacas

Meeting the Public

Several years ago, when I was still a rookie, my partner and I were cruising down the street in a marked car on patrol. All of a sudden, there he was: A guy on the sidewalk, four in the afternoon, pants around his ankles, taking a dump! The turtle was out of the shell, if you know what I mean. He had his back to us, so I told my partner to pull up right behind him. I figured we’d hit the lights and sirens and literally scare the shit out of this guy! So I flick all the switches and… NOTHING. He doesn’t react at all! Now we needed to get out of the car and approach this lunatic. I didn’t want to have to touch him, because he was still in the middle of his business, without a care in the world. Finally, he stops and we walk up. I’m thinking to myself, “What is this genius—deaf?” Well, guess what?

So he is deaf and now I can finally see that he’s also not all there. Gesturing, I tell him to move along. He looks at me and barks out probably the only phrase he could speak: “Fuck you, police!”

Of course, in that deaf accent it comes out, “Fuun yuu, podice!” I look at my partner, he looks at me, and we’re both just blown away. Believe it or not, shitting crazy deaf guys never came up at the academy. The guy walked off and we never saw him again. But even now when I run into my old partner, I greet him with “Fuun yuu, podice!”

EDDIE BUTLER


Strapping on Your Balls

I remember the first DOA I had to deal with. I was a brand-new rookie. The call that every cop comes to know came over the radio—“10-10 foul odor,” and an address.

I showed up a few minutes later, and although the door and windows of the apartment had been opened, I was struck with my first whiff of what I now call the “DOA smell.” It is a putrid sickly sweet reek that pervades every ounce of your being. Somehow it actually stays inside your nostrils for hours afterwards. You’ll be outside, taking a deep breath, and the smell will come flooding back.

This particular gentleman was an elderly black male who died in a circumstance I would come to find out was quite common: Alone and naked. He had been dead for a week or so, and time had taken its toll. A dead body releases lots of gas as it decays. If there’s no open wound, it can blow up like a balloon. This gentleman’s face was swollen to three times its normal size, as were his extremities. What really struck me though, was that his testicles had swollen to—and I am not exaggerating—the size of bowling balls.

The cop I was relieving, who had a few more years on than I did, just laughed at me when I turned my head away. “Come on, kid, show me you have a pair and get in there,” he said. In the NYPD your reputation is made early and follows you forever, and I didn’t want to be the pussy that got scared of a dead guy, so I sucked it up. Little did I know that in a few years I would stand over a dead man in a freezing park, carrying on a conversation with my partner and the sergeant as I twisted rings off the corpse’s hand with my coffee steaming about eight inches from his head.

That first time, in the apartment though, I did what I had to do. I finished the required paperwork and never heard any jokes about my reaction.

JAMES FITZPATRICK


Gross Out!

My first time on a really brutal crime scene was just a few months out of the academy. There had been an elderly woman who lived on the top floor of an apartment building. A younger woman who lived in the apartment downstairs apparently went crazy, climbed up the fire escape, and beat this old lady to death with a cane. It looked just like a movie crime scene. When I walked in, there were handprints on the door from her trying to get out. She had an older apartment. You know how the floors in older places in the city start to slope? Her place sloped towards the front, and she had bled out so much that there was this enormous puddle of blood at the front door.

There was a senior officer there. It was his scene. I was left to help guard it. If you get a DOA that lives alone, you have to find the apartment key, voucher it, and keep the place locked. Well, the only key that she had must have been in the door that she was reaching for. She had pulled it out, and it fell to the floor. It was in this inch-and-a-half deep puddle of blood. This old cop just looked at me and went, ‘All right, rookie, get me that key.’

Now that I’ve had a lot more experience with it, I know that, for the most part, homicide scenes are shootings. There’s a body laying there, a little bit of blood, and that’s the end of it. But this first one I saw was so elaborate.

My second one involved a gay couple. Apparently the guy who got killed had just started dating this new man, and hadn’t let him know his medical history. The new boyfriend, after they had been intimate already, was at the guy’s apartment. He opened up the fridge to get a drink and found all his medication. He was not happy about this.

The victim had been sitting in a chair and got smashed over the head with a vase. The killer then went behind him and sliced his neck from ear to ear with a knife—really opened him up. There was blood speckled all over the wall and the kitchen floor was just caked with it. Crimes of passion are definitely the most brutal ones.

The grossest stuff I ever saw was during those rookie years. The worst was when this older guy passed away in a flophouse and wasn’t found for a while. He had kind of rolled off his bed and landed on the heater. He was lying there cooking. His face was all bloated and black.

He lived in this little 12-by-12 room with his dog. Of course, the dog had been eating the guy—but it still didn’t bother me at that point. I was dealing with it fine.

The dog was just happy to be with people again. We took him in the police car back to the station house. He was running loose around the house, tail wagging all over the place. Our lieutenant goes to pet him, and the dog just shits all over the floor. It was this liquid shit, the foulest smelling shit ever. I mean, you can’t even imagine. So I walk over to it and I think about where we got this dog, and I’m like, “That’s his owner, all decomposed and digested.” I was like, “I got to get the fuck out of here.” It was like witnessing the cycle of life, seeing this guy getting shit out by his own dog.

MIKE PAWLEWEICZ


CONTINUED:

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