An Apology for the Dead

As a rookie cop working in Harlem in the early 1990’s, I was introduced to death at a rate which illustrated the horrors life on a grand scale. Prior to being assigned there to work, my relatively sheltered existence only saw death through the rosy prism of a half-opened coffin and heavily applied post-mortem cosmetics. The deceased I encountered were relatives, neighbors, and even a best friend; all of them expired quietly and “naturally” and looked peaceful in their repose.

On the job, and not just in Harlem but everywhere I worked as a police officer, death has an unkind visage. Only those who experience the malodorous wretchedness of a lifeless body which has been exposed for a while can appreciate how vile it is. The mere memory of such a putrid stench causes anti-peristalsis. The stink never leaves the olfactory nerves. It’s a haunting odor, destined to return after one’s own death.

A sergeant of mine was ridiculed once for praying over a dead body at crime scene. The family of the victim was not present and he and his squad were awaiting for the coroner to arrive. Harmless enough, he thought to pay respects to this fallen person. Callous though, were the restless officers in his charge who’d seen too much and thought his actions ostentatious.

My own eyes grew weary of the abundance of death which is the reality of a big city such as New York. Eight million people live there, and a million or more commute to Manhattan and the other boroughs every day to work. There are murders, accidents, suicides, and natural deaths in numbers which are sobering to the uninitiated. Death does brisk business in Gotham City. It is easy for the morgue workers, fire fighters, emergency medical technicians, and even police officers who see unabashed death scenes long before a funeral director casts a magic wand over the deceased, to become as cold and distant as are also the eyes of the departed.

That is why the praying sergeant was mocked. It was not his faith they expressed amusement at; it as the gesture of dignity which he gave to a person whom others, in their defense, regarded as a mere object. Self protection against guts and gore often means removing reality from the details. It is not a dead person, but a cadaver; an object to be investigated and removed to a place where folks with ice water running through their veins do even more dirty work: an autopsy, a dissection, and examinations in all those places where maggots and vermin thrive. Pray over that? To do so is a reminder of what awaits steely eyed cops no matter how much they are told they are super heroes; and that is their own demise.

For myself, I remained civil with those whom I handled. There are faces, limbs, babies, and teenagers who glance at me from the corners of my paradoxical sleep while I am in bed. One particular night, we were called to a small apartment where the folks who lived there had a tenant. It is not uncommon for families in the city to rent rooms for extra money, and in this case the couple who lived there went through pains to respect the privacy of the young, thirty something year old woman who took up residence in their spare room down the hall. This tenant was diabetic. Health care is often unaffordable, and in her case, not available. Her insulin was scarce and she had meager means to obtain this necessary medication. After missing their house guest for about a day or so, the husband and wife made the decision to open her door and check on her. To their horror, the woman lay dead on her sofa bed. When we arrived, details became clear that this poor young lady slipped into a coma and passed away.

My squad sergeant assigned various tasks to the officers on the scene to expedite the investigation. With the husband present, we took inventory of the small room and began the tedious process of cataloging and vouchering her valuables which were few. It was my duty to remove her jewelry as the medical examiner will not collect a body with necklaces, rings, watches, and the like as they do not want to be accused of theft and these items are to be submitted to the probate courts.

The young woman had many body piercings, several in each ear, and she had dozens of bangles on each wrist. Removing these proved difficult as rigor mortis had set in and I needed to move her several times to take these items off her. Then, I had to slip off her rings. The best way to do that was to lubricate her fingers. The landlord offered us a small tub of soap and water. I took my time until my sergeant began to hurry me along.

I stopped what I was doing and told him that I was taking care of this as best as I could. He snapped at me again as he believed the coroner had arrived and he was anxious to leave the apartment. I told him once more, in no uncertain terms, that I was doing the best I could and short of using wire cutters, the rings wouldn’t come off any faster. He was miffed, but what could he do? I wasn’t lazy, and there is no special training for handling dead bodies. Trust me, I would have asked him to do it if I had the authority; but I didn’t. The sergeant was forced to wait.

Getting back to my unpleasant task, I washed this woman’s fingers in the warm, soapy water supplied by her friend, the landlord. She surrendered her rings to me. Then, I placed her hands gently on her chest after pulling her blanket up much the same way her mom or dad may have tucked her in at night when she was a young girl.

“I’m sorry, dear.” I remember saying. She deserved at least that much. It was her death, her final repose, that poor young woman; and like my other sergeant who openly prayed for the dead, I was remorseful.





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Confessions of a Blood-Stained Twit

Notice to readers: names of the individuals in this story have been changed to protect the innocent, and the stupid.

In early 1990 I was a young rookie cop walking a beat in New York City. I was part of a field training unit sent out to patrol a housing development in upper Manhattan. It was a four-to-twelve shift on a January evening and I was deployed with a group of about twenty other rookies and a training sergeant to cover an area in Harlem. While patrolling alone, I rounded the corner at 125th Street and Amsterdam Avenue and I was confronted by an extremely tall man, well over six feet in height. He was wearing a long white jacket with a white, brimless cap, and he was covered with deep, red blotches of blood. My initial suspicions were immediately quelled when I realized he was a worker from the nearby meat packing plant. The man, whom I’ll refer to as Ned because I like that name for this story, was talking on a payphone and hung up when he saw me approaching.

“That was fast, I just called you, Officer.” He said.
“You just called me? I didn’t get any calls.” I checked the volume knob on my bulky, police-issue, handheld radio to see if I inadvertently left it off.
“I just called nine-one-one.” He told me. It was at the moment that the central dispatcher alerted my unit to this individual at our location. I answered and informed the dispatcher that I was on the scene. My sergeant, a street smart young woman, Sgt Wertz (I like that name for her) responded also that she was on the way to that location to meet me and she ordered all other training units to respond as well. It was a slow tour, and I knew that she wanted to instruct us young cops on how to write a proper field report, and nothing more.

Confident that I could handle this situation myself, I opened my memo book and took the cap off a ball point pen and started to interview my “complainant.”

“Why did you call the police?” was the obvious question.” Ned smiled and placed his hands on his blotchy, maroon and white butcher’s coat.

“Okay Officer, it’s like this. You see, I’m a bookie. Now, I know that’s against the law, but I had an argument with a woman who owes me money, and it might have gotten a bit out of control, and I might have pushed her a little, and I just wanted to call you guys and set the whole thing straight before she did.”

I put the memo book back into my back pocket and took another look at the blood stains on his uniform. Precisely at the moment when he completed his pitch to me about telling his side to the story which hadn’t been reported yet by the other person involved, Sgt. Wertz and a small platoon of cops turned the corner where I came from and appeared behind me. I’ll never forget Ned’s eyes widening and saying “Whoa” out loud.

Sgt. Wertz took command. After a few moments of questioning, Ned told a tale of asking a woman he knew for the sum of forty dollars which she allegedly owed him for betting on a ball game. Ned was enlightened enough to understand that cops tend to make sort of a frowny face when it comes to illegal gambling; but, as an otherwise law abiding citizen, he enlisted the aid of the police to assist with this somewhat thorny issue involving him and one of his betting clients.

“Where is this woman now?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Ned took a few steps westward and pointed to one of the corner buildings on the opposite side of the development. She allowed Ned to lead the way as we all escorted this young entrepreneur who suddenly became quiet. We learned what floor the woman lived on and what apartment she was in and Sgt. Wertz asked me and two other cops in my squad to accompany her to the apartment. She ordered the rest of the squad to wait in the lobby, all sixteen of them, and keep and eye on Ned.

The woman’s apartment was on the sixth floor at the end of the hallway. We knocked, and knocked again, and waited. As we were about to leave, someone’s eye appeared in the peephole. The door opened abruptly. There was a woman living there as Ned informed us, and she looked to be about one hundred years old if she was a day.

“How did you know that I needed you?” she asked. Sgt. Wertz looked at me. I shrugged.

“Do you need the police for any reason?” Sgt. Wertz asked. Cops always ask questions we know the answer to. It’s a method to catch people in a lie, though in this case Wertz was asking out of habit.

“Why yes, Officer. I don’t have a phone, and I couldn’t call.”

“Do you know a tall man wearing a white jacket and a hat?”

“Yes, yes. You have him? He’s the one. He did it to us.” Then the old woman turned around and shouted, as only an extremely elderly person can “Henry! It’s the police!” Henry turned out to be her husband who was older than his wife. No kidding, the woman was ninety three and the husband was ninety four. They had a very different story to tell than Ned did.

For about three or four days, Ned, who worked in the meat packing plant nearby as I deduced from his attire, confronted the woman and her husband while he took his lunch break and they were sitting in the bench in front of their apartment building. Each day, he’d ask them for money, and they’d tell him to get lost. Only, Ned didn’t get lost; and on that day, he followed them into the lobby of their building as they tried to escape his persistent and increasingly menacing presence.

The woman and her husband shuffled onto the elevator together and watched as the door closed on Ned’s face. That didn’t stop clever Ned as he ran up the stairs and met them as they came off the elevator. She screamed and fought as Ned tried to rip her pocketbook off her shoulder. Her husband pushed and shoved at him too and Ned knocked her over and dragged her down the hallway by the pocketbook strap. When he was able to yank the pocketbook free, the husband started beating Ned about the head and shoulders with his cane. Ned wisely dropped the bag and ran fled, unable to subdue a couple in their nineties. The first thing he did was to locate a payphone and call the police to get his side of the story in first before they did. That’s where we came in.

Sgt. Wertz heard enough and contacted the other officers guarding Ned in the lobby. “Put him in handcuffs” was all she said. The cop who answered said “10-4” but left the radio keyed long enough for us to overhear Ned in the background saying “Hey wait, I called the police, I called the police.”

I rode in the back seat of the patrol car with Ned, as he writhed in discomfort with his hands cuffed behind his back. The cop driving the RMP (that’s NYPD cop terminology for a police car: Radio Motor Patrol) ignored Ned as he ranted and complained to me, the senior officer behind the wheel, and to anyone who drove past us oblivious to his plight.

“You can’t lock me up, I’m the one who called the police.” He kept repeating.

“That’s right, you called the police, and we thank you.” I said.

“No Officer, I called you guys, so you can’t lock me up.”

“What? No way, you don’t think…” The other officer and I laughed out loud. It was clear that Ned truly believed that if a person called the police first, he was immune from being arrested no matter what he was accused of. Though Ned was the first person I encountered in my police career who acted under this misapprehension, I met many more folks like him during the course of my career who believed that they would be absolved of their crimes if they called nine-one-one before the other guy did.

“Hey hey, Ned, knock it off, you’re way too loud.” The other officer said. He stopped the car and chirped the siren at a garbage truck which was blocking the side street we were on.

“No, no. I’m not supposed to get arrested, this is wrong.” He griped. I couldn’t believe it. I never met anyone so dim-witted.

“What’s wrong is that you robbed somebody and called the police on yourself.” he turned around and looked Ned in the eye. “You have the right to remain silent…use it.”

Ned was a dumb guy, but he knew useful legal advice when he heard it. Not a word came out of his mouth and he drove with us the rest of the way to the precinct with his chin in his chest. Poor Ned, maybe he would have been a better bookie than a robber; but I’m willing to bet he never called the police again.





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