Saturday, February 19, 2005
Cop beat flashback
By the Erudite Redneck
Once upon a time when I was on the night cop beat at a paper at a small daily in Texas, the police scanner cracked with a "major-major," copspeak there for a bad wreck with at least one fatal.
It was 10:06 p.m. Deadline was 11 p.m.
This was 1989 -- no cell phone, no laptops. I had a two-way walkie-talkie-type radio that worked if I could get far enough over the horizon to get a line-of-sight connection. Didn't come into play on this story.
I roared out of the newsroom to the back alley, jumped in my 1989 4-cylinder Ford Ranger pickup and rushed to the scene, about 5 miles way. Pulled up as far as stopped traffic would let me. Continued on on the side of the four-lane highway, in the grass, puttering up just as close I could.
Jumped out. Ran up to the scene. I saw two '70s-era cars that had hit head-on. From where I stood, I could see one of the two dead drivers:
His left heel was sticking out of the back of his sock; the shoe had torn down the middle back of the heel; the threads in the seam just snapped like twigs -- because, as I found out from chatting with a cop-ID tech working the wreck, both cars were going in excess of the speed limit, which meant more than 55, which meant that because one driver was on the wrong side of the freeway and didn't know it, and the other driver was just driving along on the curve minding his own business, they hit at full force.
No interview took place. Just that chat with the cop. Didn't care what his name was. Didn't matter. I wrote down the color, type and other info of both cars, wrote down the precise location of the wreck, and what all the officials and such were doing at the scene; took note of the few gawkers who were standing around. I probably took note of the weather.
Got back in my pickup and rushed back the newsroom where I banged out about 8 inches on the wreck, on deadline. Turned it in at 11 p.m. sharp. 54 minutes from the time the scanner first cracked about the major-major.
Not anything close to an "all-encompassing story." But a story. Turned in on deadline. The next day we ran a brief that identified the dead.
I remember it because it was really a rush to go from sitting on my butt to rushing to a fatal, to rushing back to my desk, to banging out a story, all in 54 minutes flat. Something in the weather triggered the memory. It was about this time of year.
END
P.S. Today is my Bird's 19th birthday! Happy birthday to Bird!
P.P.S. Oklahoma State vs. Texas Tech today at 2:30 p.m. Bird will be in the stands, as usual. GO POKES!
P.P.P.S. No. 1 Oklahoma State wrestling team takes on No. 6 (or 7?) ou wrestling tomorrow at 2 p.m. Ol' ER will be there, between catching the first and last parts of the Daytona 500 on TV. GO POKES! GO HARVICK! GO JUNIOR!
--ER
Once upon a time when I was on the night cop beat at a paper at a small daily in Texas, the police scanner cracked with a "major-major," copspeak there for a bad wreck with at least one fatal.
It was 10:06 p.m. Deadline was 11 p.m.
This was 1989 -- no cell phone, no laptops. I had a two-way walkie-talkie-type radio that worked if I could get far enough over the horizon to get a line-of-sight connection. Didn't come into play on this story.
I roared out of the newsroom to the back alley, jumped in my 1989 4-cylinder Ford Ranger pickup and rushed to the scene, about 5 miles way. Pulled up as far as stopped traffic would let me. Continued on on the side of the four-lane highway, in the grass, puttering up just as close I could.
Jumped out. Ran up to the scene. I saw two '70s-era cars that had hit head-on. From where I stood, I could see one of the two dead drivers:
His left heel was sticking out of the back of his sock; the shoe had torn down the middle back of the heel; the threads in the seam just snapped like twigs -- because, as I found out from chatting with a cop-ID tech working the wreck, both cars were going in excess of the speed limit, which meant more than 55, which meant that because one driver was on the wrong side of the freeway and didn't know it, and the other driver was just driving along on the curve minding his own business, they hit at full force.
No interview took place. Just that chat with the cop. Didn't care what his name was. Didn't matter. I wrote down the color, type and other info of both cars, wrote down the precise location of the wreck, and what all the officials and such were doing at the scene; took note of the few gawkers who were standing around. I probably took note of the weather.
Got back in my pickup and rushed back the newsroom where I banged out about 8 inches on the wreck, on deadline. Turned it in at 11 p.m. sharp. 54 minutes from the time the scanner first cracked about the major-major.
Not anything close to an "all-encompassing story." But a story. Turned in on deadline. The next day we ran a brief that identified the dead.
I remember it because it was really a rush to go from sitting on my butt to rushing to a fatal, to rushing back to my desk, to banging out a story, all in 54 minutes flat. Something in the weather triggered the memory. It was about this time of year.
END
P.S. Today is my Bird's 19th birthday! Happy birthday to Bird!
P.P.S. Oklahoma State vs. Texas Tech today at 2:30 p.m. Bird will be in the stands, as usual. GO POKES!
P.P.P.S. No. 1 Oklahoma State wrestling team takes on No. 6 (or 7?) ou wrestling tomorrow at 2 p.m. Ol' ER will be there, between catching the first and last parts of the Daytona 500 on TV. GO POKES! GO HARVICK! GO JUNIOR!
--ER
Comments:
<< Home
First, Happy Birthday, Bird!! Whoo hooo!
Second, isn't it eerie the subtle things that may trigger a flashback to something unpleasant in our early careers? Rarely is it a pleasant memory for our types -- those of us who cut our teeth on cop beats, fire beats, obits... we didn't get a lot of happy jolly moments unless we also had the chance to write features. Is it any wonder we grew up a little warped?
Second, isn't it eerie the subtle things that may trigger a flashback to something unpleasant in our early careers? Rarely is it a pleasant memory for our types -- those of us who cut our teeth on cop beats, fire beats, obits... we didn't get a lot of happy jolly moments unless we also had the chance to write features. Is it any wonder we grew up a little warped?
Dead bodies get ... easy after awhile. At least compared to seeing inuured people in agony. The first major wreck I covered was as an intern in downtown Fort Smith; it was just a few blocks from the paper; I got there as they were unpacking the Jaws of Life; the people were still trapped in the car; right there was a crossroads for a young ER. As now, I wore glasses. I devised a simple mental trick: using the frames of my glasses, which glasses wearers soon learn to ignore, I pretended I was lookjing at a TV screen -- the scene of two or three bloodied, screaming people trapped in a car not 20 feet away. Total bull, of course, but it got me through. I drank hard that night. By the end of the summer, I was able to hang out of my car window with a Pentax K1000, estimating focus, driving at a crawl past a wreck to get a pic of an ambulance crew putting a victim on a backboard; traffic was backed up for a half-mile either way on a narrow two-lane road with no shoulder; my assignment was to get a pic; they were letting one lane open for five or six cars to go by at a time; it took me several passes but I got the pic. Yea and verily, I am a LOT warped. But with the help of Jesus and Geo. Dickel, I get by. (Not as alarming as it sounds: Tom T. Hall had an album called "Jesus and Jack Daniels" in the early '80s!)
All that reminds me of those similar episodes in my own career -- pulling up to the scene of a T-bone wreck, where the driver's side door on one vehicle was transformed into a piece of the center consol. The fella driving that tiny car, which was smaller now, was closer to 300 pounds than 250, and the door was mere inches from the center-consol gear-shift. No surprise that while writing notes, I heard the ambulance crew report over the radio from the hospital that the victim was "Signal 30" -- the dispatcher coding for dead on arrival.
I was shocked he made it that far.
But nothing professionally agonized me more than when I sat near a woman in court. Her son had been killed a year earlier, and she weaped as witness after witness testified how her 20-year-old son had been shot in the head by one of his summer roommates. The roomie supposedly got all tanked up, got angry and loaded his 12-guage shotgun with a deer slug to "scare" the victim.
Time after time. Officers, then the medical examiner, then other roommates. My heart ached for her.
But we tell other people's stories -- sometimes their inspirational, sometimes emotional, sometimes damning and sometimes sad.
And hopefully we grow from it so that we can do our jobs better and with more compassion.
Post a Comment
I was shocked he made it that far.
But nothing professionally agonized me more than when I sat near a woman in court. Her son had been killed a year earlier, and she weaped as witness after witness testified how her 20-year-old son had been shot in the head by one of his summer roommates. The roomie supposedly got all tanked up, got angry and loaded his 12-guage shotgun with a deer slug to "scare" the victim.
Time after time. Officers, then the medical examiner, then other roommates. My heart ached for her.
But we tell other people's stories -- sometimes their inspirational, sometimes emotional, sometimes damning and sometimes sad.
And hopefully we grow from it so that we can do our jobs better and with more compassion.
<< Home
