We Are the Cops, page 6
As odd – and perhaps awful – as it sounds, police officers, for the most part (but not always), find talking about their experiences to do with dead bodies an easy subject to open up about. No matter where a cop works, death will always be part of the job – natural deaths, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, bones in the woods, decomposed, maggot infested bodies – and usually a cop will always have a story (or many) to tell about death. So for this reason it was always a great way to break the ice.
Officers would almost relish trying to shock me with their stories about the rotten body found in the attic or remembering the very first time that their department sent them on a death call. For many officers, it would be the first time in their lives that they saw a dead person and that’s something you don’t forget, particularly if the brains are dripping off the ceiling and the people around you are expecting you to act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
For most people, there is nothing normal about seeing a dead body, so the very fact that death is an almost daily part of a police officer’s life – part of their actual ‘job’ – makes it perhaps understandable that they want to tell you about it, if only to help them comprehend it themselves, talking about it and sharing the experience being a way of coping. Certainly, there is something peculiar about listening to a person recalling a truly horrific scene of death, whilst they rock back in laughter; but when something like that becomes ‘ordinary’ and ‘routine’, it can do strange things to a person. Not all officers were laughing though – some found it distressing or were sombre – they just had their own ways of dealing with it.
The work is kind of surreal. I thought that death was the one thing that would bother me when I came onto the department. I didn’t know how I would deal with dead people. I’d only seen one dead person before in my life; it was in a coffin at a viewing. And then after you get on the job, you see a dead person, you do your thing and then go to lunch. You don’t even think twice about it.
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My first dead body on the job was a guy in the Bronx. This guy, he was dead for so long that his body had turned completely black and was five times its normal size. It was the middle of summer, it was hot and this guy was completely bloated and he looked like an aborigine. He had straight white hair, but if you looked at him you would have thought that he was a black guy. I mean, the pictures in the house clearly indicated that he was a white guy but he had been dead for so long. God it was horrible.
It was fucking hot and I just had to sit on him until the fucking ME’s [Medical Examiner’s] office arrived, put him in a bag and popped him. Literally popped him. They put him in a body bag but they couldn’t move him the way he was … they fucking had to let the gas out. They fucking popped him with a poker to let the gas out so that he didn’t explode. It was really, really hot and that’s what happens. It’s like when a watermelon gets over ripe and this stuff inside starts to boil because it’s really freaking hot and this gas builds up and they explode and their seeds go flying all over the place.
Same thing happens to human bodies if the conditions are right. The gas just keeps building and building and the skin keeps stretching and stretching and then there could be a big explosion or there could be a little explosion.
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I’ve seen dead bodies before. In fact some guy once died on my front lawn. He had a heart attack on his bicycle and died on my front lawn. Other than that I had never seen anything gory, although they did take us to the morgue during our training at the police academy. It was so gross. The smell was worse than anything. There were even a couple of bodies that moved on their own and that kind of flipped everybody out. There was a woman – a crackhead – who died from a drug overdose and her body had been opened up in the morgue, you know? She looked like a lobster opened up there. But then her head moved – literally – from left to right on its own. Everybody freaked out.
We were like, ‘How did that happen? Oh my God she’s alive!’
It’s disgusting when you’re looking at her, because it’s this disgusting crack head. Imagine some druggie from the street – you know how bad they already look – but now they’re dead and they’re moving! Their parts are actually moving!
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So, we got a dead body in the alley and we go over there. We’re in this alley and it’s full of garbage and we’re looking for this body. So, here we find it and there’s some guy laying on top of the dead guy and we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’
He’s having anal sex with this guy – this dead guy.
He goes, ‘He was my friend. We used to do this all the time.’ He says, ‘I thought he wouldn’t mind, one last time.’
And really, you’re just like…‘What?’
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The only death that I’ve ever been on that bothered me was the death of a child and I’m not even sure what happened. I was the second or third unit to show up on a ‘child who is deceased’ call. Any time that that happens, we have to go to it because people that are young just don’t die – so it automatically becomes sort of suspicious.
I remember walking up to the door of the house. You’re so used to seeing bags and stuff come out but they have little body bags for children. And I’d never really thought about that before. I remember the coroner, the investigator or whoever it was, bringing out this little body bag. I didn’t even see the child but just knowing that it was in this little tiny bag, I mean, that was probably one of the most horrible things I have ever seen. And I don’t even know what happened on that call.
I spent all of probably fifteen minutes on that call and just that one moment of him walking out with that little tiny body bag… it just wasn’t right.
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The worst call I’ve ever been on was a death notification. What sucks about working in a small community is that you kind of know everyone. You watch these kids grow up. You know who they are and you often know who the parents are as well.
We had two kids who got killed a number of years ago, right before their graduation. They were good kids, they were popular kids and I knew the parents. These kids were racing down the road, they’d been drinking on the beach and they’d deflated their car tires down so that they could get out of the sand. The thing is, they never re-inflated them. So now they’re driving down the road doing fifty to sixty miles an hour and they were fucking around. One kid went to pass the other one, pulled back into the lane, over corrected and rolled out. Neither one was wearing a seatbelt. They both got ejected with the car on top of them.
I remember getting the call telling me to go to the family home to tell the parents that their son wasn’t coming home. And I’d known the father. I was field training that night with a new cop and I told him that we had the worst assignment you could ever get. I told the new cop to take the other kids upstairs so that I could talk to the parents.
I said, ‘Hi, can I come in?’
They said, ‘Sure. How are you?’
‘Can we sit down? I need to talk to you. There’s no easy way for me to say this but there’s been a car accident tonight. Your son was very badly hurt.’
They were like, ‘No, no. That can’t be right.’
‘It is and actually your son is dead.’
‘No, no. That can’t be right. I just talked to my son. That can’t be right.’
Then you have to watch the different stages of grief kick in.
They say, ‘You’ve got to be mistaken. It’s not my son.’
‘Yeah, it is and I’m very sorry.’
‘No, no. This is a training exercise for you guys, right?’
The reality of the situation kicks in and we spent the next, I don’t know, maybe three hours with them, trying to help them find a babysitter so that they could go to the funeral home.
Then they wanted to see the body and I’m saying, ‘Let the funeral home have until the morning. You don’t want to see your son like this. Let them at least clean him up a little bit and make him presentable.’
I didn’t want them to see their son in the state he was in but they were adamant that they wanted to see him and get some closure.
We don’t have the physical danger that a city police officer does but the emotional danger of this job is twice as bad in a small community because you know everybody. You’re anonymous in a city like New York with ten million people because there are very remote odds that you are going to deal with somebody you know. Down here, everyone you deal with, you know.
I didn’t sleep well for a month. It’s awful. It’s an absolute finality. You’re telling a parent that their child is never going to come home again, yet they just saw them forty minutes ago. I watched this kid grow up. He was seventeen when he died and I had watched him since he was two years old. I watched the kid riding around the neighbourhood on a bike, I saw him doing sports, watched him walk to grade school, then high school. And now he’s dead, on a slab.
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On the transit system, we usually average one death every week or two weeks. Sometimes it’s accidental but a lot of the time it’s suicide. Probably the goriest one that I was at was a fifteen-year-old kid who was on the wrong side of the commuter rail tracks. His mum was picking him up and the kid went across the tracks to meet her. I don’t know why he did it but he ended up trying to hop the fence. He didn’t make it; there was a train going about 130 miles an hour through the station and it just nailed him. That was probably the goriest one I’ve been to. Half of his brain was in a different parking lot. It landed like a hundred yards away. People freaked out. When I got there the kids books were all neatly stacked up, so you just knew that somebody flipped out and took this kid’s schoolbooks and made them into a nice pile. That’s probably one of the grossest I’ve ever been to.
All the cops go to these calls. In fact, most of the guys want to go. Everybody wants to go see the dead body. It sounds disgusting but it’s part of the job. We’re morbid and we like seeing weird stuff that we don’t normally get to see. It sounds really bad but everybody will go to look, usually.
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We got called once to an odour complaint. It was a house that sat just off State Street. It was a two or three storey home and some of the residents complained about this terrible smell that was coming from the house. I mean, I could stand on State Street and literally smell it and I knew right away that there was a dead guy there because you know what the smell of death is. Once you get that in your nose you never get it out again – you know it right away, anytime you smell it, driving down the street, you know what it is. Especially in the summer and this was summer.
So we went up to the person that called and she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed this smell in the house.’
She lived up on the second floor and the smell was overpowering. I don’t know how someone can live like that.
She said, ‘I noticed it a couple of weeks ago and it wasn’t that bad but it’s been getting worse and worse.’ Then she says, ‘There’s also a stain up on my ceiling.’
And sure enough there’s a brown, reddish, dark coloured stain that was dripping right through her ceiling and down her wall. So we went up into the attic and it turns out that there’s a homeless guy there who had somehow gotten access to her attic and he’s laying there, dead. His body had basically liquefied. I remember that his eyes were gone and it was like a horror movie - there were maggots crawling out of his eye sockets. And I remember his shirt – he still had his clothes on – he was on his back and his shirt looked like it was moving and it was because his entire body was nothing but maggots. So all of his clothes were just, you know, moving!
I remember I had to help one of the body recovery people pick up his body and put him in a body bag. His scalp was still attached but as soon as we picked him up the scalp and everything fell right off. All his hair was laying there, just a pile of maggots. The smell up there was ungodly bad, just ungodly bad. I think I went outside and actually puked. And that’s what the stain was, leaking through her ceiling – it was his body. His body juices were leaking through her ceiling. They all freaked when they found out.
I can’t believe no one had smelt that guy before. And there was virtually nothing left of him, so we never found out what had actually killed him. I’m sure it was probably natural causes – he was a homeless guy, there were beer cans all around him up in the attic – but he had been dead for weeks and it was hot. It was probably ninety-something degrees up in that attic. It was nasty.
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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.
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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.
