You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The other side of the tracks.
I am a cop reporter. My job often takes me to tough neighborhoods where humanity is frayed, where the looking glass is cracked.
Headline: Police attempt to pullover a drug suspect. He points a 45 caliber at them, and four officers open fire. The suspect is hit 3 times and will survive. The officers are on routine administrative leave.
The next day I drive to this crime scene.
I drive behind the roach motel. The run down edifice is by the interstate, but it seems to cater to the “rent by the week” crowd.
I am greeted out front by two women who are smoking cigarettes. They are holding a toddler but no job on this Friday morning.
“Did you ladies see anything last night?” I ask while setting up.
That’s how it works in my world. You barge into someone else’s life and you literally shout at them, announcing your needs and intentions. If they perk up, reel them in. If they blow you off, move on.
These women look like damaged goods. They are smoking cigarettes like it’s too early to hit the pipe. I get the distinct impression if they could smoke multiple cigarettes they would.
Both women agree to talk.
“Yeah, we saw it from the balcony,” One woman says using a version of the English language that you only find in 3rd world countries.
The women describes dozens of bullets ripping through the air. They tell me it sounds like a war zone. They tell me they hid their children. They tell me the suspect had his leg shattered by bullets. They will tell me he was suicidal and wanted to die by cop.
“You think the family will talk to me?”
“Oh, they’ll talk alright.”
I smile. If this was Brentwood, where the upper crust of society lives, I would have to check with a gate guard or an attorney only to be told “This is private property please leave.”
Here?
This is the other side of the tracks. This is where the cock roaches come to rest up for the nuclear holocaust.
I am greeted by an older woman. She is rough around the edges, perhaps from little sleep, perhaps from a life of being the mother of a troubled soul.
She is carrying items out of motel room 33. She too is smoking. I quickly deduce that cigarettes are the common denominator here.
I look for a sign, “smoke em if you got em”
“Hi. I heard about the incident last night. Can I talk to you?”
She stops and processes my request. She stares at me, trying to read my thoughts, trying to peer into my soul.
“Yeah, I have a statement for you.”
I raise my camera and point it at her face.
I see her expression grow cold.
“I don’t want to be on camera.”
“Can I use your voice.”
“Everyone knows my voice,” she says.
I listen to her voice. It is unremarkable.
I hate when people play this game. I quickly decide not to challenge her.
“OK, what’s your statement?”
“It was definitely police over reaction,” she says. “They shot a physically and mentally impaired man who wanted to die.”
The mother of the victim will tell me how her son is a good man, a good father of a three-year old daughter. She will tell me how he got into a serious motorcycle accident a year ago and suffered severe injuries. She will tell me that he talked of killing himself, she will tell me that the night before he put a hand gun in his mouth threatening to pull the trigger.
I stare at her with no emotion, as if we all do that every night before dinner.
“The last thing he said to me as they were wheeling him to the ambulance last night. Momma, I can’t even kill myself right.”
Wow, I think to myself. Is this really happening.
I quickly scan the edges of the building for cockroaches. Instead the suspect’s wife emerges.
She walks out of room 33. She is carrying a tiny dog that is ferociously snarling, showing its teeth. The dog wants to chew me to pieces.
The woman looks like she has been awake for 2 straight years. Her hair is everywhere, combed with a weed eater. She is wearing pink sweat pants with a dark t-shirt. She looks like she is dressed courtesy of sisters of the blind. A cigarette dangles out of her mouth like a factory smoke stack.
Of course it does.
I watch as she side steps a large stain on the ground in front of the room. It is red and gooey, the consistency of syrup.
She will later stand over this puddle and tell me this is where she found her husband when the gunfire subsided.
As I approach the dog squirms, snarls, and fights to get loose.
Communication is almost impossible.
“Can I talk to you?” I shout.
“I don’t want to be on camera,” she says.
That’s when I see her face. She is repulsive. If your children saw her they would cry. Her skin looks like chicken boiled in ransid water. If she was in the mall, you would walk on the other side.
“They didn’t need to shoot him 3 times,” she says inhaling her cigarette as if it is air.
I study her face. She is white, but it’s like an off white, as if she has lived in a cave and fed on the bone marrow of vampire bats.
Her face is covered with drops of water. I wonder if she has just taken a shower.
I try not to stare, but honestly, I do. I stare at each jelly filled moisture blob on her face.
WTF?
Her hair is dry, so I rule out the shower.
I study the moisture all over her cheeks and around her eyes. Did she just wash her face with petroleum jelly? I am unsure. Is it a secretion of some sort? Should the CDC be notified? Is this perspiration or ebola?
I keep my distance figuring if I don’t touch her, don’t breathe in when she exhales, I will probably be ok.
I tell her that the cops shot her husband because he had heroin and he pointed a gun at them.
“Well, did they have to shoot at him 32 times?” she says angrily.
I am getting pissed. These women want to talk, they seem to have something to say. Now I’m going to close this deal.
“Yes,” I respond. “The cops have a right to go home too. You raise a gun at a cop. You have a short amount of time left to live,” I say bluntly.
That’s when a bead of something disgusting rolls down the wife’s face.
“Look. You have something to say. I’m giving you the officer’s side of this. That’s all I have so far. If you don’t want this story to be about cops protecting themselves and your husband being a drug dealer, then you had better talk to me now.”
The wife agrees to talk to me if I don’t identify her. I silently laugh. I don’t think I would identify her if I could. Her face looks like a snake shedding its skin. She looks like a bird malting. I wonder if she exfoliates with Mr. Clean.
“That’s cool. Tell me what you heard?”
“I heard tires squealing. I heard my husband screaming, stay back. Just let me say good bye to my wife. He is suicidal. He said this would happen. He told me that if this happened to grab the dog and the baby and jump in the bath tub because bullets would be flying.”
She points to the blood stained driveway. Then they shot him and shot him and it was like a war zone, she would say. She points to the broken glass telling me that her truck had been parked there and was riddled with so many bullets she describes the metal like swiss cheese.
She says the police didn’t need to shoot him multiple times.
“They were getting their Wyatt Earp On,” his mother chimes in from the background.
I remind her she has a voice people will recognize and to be quiet.
The wife wipes her face and takes a deep breath of nicotine.
“They had him on the ground. They had him handcuffed with his hands behind his back. And they sprayed him in the face with mace. “
The chief will later tell me that the man was reaching for something in his pocket, a knife.
A witness will tell gathered media that evening “if you pull a gun on a cop, that’s what you get.”
I hear that blunt witness statement and it’s hard for me not to think that’s the truth.
The women will tell me how he is a good man and he is not a heroin dealer and the police planted drugs on him.
I listen and think to myself that these women are lost. They both sit in a hotel room as big as a handicapped toilet at a bus station. The sign on the door says no smoking. They smoke as if they can’t read, as if they don’t care.
I ask the mother if she has a picture of her son, the suspect, that looks better than the mug shot I have.
She scrolls through her ipad and the best she can do is a fiendish looking shot where he is posing with his daughter. He looks meniacal, like a man who sells heroine and puts .45 caliber hand guns in his mouth for fun.
I will send you something better later, she says.
4 hours later she sends me a photo where he looks like a cross between Hitler and Charles Manson. He is covered with tattoos and his eyes scream kill me or I might kill you.
“This is the shot she took four hours to send to me. This is the picture she thinks will represent the nicer softer side of her son?” I say aloud at my computer. “I waited for this?”
Compared to this photo, the mug shot looks like a fun day at Disney Land.
It’s a sad story with no happy ending.
A tormented man who wants to die will live, probably in prison the rest of his life.
Four officers will have to live with the fear that at any moment their lives can be taken by a heroin junkie.
A wife whose face is melting will forever be tormented by the image of her husband lying in a puddle of his own blood wondering why they shot him so many times and why they allegedly sprayed him in the face once subdued.
A baby girl will grow up without a father and constantly ask questions that will never be answered.
And the mother of a convict, a suicidal mad man, will have pain in her heart that will never subside.
When you read this, from your home, from your office, from the Starbucks in your fancy neighborhood, take stock of how good your life is.
You could go to work with me on the other side of the tracks where life is a chain smoking vampire bat.
Life’s Crazy™