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David Salter has worked the streets of Galesburg, Illinois for 17 years, starting as an Emergency Police auxiliary in 1993 and becoming a full time sworn officer in 1996. He currently is a day shift officer on street patrol.In September of 2009 he retired from a 22 year military career which included service in the USAF and the Illinois Army National Guard. His Army National Guard duty saw a deployment to Iraq in March of 2004. As a Mechanized Infantryman he served in Baghdad, Tajii and Tarmia and was acting platoon leader for QRF South during the Easter Battles on Route Tampa in spring of 2004. Today he continues to work day shift taking calls that run the gamut from lawn clippings in the street to dead people in the road and everything in between. The Blind Eye It was spring and one of the first nice days we'd had in a long time after a pretty dark April.I got the call while deep in 4 Land. In our city we divide it up in to five zones, one central and 4 quadrants. Zone One was Northwest, parks, the lake and Henderson ST, the commercial strip, Zone Two was Northeast, residential, Swedish and quiet, Zone Three was Industrial, projects, Black, Mexican and sometimes not so quiet. Four Land was our affectionate name for 24 Zone, the South East side of town and Hillbilly Heaven with two trailer parks, 2 auction houses and a project to serve our little city of 35,000 or so. Zone Five was down town. For whatever reason it was decided back in the day that all cars and zones would have the prefix 2 with the suffix being the zone assigned. So today I was 24. If we had extra cars we just used them as float cars starting with a suffix of six, seven or eight depending on how flush we were in bodies. We have a nice mix of activity as police work goes. Everything the big cities have we have too just not as much. While we might go for a while without a homicide, there is a good chance the next one gets handled by the same guy that handled the last one. We also do bat calls, lost dogs and vacation checks for our citizens, something the larger Departments in the State do not understand. We handle the city with 5-7 officers per shift, sometimes with more and often times with less plus a Sergeant at the desk. We all operate solo unless something big comes up. "22 Headquarters" That was Leonard who had 22 zone today. "Go ahead." "Report of a man with a gun outside of 224 N Pearl, getting further." "10-4." "25 cover" Brandon was downtown zone. Being central and usually not quite as busy as the others were, he was often a cover car. "24 head that way," I said as I went to lights and siren and scooted up Chambers St. from way down around 6th St. and the South edge of town. Some calls you just know are real. The edge in Barb's voice had me convinced. Besides, you could actually hear her this time rather than her usual bored whisper trailing off to a husky nothing. On the way, she put out the information that the complainant was inside her residence across the street at 231 N Pearl and had seen an elderly white male in his front yard across from her with a silver handgun. "Units responding to Pearl, complainant has lost sight of the subject." I heard Brandon put out his arrival first, followed later by Leonard. Both had been close when the call came out. I was there in probably 3 minutes. "Headquarters 24." "Go ahead," "36 On Pearl," I pulled up near the curb by their empty squads. Since their arrival neither had any radio traffic. It was dead quiet with no one around. This was a little strange. Usually gun calls have plenty of people to point out the problem or where it went. Not this one. Half way down the street a woman was mowing her lawn as if all was right with the world. Someone else a little closer looked out their door at us and shut it slowly. I got out of the squad and moved toward 224 N Pearl, a light green, neat two-story house with shutters and polished brass house numbers. Normally we try to pull up a few houses down, but somehow this time we were pretty much in front of the residence. Leonard and Brandon were nowhere to be seen. What really bothered me, though, was a wide-open yawning garage door opening on a detached garage back at the rear of the house. It was black as midnight. Anything could be hidden in that shadow. It occurred to me again we should have pulled up further down from the address. Oh well. As I slowly crossed the terrace towards the sidewalk I was fully aware that our guy with the gun could be taking a bead on me from the depths of that garage and I wouldn't know for sure until the muzzle flashed. This was not the way to do it, moving across the open area of the front yard dominated by that door but what else could you do? "March to the sound of battle." I always recalled that phrase on an old 101st Airborne poster with a photo of a real WWII GI posted up on the second floor of the old National Guard Armory. You could be as tactical as you wanted but sometimes you just had to go forward no matter what. Still absolutely no indication where the problem was. I started across the lawn, slowly, listening and looking and moving over somewhat so the house blocked part of the open door of the garage. I had my City Issue Sig .45 loaded with hardball (we were lucky to have .45s) and I was spun up, ready for anything. All was peace, twittering birds and dead calm. Something made me look down just as I was about to step and I felt like I jumped straight up. My next step would have been right on top of a crumpled old man in a green jacket lying in a heap on his side with blood coming out of his mouth and ears with his dentures half out his mouth. He was right out in the open on the front yard. In his hand was a nickel-plated or stainless 9mm automatic that I thought was a Beretta but which later turned out to be a Taurus knock-off of the Berretta US Service 9mm pistol. I got my wits back. OK, here is this dead guy with a gun in the yard out in the open and I didn't see him? Not only that, I nearly stepped on him? How rookie can you be? How can a human contort himself this way as he collapsed? Did he shoot himself? Did someone else shoot him down, and if so, where the hell are they? And how come no one else is around? What the hell? As these and other considerations came and went, Leonard and Brandon simultaneously appeared from opposite edges of the house. Brandon said "No one else." It was Leonard's zone and he took over the call. "HQs, 10-79, advise 19 I'll give him a 2" Leonard had just called for the coroner and let our sergeant know he would be calling him to let him know what was going on. At this time the ambulance showed up. Normally they stage somewhere out of sight until the scene is secure and are given the OK to proceed, but this time they must have seen all they needed to and had come on in, although slightly bug-eyed. There was obviously nothing to do for him. One of the guys felt for a pulse and finding none eased away. Other units showed up. For the next hour or so we worked the scene, finding out who he was, where he lived, where his family was and who saw what happened and why it happened. He turned out to be a retired high school teacher, about 75, who had lost his wife earlier in the year and had himself been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Apparently today was the day he could take no more and had decided to end it. He had left his house with his pistol in hand, walked to the neighbor's house and told her to call the police and then calmly walked to his front yard and shot himself through the mouth. Hence the dislocated dentures and bleeding out his ears. I didn't see him when he was untangled to be placed in the body bag, but the 9mm military hard ball had done what it was designed to do by all accounts. As death scenes go it was remarkably short and sweet. For whatever reason, our complainant was the only witness and the rest of the neighborhood was either at work or had the good grace to stay inside so it wrapped up fast. After the coroner and funeral home people departed, Leonard, Brandon and the investigators went through his house and then later notified the two grown children out of state. Two days later I sat alone in the break room in the basement of the station sipping coffee out of a little white cup. I had been wondering off and on why in the world I had missed a dead man lying out in the open with a gun in his hand plain for all to see and I didn't see him until I nearly stepped on him. Am I that dense? Am I in the right line of work? Brandon came in and sat down. I casually mentioned it to him, trying hard to phrase it in such a way so as not to seem stupid. After a slight pause, he said, "You know, I did the same damn thing. I was looking everywhere else and never saw him till I damn near tripped right over on him." We talked a little more about it and how odd it was and I didn't feel quite so bad. Later that day I chatted with Leonard. I told him about it. To my surprise he said he too had done exactly the same thing. We decided we had each arrived in sequence and one by one took the same route to approach the garage, but had not seen him lying there until right on top of him. We didn't go into it much other than it was a weird call from the get-go and to this day the three of us have never discussed it again. I have thought about it since though. Three cops pull up to a gun call, take pretty much the same approach to the area one by one and almost step on a fresh corpse lying in the front yard as plain as day. Because they didn't see it. Why? Well, I have a theory. In most survivor accounts of near-death experiences from being shot at, slashed at or otherwise having life threatened with extinction by some jerk with a weapon, it seems that the survivors really focused in on that weapon to the exclusion of all else. We call it tunnel vision, the military calls it target fixation and the Neanderthals called it ARGGHH! but they are basically the same thing and describe how the mind focuses only on the weapon or threat. All else but the threat seems to be excluded and things remain in that state until it ends one way or another. That is how we are wired and it must have worked for thousands of years. Or millions of years if you buy in to Darwin. But what happens when the conditions are reversed? What if you go from seeing the threat to just knowing the threat is imminent but unable to locate it? What then? Perceptions are reversed. There is no weapon to be seen and the location of the danger is unknown. Instead of boring in on something specific and discarding the useless you have a multitude of possibilities but only so much brain power to analyze them. So you start discarding the useless things while trying to find the essentials in the situation to deal with. When you stop and think about it, that can be a somewhat rare experience. A lot of people experience threats they can see. Fewer deal with the unseen threats. Often they die and it is the survivors we look to in order to glean any information that might be of use to us should we find ourselves in similar circumstances. It seems to me that in the latter situation, the inner you, whatever that is, can take over from the conscious mind, assess the situation and then allow only that which is vital and relevant to ping upon the addled consciousness we operate from and then render a course of action to follow. In our case, the absence of the usual excited witnesses or fellow officers pointing out the obvious had resulted in a situation where there were really wasn't much to orient towards as to a threat. That resulted in a visual overload in which everything was scanned, then dealt with by the inner me who threw out non-essentials such as the obviously dead old man and other mundane non-relevant items, and allowed me to deal with that which was vital. A correct solution was rendered. Something knew what it was doing when we humans were designed and wired for survival. I guess a credible report of a man with a gun supersedes a corpse with a gun in the general scheme of things and can lead to rather remarkable lapses in perception. I wonder what the shrinks would say to all of this? |