Burden of the Badge

It was Halloween – October 31, 2000. The late autumn air smelled of decaying leaves. The streets were active with the buzz of children. Sometime after darkness had fallen I was dispatched to this neighborhood on the city’s Eastside for a fairly routine call of shots fired. Soon, though, the call began to take the shape of something more severe. More calls were coming in, Central Dispatch advised. There was a rifle involved. Someone was shooting at a car. A vehicle had crashed into a telephone pole. The car was on fire and there may be people trapped inside.

Arriving at the scene within about 45 seconds of being dispatched, Officer Matthew Ward and myself could see the fire from six blocks away. As we pulled on to the scene, the front end of the car was engulfed in flames from bumper to windshield, a telephone pole protruding from the engine compartment. There was a person slumped down in the driver’s seat.

Opening the driver’s side door, the only things more intense than the heat were the driver’s gunshot wounds and the blood they produced. As Matt and I tried to pull him from the car, I recall waiting for an explosion and wondering if my wife would still love me after I became disfigured by fire this night. By the grace of God, that did not occur. Matt and I extracted the driver, during what seemed like an eternity, and dragged him to a front lawn, streaking blood along the pavement. The relief of being away from the burning car lasted for only a second. 

“There’s another one in here!” Matt shouted after going to check the vehicle’s back seat.

Returning to the burning car, we began pulling a second man from the rear seat. A Saginaw Fire Department Inspector, who had been on fire prevention patrol in the area, ran past with an extinguisher and started to work on the engine compartment. Sirens screamed from blocks away. The man in the back seat was modestly built, but seemed to weigh a ton. He too had been shot. There was a pistol lying on the floorboard near his feet. Two more police cars screamed up the road. A fire truck followed and several more emergency vehicles descended upon the intersection from various directions.

Red and blue lights shattered the darkness as we finally freed the second man and dragged him away from the car. Wailing sirens filled the air. Then came a muzzled explosion. I turned quickly and, through the smoke, could no longer see the fire department inspector. For a brief second, I thought about how to tell his wife he had been killed. Then he was visible again. He would later tell me how the tires on the car had blown out from the heat while he tried to extinguish the engine fire. He joked about needing to change his underwear.

By now, Halloween was a distant memory for this neighborhood. Tonight, the scary stuff was no longer pretend; the blood and screams were for real. Fire engines, ambulances and police cars clogged the street. People - some carrying fire hoses and some toting medical bags - rushed to do their jobs as a young man breathed his last breath and died on a stranger’s front lawn. The other man survived, although I have never been told, nor have I inquired, of his injuries or the extent of his recovery.

After being hired together in May of 1994, Officer Matthew Ward and I have remained the closest of friends. We never discussed this incident at length after it occurred. This night, however, remains one of the most vivid memories of my career, as I am certain it is permanently engrained in Matt’s mind also.