While others have never been exposed to police work, yet they know they have a passion to become a police officer. I was one who lived a pretty sheltered life, having never been exposed to much of anything, causing some to question if I would make it in this challenging profession.

I remember my academy instructors showing us some very graphic pictures of scenes they had worked. They were trying to prepare us for what we would likely see for ourselves one day. I’ve often heard of officers who would make off-color or inappropriate remarks when confronted with gruesome or tragic situations, and I never really understood why they acted in such a manner. I never realized how many different emotions sweep over a cop each day until I became one myself. Sometimes snide remarks are just a mechanism that helps us cope. It has often been described as “gallows humor.” It’s not meant to be disrespectful—it just keeps us from being swept up in the abject horror of some incidents, one of which I’ll describe below.

It was approximately 10:30 on a Saturday night. I had just finished filling out the paperwork for a prisoner I had booked into the jail. My partner and I were joking around as he was getting his boots shined. It was a calm night; we both felt relaxed. Little did we know that in the next few minutes, our calm night would morph into a terrible storm. As we finished up at the jail, the dispatcher called our radio numbers. I recall hearing her voice and knowing the call we were about to embark on would be one with a very high priority. Dispatch was sending us to a residence about fifteen minutes away where a man had fired shots. He was still on the scene.

My partner and I immediately ran to our patrol vehicle and set out toward the location. Whenever we’re enroute to a call such as “shots fired,” the adrenaline rush from driving at speeds of 100 miles per hour or more is incredible. Aside from the rush I was getting while trying to get there quickly and stay in one piece, my mind began to entertain other thoughts, particularly about my family. What if something happened to me in the next few minutes? Did my family know I loved them more than life itself? Had I shown them how much they meant to me each day? I knew that anything could happen at these kinds of incidents, and that knowledge prompted me to think of those I loved. The anticipation and fear of the unknown caused me to want to call them, perhaps for the last time, to tell them I loved them.

My anxiety was quickly interrupted by the dispatcher’s frantic voice telling us that the shooter was now at large. Then two minutes later, she informed us that the shooter was still on the scene. Our hearts pounded against our ballistic vests, thumping almost audibly with each update. My partner and I scanned the roadways and residences as we arrived. We saw no one. We cautiously made our way toward the back of the location, listening for any noises. As we approached the backyard, we saw a young male seated on the deck and an older male standing a few feet away.

“He’s got a gun!” The older man yelled, as he pointed toward the other man seated on the deck. Having just arrived, we were unsure about what was going on. My partner barked out a command to the man on the deck.

“Show me your hands!”

No response. Upon closer examination we immediately realized what had happened and holstered our weapons. Blood was everywhere. Suicide.

Without going into detail, the scene could only be described as extremely graphic. The older man continued to franticly pace back and forth while telling us the younger one had a gun. We calmed the older man down and took him inside the house to investigate the situation further. We notified dispatch of our status and told her the scene was secure. Soon, investigators and crime scene technicians arrived at the residence to process the evidence and complete the appropriate reports.

While my partner and I discussed the tragic event with the older man, who turned out to be the victim’s stepfather, the victim’s mother approached us crying hysterically. She asked whether her son was okay. The mother began telling us that she knew her son was wrong, but that he was still her son and that she needed to know that he is okay.

At moments like this, my job is sometimes almost too difficult to bear. I stood there searching for the right words, but in this case there really were none. I waited silently for a few seconds as she asked one more time, “Where is my son? Is he okay?” More than anything else, I wanted to be able to tell this mother that her boy was still alive. Reluctantly, I told her as gently as I could that her son was gone. Instantly, I saw the horror and pain flash in her eyes, like a storm brewing on the horizon. I knew that nothing I said would release her from the hell in which she was then immersed.

She repeated over and over there was no way her son was dead. I recognized she was in shock, as any parent would be. Finally, her husband pulled her close to him and tried to assure her everything would be all right, but it wouldn’t. Although this man had been close to losing his own life that night, he had to be strong for her. He was. After a few minutes, an ambulance transported them both to the hospital.

That night ignited a myriad of emotions in me, almost like a carnival ride with all of the highs and lows. I had never experienced such a dramatic range of disparate feelings before. One minute I was laughing and joking with my partner; the next minute we were engulfed in a sea of despair. We faced possible danger, and then we felt relieved knowing it had passed. The harrowing ride to the location, barreling along as quickly as we could toward the belly of the beast, reminded me not to take my family for granted. I had felt such a profound need and love for them, one that I had never felt before.

Afterward, I felt sad for the parents. The stepfather, his life threatened by the boy, felt fearful that he himself would not survive. Yet witnessing his stepson commit suicide will be forever etched in his memory. And the mother, her regret that she was unable to save her son; the grief of losing a child, will be her constant companion. So sad, so frustrating.
I know the parents could never have anticipated what had just happened, and I don’t know if there were any contributing factors, such as alcohol, that led to this final catastrophic confrontation.

Whether some choose to believe it or not, when police officers respond to calls like this one, those calls do have a lasting effect on us. Our duty is to protect and to serve the people in the communities where we work. Often, that means finding ourselves in harm’s way, running toward the danger when most people choose to run away from it. On the outside, we have to be in control of our emotions, but on the inside, those feelings sometimes wreak havoc upon us, constantly trying to overrule what we know to be the proper course of action. These constant highs and lows sometimes change our lives forever.

Seeing death, witnessing violence, and being exposed to man’s inhumanity to man can have a ruinous effect on an officer’s physical and mental health. Police work is a vocation rather than a job—it’s not for everyone. However, if one is able to withstand the dark side of what we sometimes encounter, it can be the best job in the world.

(For more stories from “Women Warriors: Stories From the Thin Blue Line” go to www.totalrecallpress.com or www.amazon.com.)

 

is a tired aphorism we’ve all heard many times. With a corollary I’ll add, “If you don’t like Texas climate, drive a couple hundred miles, but be sure to stay in Texas.” Our state has awesome variety of weather, starting in the distant South where the Rio Grande oozes into the Gulf of Mexico, with its near tropical heat most years. In the Panhandle you have the usual four seasons, compounded by so-called blue northers, known in other areas as cold fronts, that slam down from the North Pole when they want to.

A friend once said of his little boys, “They have two speeds; slow and stop.” Let me adapt that thought and say that Houston has two temperatures: hot and steamy hot. That may not be quite fair, but it’s not far off either. In past years I referred to Houston’s “annual week of winter” when temperatures hung out in the 50s or 40s, perhaps even freezing a night or two, but last year we didn’t have any winter, not even one night cold enough to build a fire in our fireplace. The AC was on for ten months. About every five years or so, it might snow enough for kids to scrape together a snowball, and schools will let out for an unplanned holiday. Growing numbers of Texans have found their way to ski lifts in Colorado and New Mexico, much of which was formerly parts of Texas.

The real extremes of Texas weather tend to center around rainfall or lack of it from West to East. Extremes range from single-digit average annual moisture in El Paso to over 60 inches average at Orange and the lower Sabine River area. Ranchers in West Texas are always anxious to get as much moisture as they possibly can in any form. Almost no one in far West Texas can imagine the concept of too much rain, such as a flood, until they have one. Ranchers who made it through the drought of the 1950s in banker’s parlance describe annual rainfall as dropping “to the low single digits.” At the annual Bloys Camp Meeting, where our family went some summers as guests of Mr. J.W. Espy, the ranchers’ prayers for rain compared in earnestness with those of the prophet Elijah.

It happens my mother was born in Tucson, Arizona, a place even hotter and drier than El Paso. When our family moved from El Paso to San Antonio, we had three times as much “rain”, and Mother considered it an event when she could drive her old Chrysler with all windows open. Her neighbors must have thought she was plumb crazy. That was before the days of automotive air conditioning.

Though the rest of our nuclear family continue to live happily in San Antonio, with Dad’s move in 1952 to head up National Bank of Commerce there, I had no idea what a paradigm shift I was in for in 1958 when this “prodigal son” chose to “go East young man.” Sometimes Houston gets three times as much rain during a hurricane as El Paso will get in two years. In my collection of Texas books I have one entitled The Time It Never Rained.

Every self-respecting Texas town has a “war story” to tell that’s a one-hundred-year flood plain event. There was a restaurant in Lampasas that I suppose still has the floodline painted high on their plate glass front window with the note, “It came to here.”

Sanderson, Texas surely has its “war story.” Dad’s friend, Johnny Williams, owned a wool warehouse next to Highway 90. By a freak of nature the summer of 1964, a super heavy rain dumped on the rocky hills above town, and the water cascaded down through Mr. Williams’ warehouse like a dose of salts through an old widow.

Sacked wool and mohair rode the crest of the tidal wave through downtown Sanderson, on to the Rio Grande and beyond, most all of it irrecoverable. This was in the days when almost no one thought of flood insurance. Lost in the flood were Mr. William’s records, who owned how much wool, or was it mohair?

No one knew what page of the book they were on, so what next?
Anyone for Kings ex? Force majeure? Bankruptcy?
Not on your life.

Mr. Williams promptly set up office in the cab of his pickup, and met with each of his customers to try to figure out the amount of wool or mohair each had prior to the flood; parties hoping for a satisfactory compromise.

Essentially it came down to Mr. Williams accepting the figures of most customers on his bailment, even without the formality of warehouse receipts. In the Texas tradition of a “man’s word is his bond,” Johnny Williams fully repaid every man without lawsuits and without “government aid.”

In the late ‘50s when I moved to Houston, I didn’t have to wait long to learn about hurricanes. I got to encounter a really big one in 1959, Hurricane Audrey.

That was at a time when I was still wandering in the petrochemical wilderness trying to sell dry ice and chlorine gas to small towns’ water works, even some east of the Sabine River. One morning as I was driving to Lake Charles in my rattle-trap 1946 Ford, the radio program was interrupted to give warning of a hurricane expected to make landfall in a couple of hours near Cameron, La.

“That’s due south of where I am!,” I said to myself. Though it was mid-morning, I decided it would be best to get indoors, so I pulled into the next “tourist court” as we used to call them. What I witnessed that morning from inside the tourist court was the ferocity of Mother Nature, such as I had neither seen before nor since. I experienced Hurricane Audrey in the midst of torrential rain and semi-darkness, coupled with winds clocked at over 100 miles per hour that whipsawed the large steel sign on the tourist court. But it never came off its mooring. Extremely high winds picked up again following the period of near quiet when the eye of the storm passed over us, but what I witnessed from my motel window was child’s play compared with the damage Audrey heaped on Cameron, Louisiana, 20 miles to my south.

After a time, the wind and rain decreased as Audrey made its way straight at us in Westlake, Louisiana! People began to venture outside. Gradually the locals realized communication had been lost with the town of Cameron. Phones were out. There were no cell phones then. There was no power. Why was there no word from Cameron, Louisiana?

It would be another day before the picture began to emerge of Audrey’s damage, surely not a pretty one. Most folks got word of the storm, except that 10 percent who never do. Weather forecasting then was less than a science, so neither the direction nor force of the hurricane could be determined until it was too late.

Hour by hour as day two emerged, news of the death toll climbed steadily, together with horror stories of drownings and encounters face to face with water moccasins. Soon the death toll passed 100. By the third day it passed 200, then 300 and ultimately over 400 confirmed deaths resulted from Hurricane Audrey.

While not in league with the estimated 6,000 – 12,000 deaths that resulted from the Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the deadliest hurricane in US history, Hurricane Audrey of 1960 was big and she was bad. The most terrible aspect of it was that nearly all loss of life might have been prevented had those persons taken weather reports seriously and evacuated early.

Though I failed to be thankful at the time, I was fortunate to have survived Audrey. With named hurricanes, a good rule to remember and implement is this: overreact early.
More important, far more important concerning hurricanes, wherever you are in Texas, forget that you ever heard the tired saying about waiting twenty minutes for a weather change. That’s not the way it works.

Overreact immediately!

Move out, if you can; otherwise, take the highest cover nearby.
(For more stories by David Smith and “Texas Spirit” go to www.totalrecallpress.com or www.amazon.com.)