Never Let Them See You Cry (23 page)

“He's a mess,” agreed the prosecutor.

Prosecutors translated twenty pages of testimony from an old murder trial into Spanish, had El Loco read it aloud and then asked questions. Their conclusion: He did not understand a thing. Both sides agreed there was no way El Loco could comprehend his own trial.

“He's as sane as he can be,” insisted the dead cop's still-bewildered mother. “Our son was our best friend, one of the nicest guys who ever lived. It's hard to believe that someone like this man can get away with killing him.”

The judge ordered El Loco confined in a maximum-security state hospital, but lawyers for the state objected, arguing that it is unconstitutional to jail someone who is no longer charged with a crime. Maximum-security state hospitals are for defendants tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Insanity, however, was why El Loco could not be tried. State officials offered to place him in a “campus like” facility from which he would be released when no longer considered a threat.

The Miami Herald
reported the Catch-22 situation. Public outrage persuaded the state to relent and lock El Loco in a hospital for the criminally insane. No one knows if or when he will be released.

In the final analysis, nobody is paying for Donald Kramer's death—except us.

Nearly all cop killers have prior criminal records. They are usually on parole or probation or free on bond. Most often the distance between cop and killer is zero to five feet, nose-to-nose confrontations, not drawn-out firefights. The officer stands little chance.

That was the case with three Metro autotheft detectives who possessed an uncanny sixth sense about stolen cars.

Frank Dazevedo and Thomas Hodges, both thirty-two, and Clark Curlette, twenty-eight, were never off duty, even when away from their office and out of their jurisdiction.

Miami Beach was not their turf, but a tip they had passed to the Florida Highway Patrol had panned out, and three employees were about to be arrested for selling fake licenses right out of the Miami Beach motor vehicle bureau. It was a big deal; the FHP state commander had flown in from Tallahassee to wrap up the investigation. As a courtesy, the FHP invited the detectives to attend the bust.

Dazevedo had recently cracked a stolen car ring that specialized in Lincoln Continental Mark IVs. As they stood outside the motor vehicle bureau that afternoon, a light-color Mark IV cruised by in traffic. The three detectives exchanged glances. Their sixth sense said it was stolen. They watched the driver park the Lincoln behind a motel a block away. Two decided to go have a look, while Dazevedo remained with the FHP officials.

Hodges and Curlette clipped their badges to their clothing, drove over to the motel and stopped their unmarked car next to the Mark IV. From inside the room, the driver was watching.

As Hodges walked toward the room, window glass shattered and a shotgun blast caught him in the face and shoulder. The detective, the father of three small children, stumbled back thirty feet and fell, dying.

The man burst from the motel room, firing his twelve-gauge shotgun as he ran. He also carried a .38-caliber revolver. Curlette, still standing next to the Mark IV, was shotgunned in the chest. He died on the parking lot pavement.

A Miami Beach policeman passing on routine patrol had noticed the detectives with clipped-on badges. Now he heard the gunfire and radioed for help. A block away, at the motor vehicle bureau, Dazevedo also heard the shooting and saw his partners down. He asked the troopers if they were armed. Only one was.

Dazevedo sprinted after the man with the shotgun. Fellow detectives agonized later over why he did not wait for help, why he never took cover. Instead he charged in pursuit of the man who had shot his partners. He fired his service revolver, no match for a shotgun. The gunman wheeled and blasted Dazevedo in the face and shoulder with the twelve-gauge. The detective was already dying when the killer shot him again, in the stomach.

An editor shouted across the newsroom to me that a cop had been shot, on the Beach. I snatched up a notebook and started to ask the location. He put down his telephone and said, “That's two cops shot.”

As I headed for the elevator, somebody called after me, “Three cops shot.”

I sped across the causeway, tuning the police scanner in my car to the Miami Beach frequency. In the confusion, a policeman had left his microphone open. The enraged, almost hysterical shouts of cops in pursuit of the killer were chilling. The fear, the fury and the stress in their voices were terrifying. Beach task force officers were sweeping across a stretch of ocean beach. They had the killer cornered, surrounded in a dense clump of vegetation, palms and sea grapes. Screaming obscenities, they ordered him to surrender. I heard the shot that killed him and nearly drove off the road.

He had shot himself in the head as cops closed in. They half-carried, half-dragged him out of the undergrowth as I pulled up.

“Somebody call an ambulance for this piece of shit!” somebody shouted, but it was too late. They were all dead: three cops and their killer.

As their three children played nearby, Hodges's wife, Karen, saw TV news bulletins reporting the shotgun murders of three Metro detectives in Miami Beach. She knew that her husband and his two partners had gone to Miami Beach that day. The knock at the door found her gripped by a growing fear.

“I thought it could be them,” she quietly told me later.

The partners who shared a sixth sense about stolen cars were right. The Lincoln was stolen, from Palm Beach, the license plates from Fort Lauderdale.

Cops are human. You know that, but sometimes it slips your mind. That is why it is devastating to see a cop cry.

As a rookie reporter covering demonstrators at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, I met undercover officers Harrison Crenshaw, Jr., and Gerald Rudoff. A salt-and-pepper team—Rudoff white, Crenshaw black—with the Metro Organized Crime Bureau, they wore beards, beads and hippie hats and infiltrated protest groups. Crenshaw and Rudoff were responsible for the firebombing convictions of Black Afro Militant Movement (BAMM) members and the indictment of the Gainesville Eight on charges of planning to disrupt the convention.

They were as close as brothers. When Crenshaw married a legal secretary named Margaret she half-jokingly asked if Rudoff was joining them on the honeymoon. Promoted to sergeants and no longer partners, they still spent time together. Until late one night, in an unmarked car on his way home from a fruitless stakeout, Crenshaw stopped a Buick. The driver had a gun. They scuffled, and five shots were fired. One dented the gold badge in Crenshaw's pocket. The fatal bullet struck him in the chest.

The shooting happened in front of the home of Metro Officer Simmons Arlington, thirty-one. He heard the shots, ran outside and found Crenshaw in the street. He cradled the dying policeman in his arms.

A petty criminal named Charles Vassar, twenty-two, was arrested the same night.

Rudoff broke down in unashamed sobs. “Harry didn't make mistakes,” he told me. “We were involved in many, many explosive situations that we managed to walk away from without anybody getting hurt. Somebody caught him off guard.”

Rudoff rushed to his partner's neatly fenced, sunshine-yellow and white house and took Margaret to her parents. Later that night somebody broke in and ransacked the dead cop's home.

What occurred between Crenshaw and his killer was never clearly established. We will never know for sure. After a court hearing, at which he was ordered to stand trial, Vassar hanged himself in his cell.

Three days after Harrison Crenshaw's death, Officer Simmons Arrington, in uniform, on patrol, was dispatched to a routine neighborhood dispute. A resident complained that a man named Sam Smith threatened him. Smith was seated in a car when Officer Arrington arrived.

“I'm the man you're looking for,” he called out. As the officer walked toward him. Smith fired a shotgun at point-blank range.

Seventy-two hours earlier, Arrington had cradled a fellow policeman who died in his arms. Now he too was dead.

Cops who survive shootings sometimes lose heart and want out of police work. Who could blame them? Few are like Everett Titus, determined to come back, against all odds. A Metro cop, he risked his own life to save one.

A young man, troubled at nineteen and bent on suicide, braced a rifle against his own stomach. He had seen his father shotgunned seven years earlier by a neighbor. Now he wanted to die.

“He was definitely going to shoot himself,” Titus said later. “He'd taken up the slack on the trigger. The only way to stop him was to take the gun away.” As they scuffled, the rifle barrel swung toward the doorway. “My partner was coming in. I knew it would have shot him. I pushed the gun down.”

It fired. The shot shattered Titus's thigh, blasting away three inches of bone. Doctors wanted to amputate, but he fought them. Three doctors said he would never use the leg again, so he found a fourth doctor. The new plan was to let the fragmented stubs of bone heal and then perform a bone graft with metal plates.

The bone graft never took place. There are no metal plates in his leg. Titus returned to work, despite the doctors who said he would never walk or be a policeman again, despite the wheelchair, despite the brace, despite the cane, despite the doctors' orders.

His comeback was excruciating. He lay in traction, forty-pound weights attached to either side of a pin through his leg. Amazingly, the shattered stumps, three inches apart, began to shoot calcium, like a cobweb building. It took half a year, but the bone regenerated. Muscles written off as destroyed began to rebuild. His secret may have been the daily swimming in a therapeutic pool.

Titus is the father of five. His wife discovered she was pregnant with their youngest while he was hospitalized, still uncertain if he would ever walk again. “She came running into my room all smiles,” he said. Soon after his release from the hospital, he discarded his wheelchair. They strapped his brawny six-foot four-inch frame into an ankle-to-waist brace, but it made him feel handicapped, and he swore not to wear it anymore. He took it off, stood up and walked. He could have retired, but this was a man who left a junior executive position with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co., and took a six-thousand-dollar-a-year pay cut to be a cop.

One year after the shooting, Everett Titus went back to work.

And the man who shot him? Just before the case was to go to a jury, the defendant won a dismissal on a legal technicality and walked free.

“Too bad,” Titus said, “because the boy really needs psychiatric help. I don't feel bad for myself. I did what I thought was right I'd do it again. I get paid for that. I only feel bad for my family.

“I'd been shot at at least four times before I got hit. Every police officer and his family realize he can be shot. It's just something that happens.”

Patrol is the most dangerous job for a cop. Men and women in uniform are easy targets. Other police officers may encounter hazards—but not with the same frequency as patrolmen. Growing numbers of police shootings are drug related, but most shot cops are gunned down during routine traffic stops or while handling domestic disturbances.

The day after Police Memorial Day on May 15, a nationwide observance of officers fallen in the line of duty, three more Metro cops were gunned down—patrolmen. This time it was at a Liberty City intersection. The shooter was a lovesick husband stalking his estranged wife.

They had married young—too young. The bride was fourteen, the groom seventeen. Now, three and a half years later, she wanted out. He was AWOL from the army, wearing a red warm-up suit, carrying a satchel, and lurking in the pine trees near the house where she lived with her mother, her 79-year-old grandmother and her 101-year-old great-grandmother.

When his wife arrived in her best friend's car at two
P.M
., he opened fire. The wounded driver stumbled out and fled. Another teenage girl also ran. The terrified wife scrambled from the backseat to the front and tried to drive away. He overtook her at the comer, caught her by the throat, jammed his pistol to her head and forced his way into the car. The couple struggled as the car bucked and lurched down the street. Neighbors called police.

Officers Keith DiGenova, twenty-seven, his best friend, William Cook, twenty-five, and Robert Edgerton, thirty-nine, arrived first.

Another officer had been dispatched but the call was “shooting in progress,” and they were closer. The time was 2:10
P.M
., forty minutes before shift change, five minutes before they would have begun to clear out of Liberty City to start back to the station. Each was in his own patrol car.

A pharmacist who lived nearby heard the fracas and approached the car, now stalled in the intersection. The terrified wife begged him to call police. The husband waved his gun and ordered him away. The pharmacist saw DiGenova's approaching patrol car and flagged it down.

“That's the car, the one in the intersection,” he said. “He's got a gun. The man inside has got a gun.” Cook and Edgerton arrived moments after. A reserve officer was riding with Cook.

While police distracted her husband, the wounded wife fled the car. Officer DiGenova, his service revolver in his hand, reached in the open passenger window to disarm the driver. The reserve officer, on the driver's side, tried to hold on to the man, who was struggling and screaming threats.

DiGenova's upper body was completely inside the passenger window when the driver suddenly broke free and shot him point-blank in the face. DiGenova's service revolver dropped onto the car seat as he crumpled to the pavement.

In the seconds that followed. Officer Edgerton shot the gunman through a vent window, holstered his gun and rushed to help DiGenova. The wounded man was out of ammunition, but he found the fallen policeman's revolver on the seat beside him and used it to shoot both Edgerton and William Cook.