Never Let Them See You Cry (26 page)

A middle-aged couple in a nearby apartment saw and heard what was happening. The man kept watch as the woman ran for the telephone. “Get here now!” she told police. They did, just in time. The witnesses who saved the woman were black. So were the rapists. She was white.

Proof again, as Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez said that night, that “there are still some good people in the world.”

Age is no barrier to bravery; quite the contrary, the simple act of aging often takes valor. Ethel Lottman, a no-nonsense Miami Beach widow, seventy-two, handled her heart condition, her arthritis and a homicidal maniac with the same aplomb.

A young bank teller was the innocent victim. Hunting an apartment near the bank where she worked, the woman had arranged a 10:30
A.M
. appointment with a landlord. As she walked briskly toward the building, a strange woman rushed up behind her. “Do you think you are going to bury me?” she shouted, and plunged a stiletto into the young teller's back.

The bleeding victim ran screaming toward Ethel Lottman, who had just emerged from her nearby condo, on her way to a doctor's appointment. “Put the knife away. Don't be so temperamental,” chided the widow, and stepped to block the pursuing attacker. “You'll get in trouble if a policeman sees you.”

The woman with the knife was momentarily distracted and her victim escaped. “I ought to give it to you!” the attacker snarled at Lottman. Stared down, the attacker fled.

Ethel Lottman, in her red-and-white saddle shoes, limped slowly after the woman, ignoring the painful arthritis in her toe. She “walked slow and laid low,” she told me later, trailing at a distance. The woman she was following was a thirty-nine-year-old mental patient who had won acquittals, by reason of insanity, after five prior knife attacks. When she ducked into a hotel several blocks away, Ethel Lottman stepped into an adjacent hotel. She told the desk clerk about the stabbing and asked him to call police. He refused.

Lottman's toe ached. Frustrated and late for her appointment, she went on to the doctor. On the way home she spotted a policeman. He was knocking on doors, seeking information. The stabbing victim was in intensive care.

“You're never around when you're needed,” Lottman complained to the startled officer. She took him to the attacker, psychotic, unpredictable and still lurking in the hotel lobby, knife in hand. The attacker was arrested and locked in an isolation cell until doctors decide once again that she is well enough to unleash on an unsuspecting public.

The system may not always look out for the other guy, but luckily some people do.

Like good cops, heroes are somehow at the right place at the right time. Timing is everything.

When the year's worst sudden storm slammed into Miami and ruined their fishing trip, all Joyce and Richard Chicvara thought about was towing their boat safely home through hazardous high winds.

The couple strained to see through the rain that hammered the windshield. A stalled truck and two Florida Highway Patrol cars blocked an expressway exit ramp ahead. A bolt of lightning crashed so close that the two troopers felt the tingle and ran to the nearest patrol car for cover. As Trooper James Benton grasped the metal door handle, a blinding bolt of lightning flashed.

“I saw the trooper fly through the air, do a back flip, hit the ground and roll down the ramp,” said Chicvara, a fire department paramedic. His wife is a cardiovascular hospital technician. Both scrambled out into the drenching downpour and turned the trooper over. Chicvara began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as his wife searched for a pulse. When the trooper began to breathe, they rushed him into the other patrolman's car for the race to a hospital. During the trip, the trooper went into cardiac arrest. Chicvara pounded his chest over and over until the fifth blow restored a heartbeat. He continued mouth-to-mouth breathing.

The trooper survived because, of all the motorists who could have passed by at that fateful moment, the ones who did were the two best trained to save him.

Who can explain the forces that place a person in the right place at the right time?

When Hilde Madorsky moved to Miami, she found that her new apartment was not ready. Exhausted by the long car trip, she had nowhere else to go, so management provided a water-front substitute for the night, high on the twenty-second floor.

Transplanted from Manhattan, “where nothing ever happened,” she relaxed and stepped out onto the terrace for her first glimpse of Miami's star-studded skyline. As she drank it all in, she heard the screams.

Her first thought was of
Miami Vice
.

The cries came from out in the water, carried inland and up by a strong easterly wind. “I heard one of them yell, ‘Holy shit, Michael! Hold on! Help! Help!'” She did not waste a heartbeat. She dashed inside, fumbled for the card a security guard had given her and dialed the number. As police were dispatched, at 10:26
P.M
., two security men from the apartment complex ran to the marina. Now they too heard the screams and swiftly lowered a twenty-foot open fisherman into the water.

The tide was sweeping out; waves were rough. With only running lights, they would have to try to follow the sound of the screams. Then they spotted police arriving at the seawall and wheeled to pick them up. It was 10:28
P.M
.

“You could hear people yelling out in the bay, screaming for help,” Officer Steven Sadowski said. Had it not been for the wind blowing out of the east, no one would have heard them. Twenty-two stories up, Madorsky was screaming back at the panicky voices. “Hold on, hold on! Help is coming!”

“I never yelled so loud in my life,” she said later. “I felt like I could dive off the terrace to help them.”

Police switched on their high-beam headlights and powerful spotlights. Sadowski and another officer took flashlights and jumped aboard the boat, along with paramedics. In the light from their cruisers, they could now see arms flailing, two hundred yards offshore. When they reached the two boys clinging to their capsized fifteen-foot aluminum canoe, the frightened teenagers' first words were “Thank God.”

The boys, ages seventeen and nineteen, had paddled their canoe out a canal and into the bay. When they tried to turn back, rough water capsized the canoe. They had no life jackets. If not for the wind out of the east, Hilde Madorsky never would have heard them.

“It's strange,” she told me. “I'll never know them. They'll never know who I am.” But, she said, they made her first night in Miami unforgettable.

Wilfred Yunque was driving to pick up his elderly mother at church. Traveling westbound across the MacArthur Causeway, between Miami and Miami Beach, he stopped at a red light. A young woman's red Corvair roared past, through the light, at about sixty-five miles an hour. A minute later, as he continued west, he saw the red car again—sinking in Biscayne Bay. Other motorists slowed and stared but did not stop. Yunque pulled his Vega to the roadside, jumped out and dived into the water fully dressed. He never even removed his watch. Water pressure prevented him from opening the red car's door, but the window was open. He grasped the driver's shoulder and tried to drag her out but could not. She was limp, unconscious, slumped across the seat. He crawled in through the window unable to do more until the car sank, equalizing the pressure inside and out. Crouched on the front seat beside the twenty-three-year-old woman, he waited as water filled the car. When it submerged completely, settling onto the bay bottom, he floated her out the window to the surface, holding his breath and keeping his hand over her nose and mouth.

Miami and Miami Beach police, coast guard and police boats, a flotilla of pleasure boats, several fire department units and a city commissioner all rushed to the scene, but Yunque, forty-nine, had everything under control.

I was impressed. How, I asked him, could he do what he had just done?

“I'm an old sailor,” he said modestly, retired from the Merchant Marine. His seventy-nine-year-old mother was waiting patiently outside her church. He had never been late before.

“I had to stop and pull a girl from the bay,” he explained.

“I knew God had a reason,” she said.

One Father's Day, Lawrence B. Eaton, fifty-two, was driving to his parttime job as a security guard when he saw a wrecked Pinto in the median strip. The car had knocked down a palm tree. He stopped, turned around, walked toward the smoking car and heard a sound that chilled his heart: a baby's wail. Dashing into the roadway, he flagged down cars, telling drivers to call the police. “There's a baby in the car!”

He ran back to the Pinto and peered inside. The driver was pinned behind the steering wheel, gasping, his neck obviously broken. The baby, an injured toddler, lay pinned to the floor on the passenger's side, part of the engine on top of him. Crying and covered with blood, he reached out his little arms. Eaton pulled the wreckage off him and tossed it aside. A tree blocked half the window, and he could not quite grasp the baby. Another motorist stopped to help, reached down and held the baby's feet. Eaton slid his hand under the child's back. They lifted him from the car, slowly and carefully. It took about five minutes. The wreck was full of food wrappers, beer cans and junk. The windshield was blown out. There was no baby seat.

Larry Eaton carried the baby in his arms and gently put him down in a grassy area. He was scared, afraid the child would die. He thought of his own son, now grown. “All I could see was a young life, wasted. I kind of cried a little bit.”

It took medics half an hour to free the driver, who was pronounced dead. Larry Eaton, his uniform covered with blood, went on to work. The seriously injured baby went to the hospital. Officials later told Eaton that he had saved the child's life. The good news made an otherwise lonely Father's Day special—he had not heard from his own two children.

The identity of the injured baby was a mystery. The dead driver was Kenneth Wayne Thrift, forty-five. Through fingerprints, the Florida Highway Patrol learned that he had a long criminal record. He carried a California driver's license, but the car's ID number checked back to Lakeland, Florida. That lead deadended, they said, grimly announcing that the child might be a kidnap victim. The injured baby's fingerprints went to the Missing Children's Network in Washington, and the FHP appealed to the media to help launch a major nationwide search for the baby's parents.

Before writing the “mystery baby” story, I asked the Lakeland information operator if anybody named Thrift was listed. Soon I was speaking to relatives of the injured baby, who was no missing mystery child after all. Kenneth Wayne Thrift, babysitting for his two-year-old nephew, Robert, agreed to drive a friend to Miami. He took little Robert along for the ride. They must have been about to return when the accident took place.

Unlike most people I write about, Larry Eaton stays in touch, drops a line now and then, the first time to say that the story about the baby's rescue had resulted in a happy reunion with his own son.

Putting it in the newspaper works.

So many people owe their survival to strangers who are there for them when it counts. Sometimes it takes courage just to hang on a little bit longer.

A young girl, wearing a denim skirt and platform shoes, sat poised at the edge of eternity, her feet dangling over the edge of the seven-story parking garage at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Somewhere below, nurse Janet Gilliam had arrived on her day off to help move the hospital's crisis intervention unit into new quarters. Two detectives were also arriving, to show mug shots to an assault victim, and at that moment somebody in the high-rise Cedars of Lebanon Hospital nearby glanced out a window and ran to a telephone. The girl on the ledge was no longer alone with her secrets.

As the detectives stepped from their car, their radio reported a possible jumper on the parking garage roof. They dashed across the street. Detective Ray Vaught ran up six flights. Detective Ozzie Austin radioed for fire rescue and police. Then he too sprinted up the stairs. It was raining. “Go away!” she screamed at them. “No men!”

Nurse Gilliam volunteered and ran up the six flights. The girl on the ledge and the nurse stared at each other. Sergeant Mike Gonzalez joined the rooftop rescuers and asked the girl, “What do you want us to do?”

“You all get back. 1 want to talk to her,” she said, pointing to the nurse.

Police left them alone, and Nurse Gilliam sat down on the roof twenty feet from the girl. She knew she could not stop the girl if she tried to jump. She had to rely on talk and trust.

For a time, the girl seemed to respond. She even swung her legs back inside. But an hour after she was first seen, she suddenly threw one leg over the side again. We all gasped.

“Oh my God!” a policeman cried aloud.

She did not jump. Thirteen minutes later, she slid off the ledge onto the rooftop and walked toward Gilliam.

“I wanted to grab her and hold her—to assure her and just know she was in my arms, safe.” Instead the nurse gently took the girl's arm, and they walked down the stairwell together.

“My hands are still shaking,” said Detective Austin, soaked by rain and perspiration. “The butterflies in my stomach were so bad, I thought I would be sick.”

Heroism in high places does not always succeed, but people of conscience always try. One hero risked his life so close to the
Herald
building that I did not have to drive to the scene. I ran.

Humberto Alfau, twenty-nine, a carpenter, was weary, on his way down from the sixth-floor level of the huge Omni project at quitting time, when he heard a worker at the fourth level shout. He saw a pretty young woman in white.

“I couldn't believe what I was seeing. If you do see a woman on a construction site, she's usually in a hard hat.” This girl was a nursing student, the daughter of a veteran police officer. She stood precariously on narrow, unfinished beams extending several feet off the edge of the building. “I knew it was a suicide. I wanted to sneak up behind her and grab her, but she turned and saw me.”