The boy and the blood

I can still remember his name…

It’s been ten years, thousands of faces and stories later, and yet this one, the image from that night… it hangs like a portrait, mounted in the dark hallways of my mind.

[It was] Only two [Januaries |summers] prior that the course of my life had taken a radical turn - or at least that’s how outsiders saw it. From pastor to police. That was my story. The transition always conjured puzzled looks, but for me, the change was merely external - a different expression of the same goal. At the end of the day I was still just a guy trying to figure out what it means to live faithfully to God, even if that now entailed a few less sermons, and a few more bullets.

Back then, I was still a rookie by all legitimate accounts, despite having a couple hundred cases under my belt. But that February night, it changed me. Perhaps that not the right way to say it. the job… it had changed me. That night, showed me just how much.

It didn’t happen all at once… it never does. It was slowly, imperceptibly, over the course of those initial two years. As an inner city cop, serving in a place that had once been deemed the poorest city in the nation, it had been two years of daily depravity. Two years of Break-ins, Two years of fights, two years of thefts and rapes and Murders. Our schedule at the time had us working for 7 and 8 days in a row. It was inescapable - a constant steady exposure to the evils of mankind. I think all of us going into this job knew at some level that we are going to see some horrendous things. Grotesque, perverted, heinous things. We were prepared, somewhat, and encouraged to talk it out after being subject to one of these extremities, one of these dangers. What I didn’t fully grasp was the true danger of all the rest of it... not the extremities, but the cumulative effect of living in a world, day in and day out, that’s just the bad stuff, all the time. How does that kind of exposure affect the human heart?

By the time that night had come, I was much further gone than I had realized. It didn’t help that the days leading up to it were particularly trifling. You see, for some reason, there had been a streak of these - of kids getting run over by cars. Any cop will tell you, it’s always the kids that effect you the most. And somehow, when the maiming of innnocent children is on your mind, going to that call for neighbors physically fighting over parking spots just seems to grate on your soul that much more.

When I had heard news of this third child being run over… and that the driver had just kept on going, as if the birds would somehow clean up what he had done… the two years had caught up to me. I was at my breaking point, though I didn’t know it. There was one last piece of the puzzle that would finally shove me off the edge.

Strangely enough, I don’t remember the crime scene.