One Department

by Thomas A. Young

  The Settling Of Dust

  Young Andy and Erica were still waiting to be released by the Sheriff’s deputies, who continued to insist that they couldn’t go yet because the paramedics had not cleared them as being okay. Their parents were all there by this time, and they were howling with protest, because it was obvious what the real reason was. The kids weren’t talking about Randy, and that put them on the wrong side of things.

  Finally a deputy approached the scene and told them that Randy had been shot and captured. Erica wouldn’t believe it at first, but her mother checked the news on her phone and it was true. The deputy told them that if they would talk about what happened, they could go home. There didn’t seem to be any more argument against it.

  With a news camera trained on them, they told of how Randy had tried to call a cease-fire to let them get out. They told of how the cops had shot the door full of holes when it moved, and how they would have died if they had actually tried to use it. They described their terror at being caught inside a burning building with no way out, and no one they could call to get them out. Then they told the story of how Randy had stepped up to save them, and how he had delivered.

  Randy had known of a sewer grate in the basement of the building, but had never known for certain where it led. Together they had worked it loose, pulled it free, and gone inside, not a minute too soon. Burning wood and debris had poured down and choked off their last remaining pocket of breathable air.

  They were in a sewer line that hadn’t been used in decades, which led into lines that were still being used. It was not a fun journey. The smell was overpowering, the rats were terrifyingly huge, and Erica had to be carried most of the way. When Randy was too tired, Andy had carried her. So it had gone through seemingly endless amounts of tunnel until they had found a way out.

  The deputy asked them why they didn’t call 911 when they were free. Andy replied that they had already been saved. From the police, not by them. It didn’t make much sense to call for help from people who might be the good guys, and then again might not.

  * * *

  Randy had substantial internal bleeding, and he could have easily died after waiting a far shorter time than Arnold McCaslin had waited. The Sheriff’s deputies and State Patrol officers who converged on the Forest Hill Police Department building were more than a bit puzzled as to why Burt considered his medical care to be such a priority. They had wanted to spend more time securing the scene. Lots more. Burt got his way though, and it was fortunate that he did. Because while the shooting was over, Randy’s work was far from finished.

  He was loaded into a Life Flight helicopter for transport to Harborview Trauma Center in Seattle. A State Patrol commander was assigned to ride with him. His name was Kyle, and he had some venting of his own to do.

  The helicopter ascended over Forest Hill, but Randy didn’t have much of a view. He was still wearing handcuffs behind his back, despite his wounds, and his comfort appeared to be low priority. Randy had a clear view of the State Patrolman who sat next to him though. Judging by the look on his face, this man would have been perfectly happy to slide the door open and roll his gurney right out of it.

  “I’ll bet you feel pretty accomplished right now,” the man shouted over the noise of the aircraft. Randy stayed silent. “Do you have any idea what you may have started? We’re getting threats pouring into police departments all over the country. Serious ones.” Randy hadn’t been aware of that, and it didn’t give him any joy. That bit of news made him even more scared than the numbness in his legs did. “You know this could take off and turn into a war? Is that what you wanted to be famous for? ‘Cause it’s happening.”

  Randy found his voice. “There’s another way this could go. But you need to listen to me.” Officer Kyle reached into his vest pocket, took out a small voice recorder and held it up before Randy. Randy nodded okay, and he turned it on.

  * * *

  Illinois, 6:45AM

  Dennis Freman had been following the story of Randy’s war with an obsessive level of interest. He was in his mid-fifties, always seemed to be battling ailments, and he was also battling his own Sheriff.

  Dennis had taken up the cause of property rights after he had dug a well on his property without the County’s permission. He had filed his paperwork, gone through the process, but the county did nothing but delay and delay. He didn’t have money to sue them, so he finally took things into his own hands. Since then, the Sheriff’s Department had been a frequent visitor. A visitor that typically came bearing threats of enforcement action.

  On this morning, Dennis had decided that attempts at peaceful resolution just weren’t getting the message across. He had made what was intended to be his final posting on his blog, then gone to his gun cabinet, and locked and loaded. He was almost ready to go when his doorbell rang.

  “Dennis, this is the Sheriff. Open the door.” Sonofabitch. He had figured on having more time than that. “Listen to me carefully Dennis. I am not here to fight with you, but I read your blog and we need to talk. Please come to the door.”

  Dennis took a peek out his back window to see how badly he was surrounded. He saw nothing. He looked out the front window and saw one car, with only one deputy standing next to the passenger side. He weighed the possibilities. On the one hand, the sheriff might have Lon Horiuchi, or some local facsimile thereof, waiting in the trees for him to open his door, in which case he’d just as well put some buckshot through it now. Or, the sheriff might be telling the truth. It was a toss-up, but he was a believer that when someone tries to do the right thing, you ought to give him the chance. He decided to put down the shotgun, stick his .357 in his back waistband, and roll the dice.

  He opened his front door, and indeed the sheriff was standing there alone. “Good morning, Dennis,” the sheriff began.

  “‘Mornin’ Sheriff.”

  “I’d like this conversation to be off the record. But at the same time I advise you not to cop to anything.” Dennis nodded. “I’d like to propose a solution to our disagreement. My department will cease all enforcement action until your case has gone completely through the court process. Your well is already dug, and court is the right place for this to be settled. In exchange, you agree to abide by the final ruling. And you can appeal it as far as you like.”

  “You serious about this?”

  “I’m serious. I ask only one thing in return.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you take down that latest blog posting, and replace it with one about this conversation. I want you to tell people that we can be reasonable when we want to.”

  Dennis was pretty well stunned by this point. He had fully expected this to be his last day on Earth, and the sheriff had just come to his door with different news. “That Gustin fella done shook things up, didn’t he?” Dennis asked.

  “There’s a lot more at stake at this moment than just what happens here between us, so we can’t afford to do business as usual,” the Sheriff replied. “Wildfires start with one spark, and the grass is really dry right now.”

  * * *

  Randy awoke from surgery to be told he was partially paralyzed. He would have some movement and feeling in his legs, but he was going to be in a wheelchair for some time at least. Randy thought to himself that Burt had indeed inflicted the greater cruelty by not killing him.

  He spent a couple weeks at Harborview under guard, and then went to King County lockup. He was arraigned shortly afterward, and the court appointed an attorney for him named Brett Milner. It was an uncomfortable day in court to say the least, for being only an arraignment. The media packed the hallways, numerous cops packed the courtroom, and sitting at the front of them was Robin Frisk. When Randy was wheeled in, he spotted her quickly, wearing her uniform and sitting in her own wheelchair. He saw her missing left leg and felt a boulder land in his gut. She said nothing the whole time, but she stared at him with a level of hatred he had never witnessed, and she never took her eyes off him until they w
heeled him out.

  During his time in lockup, they didn’t allow him any contact at all with Elena. No notes, no letters, no news of her condition, no nothing, even though she was practically right across the hall from him in the women’s wing of the jail. After they both had lawyers though, they were able to pass messages through them.

  The King County prosecutor had a mountain of evidence to sift through, from Randy’s past writings and rants, to his encounters with law enforcement, to the amount of preparation he had made for this conflict. He didn’t figure a conviction for Randy was going to be any problem at all. Nor would the death penalty.

  But where Elena was concerned, while it seemed pretty clear that she had fired some shots of her own at the roadblock incident, the level of proof he needed for a conviction wasn’t there. The gun was hers, the fingerprints and DNA on the shell casings were hers, but that didn’t prove she fired it. So he gave Randy’s lawyer an offer to pass on: testify against Elena, and he would drop the death penalty.

  Elena was in favor of it. Randy had saved her so many times that she felt she owed him one, and it was her turn to do some sacrificing. The sentence would be long, but not her entire life. And as long as they both lived, they could write and call each other from time to time, and still have some measure of a life with each other.

  Randy thought it over, but only briefly. He had a lot invested in giving her a life, and he wasn’t going to see it ruined when his own life was as good as over in any case. Besides which, the situation that had led to her being in this mess was not her doing. He gave his lawyer a message to pass on to her, that simply said: Elena, you have to let me do the right thing by you.

  * * *

  The jail staff was professional, for the most part. They wheeled him to and from the shower, brought his meals, delivered his mail on time. They got him to his physical therapy sessions, where he eventually made enough progress that he was able to walk with a walker. But underneath the surface, there was none of the cordiality that was afforded to the other inmates. Those inmates were there for correction; Randy was only there to be put down.

  But one day, one of them brought him a newspaper. “We just had a major argument over whether you should see this,” the burly officer told Randy. “I won, but not by much.” On the second page was an article about the threats to law enforcement that had emerged after the battle in Forest Hill. They hadn’t come to pass, and the threats had pretty much stopped coming in. This was being attributed to the fact that law enforcement agencies that had been the subject of these threats had been making acts of conciliation with their communities. This wasn’t entirely a voluntary thing. As Randy had noted many times, people in power don’t give up power voluntarily. But with the attacks by Chris Monfort and Maurice Clemmons, animosity toward police had been taken to a whole new level. With what Randy had done, it had gone to a whole new level beyond that. There were decent cops and good departments around the nation that didn’t want to be dragged into a situation where a national insurgency against police became established, and they were leaning hard on the heavy-handed departments to clean up their acts. The overall result was that rather than shootings between police and citizens spiraling out of control, they had taken a sharp nosedive.

  The departments involved with this found that it didn’t even take that much of an effort. Burt had been dead wrong in his belief that giving Randy what he wanted would lead to copycats, because the people who were angry with law enforcement weren’t in the same category with other types of mass shooters. All that the average citizen really wanted from law enforcement was the same thing that Randy did, and that was some kind of assurance that they were really on the same side.

  Buried toward the bottom of the article was a brief mention that a Washington State Patrol memorandum had been broadcast nationwide the day after Randy’s capture. It stated that this had been the advice of the Forest Hill cop killer.

  * * *

  The news in Washington State from the months following Randy’s war wasn’t all good however. On August 30th of 2010, a Seattle police officer named Ian Birk stopped at an intersection as a man named John T. Williams was crossing the street in front of him. Williams was 50 years old, alcoholic, and was also a Native American woodcarver by trade, from the First Nations tribe. In his hands he was holding a piece of wood that was his current carving project, and also a 3” bladed folding knife. His attention was consumed by the project he was working on at that moment. It wasn’t hard to discern what was going on at the moment, as Birk would state repeatedly that he saw Williams “carving up that board.”

  Most of what happened next was caught on the dash cam, though the actual shooting took place out of view of it. Ian Birk got out of his car and approached, swaggering with what could be described as a “gangland strut.” When he stepped into the frame of the dash cam, his gun was already drawn and in his hand. Many people would later consider these two items of fact to constitute “premeditation.” Birk never identified himself as a police officer. He approached Williams, walked up to within ten feet of him, and shouted, “Hey, put the knife down!” He repeated his command twice more very quickly and then fired five times, hitting Williams with four of those rounds. The length of time between his first command and his first shot was four seconds.

  Birk would claim that Williams had turned to face him with the knife, but that claim would fall apart when the autopsy showed that the four bullets had entered his back and his right side. Birk would also claim that his shooting was justified because Williams displayed “pre-attack indicators,” including a threatening posture and a “thousand yard stare.” The numerous witnesses to the shooting disputed these claims unfailingly however. They included one woman who said immediately after the shooting, “What happened? He didn’t do anything.”

  Birk had replied, “Ma’am, he had a knife and he wouldn’t put it down.”

  With the sole exception of the county prosecutor, who again declined to press criminal charges, nobody bought that excuse, including Birk’s own department. This was one hopeful sign that came out of the incident. The report that came from the Firearms Review Board included the statement, “In a real sense, Officer Birk created the situation which he claims he had to use deadly force to get out of.”

  While the knife had been open when Birk first spotted him, it was found after the shooting in a closed position. Later on, Williams’s brother would tell about how their father had taught them to always close their knife before talking to someone up close. Williams had, in fact, been trying to respect the officer’s authority, he just wasn’t doing it quickly enough to satisfy Officer Birk.

  There was little question that it had been a rough year for police in Washington. But while some of them had heeded the lessons to be learned, others had not. And it was apparent from this incident that some cops still had it on their minds that what they really needed to do was to reassert their power to fire at will.

  * * *

  “Elena Gustin, please come to the door.” The female guard shouted out across the communal room of the jail. Elena had her things packed and was ready to go. This wasn’t her first trip to jail, and she knew the drill.

  Her lawyer had told her this was coming. Contrary to what the interrogating police and the prosecutor’s office had wanted her to believe, she had interjected sufficient disclaimers into everything she had said. Not by much, but it was enough. She had clammed up at the right time, which wasn’t easy for her. News that she had likely killed a cop made her the center of attention, and many of the other female inmates wanted to hear her tell them about it. Bragging about her exploits had long been a part of her life, and she had to bite her tongue hard.

  Meanwhile, over on his side of the building, Randy had laughed at the offer to trade the death penalty for selling her out. The prosecutor finally had no choice but to announce that he had insufficient evidence to charge her.

  She was led to a changing room, where she was given back the clothes and possessions
she had on the day they had seized her at the news station. Changing wasn’t easy with her arm still in a cast, but she managed. Then she was taken downstairs to the discharge processing area. There, she waited with a few other inmates for the door to be opened. She wasn’t the only one in the room, but she was the only one the correction officers had eyes on. She could feel their stares and it hurt. Part of her wanted to shout at them, you people tried to murder us, what the hell did you expect? But she didn’t.

  Finally the buzzer sounded. The door to the parking garage outside was opened, and as they all watched her, she walked out.

  * * *

  Elena took a taxi home. As the cab pulled into the driveway, she expected the place to look like a catastrophe, having heard about how it had been ransacked by deputies. It didn’t though. The lawn was cut, and the mess was cleaned up. And there was a Bronco in the driveway, Vincent’s.

  The front door opened and Vincent came out of it, followed shortly by Rosemary. “Hey sweetheart!” he said, then walked up to give her a hug. “Couldn’t let you show up without some kind of welcome.” Elena embraced him, then looked back and forth between him and Rosemary.

  “Are you two…”

  “Don’t read too much into this,” Vincent said, “but we’re talking, and that’s a lot more’n we could say before. We’ll see what happens from there.”

  “This whole thing sort of made us see sides of each other we haven’t seen in quite a long time,” Rosemary interjected, then she flashed Vincent a smile.

  Vincent took Elena’s hand and pulled her toward the door. “Come on in, food’s waiting.”

  * * *

  They had made her some ceviche’, the Mexican seafood salad that Elena had tried to feed Randy from time to time. Much as she loved it herself though, Randy always picked out the shrimp and the avocados for himself and let her eat the rest. Rosemary’s version wasn’t exactly perfect, but it was passable, and it tasted wonderful to her.

  They had done a lot of cleaning for her, but a lot remained. The deputies had torn through everything. The front of the gun safe had been cut completely off, and it had been completely cleaned out. Not one of Randy’s guns or even one round of ammunition remained on the premises. Both of their computers were gone too, but they had full drive encryption installed and she thought it would be amusing to see if they could crack the passwords. Not that it would net them anything worse than a little homemade porn if they did.