Slow Motion Riot

by Peter Blauner

  As eleven o’clock came and went, Emergency Service Unit officers got out of their truck parked near the courtyard.

  “Listen, we’re not gonna have any problem with this thing,” Lieutentant Roger Keefer told McCullough. “We’re all set … We know about this guy. We just knock on the front door, the guy will come running out one of the side entrances and we’ll grab him. Okay?”

  Just before eleven-thirty, McCullough entered the building, accompanied by Lieutenant Keefer and Officer Jenkins from his precinct and Officers Morales and Esposito from the Emergency Service Unit. During the slow elevator ride up to the second floor, Lieutenant Keefer discussed the upcoming election, Officer Morales’s physical attractiveness, and the general sorry state of the world. Detective Sergeant McCullough realized Keefer was drunk just before the elevator stopped and the door opened.

  Later McCullough would blame himself for not moving more quickly to stop Keefer from running down the dimly lit corridor to 2C, where Eddie Johnson, the informant, said King often stayed with his girlfriend, Alisha. Keefer knocked on the door twice and then pushed it open. McCullough and the others followed him through the front door. The apartment’s living room was now empty, but someone had obviously been there moments before. A quart bottle of Olde English “800” beer was lying sideways, spilling its contents into the beige carpet. An open pack of Marlboro Lights rested on the slip-covered arm of the couch. A crack pipe was next to it. The Honeymooners played on the enormous television with a fracture in the middle of the screen.

  “Come on out, Darryl,” Keefer shouted. “I know you’re here.”

  A minute seemed to pass. The other officers spread out around the room and edged toward the doorway that appeared to lead to a back bedroom. Their walkie-talkies bleated. On the television screen Jackie Gleason patted his stomach anxiously and chanted, “Homina, homina, homina,” as though it were a mantra.

  A little girl emerged from the back bedroom and stood in the doorway. She wore fuzzy blue pajamas with feet and her hair was in pigtails. Her eyes were glazed and watery and her lower lip trembled. She looked as if she’d just seen a monster.

  “Come here, sweetheart,” said Officer Lucy Morales of the Emergency Service Unit, reaching out to the little girl with both arms. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  “I have one at home her age,” Keefer said to McCullough.

  Since they were all facing the back bedroom, they did not notice that Darryl was actually standing right behind them in the front doorway. He aimed his 9 mm Browning automatic and squeezed the trigger. There was a loud pop and Keefer fell over sideways with a geyser of purplish-red blood spurting from the back of his neck.

  The other cops spun around fast, but Darryl had backed out into the hall. While Keefer lay on the carpet making low groaning sounds, a hand reached out from the bedroom doorway and pulled the little girl back inside. McCullough asked Officer Philip Jenkins to look after Keefer’s injuries and call for backup. Then the detective sergeant told Officer Esposito to give him cover so he could peer out into the hallway and maybe take a shot at Darryl. But before any of them could move, Darryl’s 9 mm peeked in through the front door again and fired four times.

  All four missed, but Darryl was not about to bring himself out into the open, McCullough realized. He was just pointing the gun around the doorway and firing randomly into the apartment, without showing himself. His invisibility made him even more frightening. He was like a disembodied, irresistible force.

  Then there was an abrupt, eerie silence. Ninety seconds passed. It was as though Darryl had evaporated. A deodorant commercial played on the TV. McCullough crawled slowly across the damp carpet toward the front door. He hesitated for a moment and then took a quick peek down the hall. There was no sign of Darryl. Officer Marty Esposito was beside him now in the doorway, holding a 12-gauge shotgun. McCullough wondered what made Emergency Service officers more qualified to use such weapons than regular cops. He heard a door slam at the north end of the hallway and he leaned out of the doorway a little farther so he could get a good look.

  Without warning, two more rounds from Darryl King’s gun rocketed past his head and pierced the grayish cinder block wall a few inches behind him. It was like a cannon had gone off right next to his ear. For a few seconds, he was deaf. The shots seemed to be coming from the south end of the hall, but McCullough still couldn’t see where Darryl was standing.

  Officer Morales stepped out of the apartment with her gun drawn. Before McCullough could tell her to look out, a third and fourth shot from Darryl’s end of the hallway spun her around and dropped her to her knees. Morales cried out and clutched her bleeding right hand. Her .38 was on the floor now. As Esposito moved to help her, McCullough saw something that looked like Darryl’s head peering out of a doorway at the south end of the hall. McCullough stepped toward the middle of the hall, assumed the shooter’s position with his .38, and fired. It was a difficult angle, and he recognized the low whistling noise he heard next as the sound of a bullet’s ricochet. He ducked and backed up against the wall. Darryl fired back and McCullough turned and saw Officer Esposito sway back on his heels and melt to the hallway floor in a heap, like the Wicked Witch of the West. The shotgun fell from his hands and blood spurted from his abdomen, just below his bullet-proof vest.

  In a panic, McCullough fired two more shots down at Darryl’s end of the hall. Again, there was no response. Once more, the long silence started. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” McCullough screamed at no one in particular.

  Officer Morales was not hurt too badly and she was able to give McCullough one hand’s help in dragging Esposito some thirty yards toward the north end of the hallway where the elevator was. The stairway door was too far to go. They fell down several times trying to pull the body along. Esposito’s wound was not quite as bad as McCullough first thought, but he was going to need immediate attention.

  While he was examining the injuries, McCullough heard footsteps and scampering coming toward their end of the hall. But when he looked up again, he still did not see Darryl, though he knew he was watching them. McCullough rang the elevator bell a dozen times in a row.

  The wait seemed like hours. There was still no sign of back-up. McCullough pleaded for help into his walkie-talkie. Morales and Esposito were both bleeding and gasping. The elevator was groaning and moving as slowly as an old elephant waking up. Just as it arrived, McCullough saw Darryl pointing a 12-gauge shotgun from a doorway some twenty feet up the hall. The shotgun wavered for a second and aimed at the cops. Darryl fired another blast over their heads.

  As he ducked once more, McCullough heard a .38-caliber service revolver being cocked and suddenly realized that Darryl was picking up each officer’s weapon as it was dropped. His arsenal was growing as he advanced on the cops. McCullough looked down and saw to his horror that his own gun was missing. It must’ve slipped out of his holster while he was dragging Esposito along the floor.

  McCullough pulled the elevator’s outside metal door open. He rolled into the car with Morales and Esposito tumbling in after him. They were all breathing hard as the door paused on its hinge and slowly began to close. Watching it was agony.

  McCullough heard the clip-clop of sneakers coming down the hall quickly toward the elevator. The first door finally closed, but the second sliding door had not budged and the elevator did not move. Slumped in the corner, McCullough looked up at the porthole window in the first door. Through the wire-screen squares in the glass, he saw Darryl King’s face. Darryl glowered at him. He looked just like his picture in the file, only meaner. Then as suddenly as it appeared, his face was gone from the window.

  McCullough closed his eyes and sighed as the sliding door finally began to close. A tremendous shotgun blast ripped through the first door. Double-aught pellets ricocheted and clattered through the car. Two rounds from a .38-caliber service revolver followed. McCullough felt a burning sensation up and down his leg. As the second door slid into place and the el
evator descended, McCullough checked to see how bad his wound was. He’d been hit in the right leg with buckshot and splintered wood. His pants were torn and bloody. His left leg seemed to have caught at least part of the shell from the .38.

  He was all right physically. But by the time they’d reached the first floor, he was becoming dimly aware that he’d been shot with his own gun.

  There was a stone pathway along the grassy knoll behind the building. Three young officers stood on its pavement, talking to each other and turning the knobs on their walkie-talkies. Old sodium vapor lights cast weak shadows around the plaza.

  The shortest of the three cops was holding forth about fly-fishing on Long Island Sound. His partner, a skinny man with a long nose and sunken eyes, flapped his shirt collar to cool his sweaty chest. A third cop named Simmons smoothed his mustache and ignored the fisherman.

  All three looked up when a rear window on the second floor opened and a young man with close-cropped hair stuck his head outside and stared straight ahead.

  “Hey, man, you better get your head back inside,” said the cop named Simmons. “There’s a wild man running around with a lot of guns.”

  “Thanks,” said Darryl King.

  He ducked his head back inside and reloaded three of the five guns he was carrying. He leaned back out and began firing the 9 mm and the .38. The cops scattered. The fly-fisherman and his partner briefly took positions near some broken green benches and returned fire. But when Darryl’s shots came too close, they ran for cover.

  The one named Simmons fell to the pavement, yowling in pain with a bullet through the back of his right knee. Darryl came down the fire escape quickly. He jumped from the last step and fired one more shot at Simmons’s prone body, missed, and then ran off into the night.

  Over the next two hours, hundreds of police officers swept through the neighborhood. They turned apartments upside down, questioned possible informants, and watched street corners, but they could not find Darryl. The police commissioner assigned several units to keep up the search for the next few days or however long it took to catch him.

  Just after 3:30 in the morning, Darryl arrived at the apartment where his sister, Joanna Coleman, was staying.

  Joanna and her boyfriend, Winston, were watching a video-cassette of the film Escape from New York. Their two small children, LaToya and Howard, were running around naked and firing Lazer Tag guns at each other.

  When LaToya saw her uncle Darryl with his bloodshot eyes and sweaty T-shirt, she ran at him with open arms and hugged him around the knees. “I was ascared for you,” she said.

  “They ain’t got me yet.”

  Instead of patting her head, Darryl looked around the place in a daze. Three men and two women were smoking crack and having sex in one of the back bedrooms. Ida Montgomery, a tiny sixty-six-year-old woman, tried to sleep on a cot in what used to be the kitchen. Her crack-addicted daughter gave use of the apartment to her dealer, Joanna Coleman, after she fell behind on payments.

  Darryl walked over to the couch and collapsed. He was exhausted from running so hard and being so scared. After a minute, he realized nobody was paying attention to him anymore. He took Detective Sergeant McCullough’s gun out of his belt and laid it on a cushion. Its chambers were empty now. He began to weep softly. His sister looked up from the television and glared at him in disgust.

  “What’s the matter with you now?” she asked. “Why you crying? Ain’t you a man?”

  “Nobody loves me,” Darryl King said.

  42

  FOR ABOUT THE LAST three nights running, the lead story on the eleven o’clock news has been the Darryl King shoot-out and its aftermath. The format’s almost always the same. First they show a clip of those wounded cops being carried out of the building on stretchers. Then they cut to the regular patrol car parked outside the building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard where Darryl usually lived with his mother. Then they talk about how at least 125 officers are taking part in a massive manhunt around the playgrounds, courtyards, bars, lobbies, friends’ homes, and street corners where he was known to hang out.

  In the meantime, the rumors have been getting started. The first one came out of the police public information department. I think what happened is that somebody there thought he saw Darryl standing behind the police commissioner in a picture of an outdoor awards ceremony. They actually investigated this, on the theory that Darryl was following the police commissioner around because that was the least likely place for anybody to look for him. That lead turned out to be false, but then another rumor started that Darryl had been seen walking the streets of Harlem in drag. That tip turned out to be wrong too, and I read somewhere that the cops picked up one very ugly and angry woman, who’s filed a $1.5 million lawsuit against the city for harassment.

  But what really turns up the heat is something that happens two days after the big Darryl King shoot-out.

  Early in the morning, police got a tip that Darryl had been seen hanging around the housing projects behind Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side.

  A team from the Emergency Service Unit was sent over with rifles and bulletproof vests, and several officers came from the Technical Assistance Response Unit. A hostage negotiator was dispatched and a dozen squad cars were assigned as backup. In one of them was a rookie named Bryan Hopkins.

  At twenty-one, Hopkins was still trying to get over the fact that he couldn’t be a lifeguard for the rest of his life. He’d grown up in outermost Suffolk County and spent so much time on the beach that when he did bother showing up at school, he had to go straight to the infirmary to deal with all the little skin cancers and windburns he’d developed. In his entire life, he’d talked to perhaps two black people, and one of them was an instructor at the Police Academy. His uncle Artie, a homicide detective in Queens, had helped him get into the department. And every day that Hopkins found himself patrolling these strange ghetto streets, like a visitor to another planet, he cursed his uncle silently and swore he’d never forgive him.

  As he sat in the patrol car now, listening to his partner and the radio shows talking about Darryl King, he cursed again and felt himself tense up inside. He would’ve preferred to stay there parked by the curb all morning. The other teams seemed to be doing a good enough job searching the first three red brick buildings in the project without his help. And when word came over the walkie-talkie that there was no sign of Darryl here, Hopkins relaxed a little. Now, he figured, he could get back to the serious business of hanging out in the back of a bodega, drinking beer with his partner, a twelve-year veteran named Franco who claimed to have relatives in the Mafia.

  But then the sergeant came by and said people on the first floor of one of the buildings had reported a couple of burglaries the night before and they suspected one of the kids who lived in the building might be responsible. The sergeant told Hopkins to go take some statements from them. The rookie swallowed twice and blinked nervously, like a man about to be lowered into a shark tank.

  Jamal Perkins lived on the first floor of the third building. Every morning when his mother saw him off to school, she thought of the bumper cars she used to ride at the Coney Island amusement park. Sending her son out into the world was like trying to navigate a car around that track without having someone smash into you. He could get hit from any angle. Somebody in his class could start him selling drugs. There could be a scuffle on the subway platform and he’d get stabbed by a mugger. A stray bullet might hit him when he was just talking to somebody on the corner. Or he could end up like his uncle James, tied up with a bunch of low-life winos and thieves, in and out of prison all the time, and dead from cirrhosis of the liver at twenty-eight.

  Just watching him cross the street in the morning sometimes, she’d get so scared that her asthma would act up on her and she’d have to sit down awhile.

  But if it hadn’t been smooth sailing so far, at least nothing had happened that couldn’t be undone. At sixteen, he was turning out to be a tall handsome boy wi
th a dazzling smile that the girls all liked. If he was mainly interested in hip-hop and basketball now, that was all right because he was doing well enough in school to make college a real possibility. That foolishness with the stolen car was a long time ago, now, and the judge had understood it was the other boy’s idea and Jamal was just along for the ride. Once he was out of the city, she could stop worrying. She knew she shouldn’t expect too much from him, because he hated pressure. He had the brains to be a lawyer if he ever applied himself. But she’d be proud if he could just get an apartment of his own.

  Hopkins, the rookie, was talking to people down at the south end of the first floor, but his mind was on what he’d heard on the radio about Darryl King. Six cops he’d shot and they still hadn’t found him. These black people Hopkins was talking to now were acting like they wanted him to help them with their burglaries, but he just knew they hated him too and would shoot him the second he turned his back. He smiled uneasily and didn’t take in a single word they were saying.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed someone leaving an apartment at the other end of the hall. He turned and saw a black kid. Thinking as fast as he could, Hopkins tried to size up the situation. The kid seemed to be about the same age as Darryl King and he was black for sure too. Hopkins made the decision right then. He’d tell the kid to stop and if the kid looked like he was reaching for a gun, Hopkins would draw his service revolver. You only had a second to react to these things the older guys said. Better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

  Jamal Perkins was listening to Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative” on his Toshiba Walkman when he saw the people at his end of the hall gesturing wildly at him. They seemed to be telling him to stop. A voice behind him was yelling something too. He figured he better turn off the music so he could hear what everyone was saying. He reached into his pocket and felt around for the stop button on the tape player. Then he turned toward the flash of light coming from the other end of the hall.