“You and this book are like part of our family,” he said. They remembered stories I wrote for the Miami Beach Daily Sun, before joining the Herald twenty years ago.
I wished them a merry Christmas, and they told me about their first taste of roast suckling pig, years ago. A Cuban shopkeeper on Fourth Street had become their friend. One Christmas he brought them the delicacy and insisted they try some. Not long after, they returned home and saw police lines around a covered corpse in front of his shop. They recognized the pink sneakers and the yellow socks.
Police caught the killer. “He’s probably out by now,” the man with the blue eyes said. His wife always liked to sit outdoors. Last time she did, her chair was almost knocked over by a running man and the police who were chasing him. When they complained about crack cocaine dealers conducting business in the burned shell of a nearby building, an impatient cop asked, “Are you willing to be a material witness?”
Of course he was not. “I’d have to sell my condo and move,” he said. How could he sell an apartment in this changed neighborhood?
When they do venture out, he said, his wife walks one way and he the other. They depart at different times and use different routes. “You can’t leave at the same time every day,” he explained. “You can’t establish a pattern. If they know when you will be gone, they break in.”
I said I was glad they liked the book, and they walked me to my car. They circled my 1984 Mercury Cougar, admiring it and asking questions about the alarm.
They are good people, survivors.
I locked the doors and drove away. Holiday carols played on the car radio. Christmas in Miami.
I work on holidays. I don’t mind. Married colleagues with families deserve those special times off. Fewer of my editors and top police brass work, and a reporter can accomplish more without them. I like to write holiday stories, reporting on how the rest of Miami celebrates. There is always news: Big families get together. Some turn on each other, and the shooting starts. On the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve they play with guns and fireworks, and somebody always gets hurt. On Memorial Day and Labor Day they get drunk and careen around in high-powered speedboats. Kids race out of the house early on Christmas morning to try out new skates and bicycles. Still shaky on their new wheels, some encounter motorists hung over from the night before.
Some people never make it home from Christmas parties.
Holidays bring despair to some, rage to others.
Sometimes there are stories of hope and renewal.
Sometimes, but not often.
Even though I work on those special days, I am old-fashioned and cling to tradition. I like turkey on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve candlelight services, but one year I missed both. The day before Thanksgiving I checked the Herald employee cafeteria. They were already serving turkey, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie—the works, but I waited. They would obviously have turkey on Thanksgiving, even if it was just leftovers.
Wrong again. The Herald cafeteria was open, as promised, on Thanksgiving Day, but all they served was leftover macaroni and cheese, scorched in the reheating. The joke was on me. So I ate burned leftover macaroni and cheese for Thanksgiving.
That was festive compared to Christmas Eve.
John Patrick O’Neill could live with his secret no longer. Alone and jobless, O’Neill, fifty, shared his home with four stray cats, his only friends. They all lived together under the east bridge of the MacArthur Causeway. From the gloom under the bridge, as traffic rumbled by overhead, they could see the city skyline, the holiday lights and the million-dollar Star Island homes of the rich and famous. On Christmas Eve, the animals lost their friend and protector.
At dark, as motorists whizzed past, O’Neill trudged more than a mile to Miami Beach police headquarters. It was Christmas Eve, and he wanted to confess. He had killed a man, he said, and buried the corpse beneath the bridge where he lived.
O’Neill had a reason. The man he killed, who was also homeless, had hurled his beloved cats, all four of them, into Biscayne Bay to drown. The thrashing, panicky animals were unable to climb the sheer concrete embankment, but O’Neill had jumped into the water after them. He rescued them, then turned to confront the man who tried to drown them.
The man, Daniel Francis Kelly, fifty-eight, pulled a knife and lunged at him, O’Neill said. O’Neill punched and stomped Kelly until he was dead, then dug a shallow grave with his hands and a piece of board.
That was on Friday, December 19. Now, on Christmas Eve, he wanted to clear his conscience.
Police were doubtful, but detectives Nick Lluy and Robert Hanlon listened. “He wasn’t drunk,” Hanlon said later. “It sounded plausible.”
Everybody hoped it was not true. Everybody wanted to go home. The detectives went out to the east bridge and descended into the darkness. They scanned with flashlights, probed the ground under the bridge, and found a suspicious mound, emitting an even more suspicious odor.
A fire truck with high-intensity lights arrived to illuminate the area, directly across from the Miami Beach Coast Guard base. The detectives sent for shovels and generators and began to dig.
About to leave the Herald for Christmas Eve services, I heard something was afoot and called police headquarters. Detective Anthony Sabatino had just bought O’Neill a double hamburger, microwaved at a 7-Eleven. “This is a heckuva way to spend Christmas,” the detective said.
He was right.
I went out to the scene to see what they would find. The underside of the bridge is a haven to street people. A number of urban bedouins had camped there from time to time. There were couches and chaise longues, even a little Christmas tree with tinsel.
Police spokesman Howard Zeifman cautioned that it might be a hoax. “People have lived under here for years,” he said. “It smells of rotten food, human waste and cats.”
It did.
But the story was no hoax. Cops, a prosecutor, a medical examiner and firefighters labored through the night, watched by a cautious full-grown calico and a curious, half-grown black cat with a white bib. By Christmas morning the shallow grave had yielded the remains of a dead man and O’Neill was charged with second-degree murder.
“I feel kind of sad for the guy,” said Hanlon, a veteran detective. “If he didn’t come in and tell us about it, there’s a very good chance that we never would have found it. I guess it was bothering him.”
Identified through fingerprints, the dead man had an arrest record nineteen pages long, mostly for drunkenness, vagrancy and disorderly conduct. He was remembered by police as a “nasty drunk.” Hanlon himself had arrested Kelly once. A Christmas Day autopsy confirmed that death was caused by blows to the head.
In his jail cell, O’Neill worried about his friends. He called the calico the Bandit. The black with the bib was Smokey. Satchmo was a striped gray, and the Tiger was white with golden stripes. O’Neill was served a Christmas Day dinner of roast beef, but nobody fed them.
“I’m just sorry about my cats,” he told Hanlon. The detective tried to catch them, to take to the Humane Society, but they scampered away, and he had no time to spend in their pursuit.
My story appeared, and Herald readers who care about animals created a minor traffic jam on the causeway. One woman rescued three of the cats and took them home. She never found Satchmo. “They were well, well taken care of,” she said. “These were not stray cats.”
John O’Neill pleaded not guilty, and I talked to him after his arraignment. He said he was not a killer. “It was self-defense. I had five lives to protect. Four of them were my cats.” The fifth, he said, was his own.
He said the cats were better friends than some people. He had found each of them on Miami Beach, lost, abandoned and hungry. He had rescued them, one by one, and taken them home, to his place under the bridge. It was home to him.
“I sure love the water,” he said. “I feel free there. I like it, it’s outside, no rent, no nothing. I always had cat f
ood for them. I fed them seven o’clock in the morning. When I left in the morning, I always left a big bowl of water. I also had vitamins for them. When I came home at five or six o’clock, I would feed them again and give them fresh water.”
His days were busy in Miami Beach, “picking up and recycling aluminum cans, so I could feed them and myself. I also got my beer and my smokes out of it. That was my daily routine, going to get cans and feeding my cats.”
Kelly disrupted the routine the week before Christmas. Other homeless men often shared the space under the bridge, and he was one of them. He snatched up O’Neill’s friends—the Bandit, the Tiger, Smokey and Satchmo—and threw them into the bay.
“They were clinging to the sea wall,” O’Neill said. He saved them, then faced their attacker. “If you ever do that again, I’ll break your jaw!” Kelly pulled a butcher knife, he said, and rushed him. O’Neill punched, kicked and stomped the man.
“What I did was for them. I just went on hitting him.” This was the first time such a thing had ever happened to him. He did like to drink and admitted his share of trouble, “but never violence.”
He had lived with the burden of his secret five days and nights, then could stand the guilt no more. A practicing Catholic, “on and off,” he said, “I had to get it off my chest.” Jailed without bond, he would stand trial in the spring.
I asked if he wanted me to contact anyone. His mother still lived in Port Chester, New York, where he grew up along the coast of Long Island Sound, fourteen hundred miles north of Miami. She was unaware of his trouble.
“I haven’t written her,” he told me. “If it was something else, it would be easy, but I don’t know how to tell her this.”
At the office I heard from a shocked reader, a man who had grown up with O’Neill in Port Chester, where he was known as Teedy O’Neill.
“He was a leader, the one you always chose first for a baseball team,” said the boyhood friend. “He was a tough, athletic kid, but never a bully.” Teedy O’Neill was a drifter and a loner even then, “an outdoorsy type guy who would just drift in and out of school. He was a hero, a good guy. He wouldn’t hurt anybody. He wouldn’t pick on anybody. Is he a bum? No, he is not a bum. It takes quite a man to confess when his conscience bothers him.”
Stories went out on the newswire, and letters of support came from animal lovers all over the country.
A jury deliberated for an hour that spring before returning a not-guilty verdict. They believed it was self-defense. The woman who cared for Smokey, the Bandit and the Tiger found O’Neill a place to stay and work at an auto dealership.
The temperature was eighty. It was April in Miami.
But it finally felt like Christmas.
9
Best Friends
The only way to have a friend is to be one.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Fred the dog sprawls on the sofa to watch television. He chews gum until the sweet taste is gone, then spits it out. He jumps up to kiss the faces of the eight Sanders children when they come home from school.
On a Friday the thirteenth he saved their lives.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Metro Fire Lieutenant William Hall said. “I never heard of an animal going back into a burning building.”
At 5:30 A.M., when fire swept their Opa-Locka home, they were all asleep: Patricia, 16; James, 15; Raquel, 14; Raymond, 13; AH, 12; Arbury, 10; Clifford, 9; Carmen, 8; and their mother, Arbury Sanders. Smoke filled the house.
They would have been overcome in minutes, but Fred, an eighteen-month-old black-and-tan mixed breed, raced to the mother’s room, pushed open the door, bounded onto the bed and pawed frantically at her chest.
The sleepy woman shooed him away. Fred dashed in and out of the room, pawed the woman again, then caught her night-clothes in his teeth and tried to drag her out of bed. Fred had never misbehaved this way before. So Arbury Sanders got up and padded to the door to see why he was so upset. Fire hit her in the face.
She choked and gasped, as she and Fred herded her dazed children through dense smoke and out of the burning house.
Then Fred turned and ran back inside, galloping through shooting flames, right to the Sanderses’ bedroom.
“Fred’s afraid of fire,” fifteen-year-old James said, “but he went back into the house to see if anybody was there. He was trying to find my daddy.”
Their father, Cornelius Sanders, had gone to work on his construction job at five A.M.
As the children screamed and a neighbor dialed 911, Fred emerged from the inferno, his head singed and the skin burned off two spots on his legs. The parakeets, Salty and Coco, perished. So did the goldfish. The house was destroyed.
But the Sanders family was saved.
“We would all be dead if it wasn’t for that dog,” Arbury Sanders said tearfully.
Firefighters lauded Fred’s intelligence and courage but lamented the lack of smoke detectors in the house. “We do not advocate that animals take the place of smoke detectors,” said fire department spokesman Stu Kaufman. “A smoke detector is the only device we can guarantee will wake you up.”
I wrote the story of Fred the Dog, then watched in awe as it took on a life of its own.
Fred the Dog Day was soon observed in Opa-Locka. A brass band played, and a red carpet was rolled out. It’s always a hoot to watch camera-conscious politicians maneuvering and jostling in order to stand next to a VIP, like the president, the pope or Michael Jackson, but it is a delight to watch them maneuvering and jostling when the celebrity is drooling and part Doberman.
They honored Fred with pomp and circumstance, speeches and applause. The Canine Medal of Valor was solemnly bestowed during ceremonies at a Metro-Dade fire station. The Tampa-based animal-rights group that awarded the medal also inducted Fred into its hall of fame.
Mrs. Sanders, a lovely woman, and her well-behaved children nearly burst with pride. The handsome boys, in three-piece suits and ties, escorted the girls, immaculate in party dresses. Fred yawned widely, obviously bored, as Senator Roberta Fox spoke, comparing him to Lassie, Flipper, Mister Ed, Mickey Mouse and Benji. “Dogs are our best friends,” the senator gushed. “I envy the family who owns Fred.”
Opa-Locka Mayor Helen Miller issued a proclamation. ‘Treat him like a king,” she intoned to the Sanderses, as the honoree sprawled on the floor, eyes locked onto a box of Milk-Bones. A letter of praise was reported en route to Fred from the White House. Senator Paula Hawkins and other dignitaries unable to attend sent Fred greetings. Seated on the dais with other VIPs, Fred basked in the glow of TV lights as the bronze medal was hung ceremoniously around his neck.
Few four-footed heroes receive accolades. Most are unsung, many are without a home.
As he crossed a footbridge with his dog, Henry Hollingsworth, nearly sixty, either fell or jumped and plunged thirteen feet into the water. James White, twenty-eight, saw it happen. Paralyzed in one arm and no swimmer, he could not help, but there was one other witness who did not hesitate to try.
“The dog jumped right in behind him,” James White said. The man surfaced in the water moments later, on the far side of the bridge. “The dog paddled toward him,” White said, “but the man slipped under, and the dog couldn’t find him. The dog kept swimming in circles, looking for the guy.”
White ran for help.
Miami police found the dog, a scrawny part-Labrador retriever, racing up and down the canal bank, barking furiously.
“He was hysterical, looking for his master,” Homicide Detective Jose Fleites said. Divers searched the murky water. They could not find the victim, whose frantic dog kept running back onto the bridge to the spot where his master fell, then racing back to the canal bank, plunging through dense underbrush, searching the water’s edge.
“Everywhere police went, the dog went,” White said. “That man would be alive now if his dog could have got to him.”
White wanted to try to find the fai
thful animal a home, but detectives whisked him to headquarters to give an official statement. Police gave up the search for the body and left. Only the dog remained. An animal control officer arrived soon after, caught the dog and took him away.
A boat-yard worker spotted the dead man floating in the water two days later. I was concerned about his best friend and called Animal Control. They would keep the dog for a short time, they said, in case the victim’s family wanted him, but apparently Hollingsworth had lived alone. No one had reported him missing after four days, and police were not even sure where he had lived.
Since no one had claimed his body, it seemed unlikely that anyone would claim his dog. No one even knew the name of the animal, still waiting patiently at the shelter. A Herald photographer shot his sad face, behind bars. I quoted White, the eyewitness, in my story. ‘Too bad,” he said, about the inevitable. “That dog had a lot of intelligence.”
After dozens of Herald readers offered homes, the dog, henceforth to be known as Duke, went to new owners with a half-acre of fenced-in yard, a pool and a golden Labrador named Duchess.
Happy endings are as rare in real life for animals as they are for humans.
Prince, a skinny street dog, has seen more than his share of trouble. Prince has been hit by cars five times. A drunken tormentor set him on fire once—just for fun—he was shot at another time, and once he saved the life of his owner, who had been attacked by a knife-wielding man.
I heard about Prince when police blamed him for a murder.
Metro officers issued a press release after arresting a man on a homicide charge, saying that the killer had shot Curtis Gervin, thirty-six, after a long-running feud. Reason for the feud: “Gervin allowed his dog to run loose, during which time the dog attempted to attack the suspect and others, numerous times.” The press release concluded that in a final showdown, Gervin was shot dead.
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 14
