Sometimes there is no justice, after all.
13
Shot Cops
Policemen are soldiers who act alone; soldiers are policemen who act in unison.
—HERBERT SPENCER
Work the police beat long enough and the moment you dread will come: A cop you know will be gunned down. The moment you hear there has been a shooting, that a cop is down, you grab a notebook and dash for your car, mind racing, scanning a mental roster of men and women you know who work this shift, in that neighborhood. Could it be one of them? Sometimes it is.
Miami Beach cop Donald Kramer seemed an unlikely target. He worked no dangerous drug details, patrolled no seething ghetto, and was not a member of SWAT. He rounded up vagrants, drunks and derelicts and drove the paddy wagon to transport his prisoners.
Kramer came late to police work, and he sacrificed to do it. At the height of the Mariel boatlift, the city issued an appeal for more officers. Kramer, a dollar-a-year volunteer auxiliary officer for ten years, responded. At age thirty-nine, he sold his successful TV-repair shop to pursue a lifelong dream: He joined the department full time. An exuberant, fun-loving, laughing man, he loved attention and the job. The biggest joy for this pudgy middle-aged Jewish cop was to distribute Thanksgiving baskets to the needy and wear a Santa suit, with a silver badge, while rounding up drunks at Christmastime. The self-appointed guardian of South Beach winos and street people, he distributed cigarettes and a buck or two out of his own pocket. He often arrested the homeless so they could have a hot meal and a shower in jail.
One of them, a scrawny derelict known as “El Loco,” shot Kramer in the back.
It happened at dawn, before Kramer was even officially on duty. It was not unusual for him to be out at daybreak, sweeping South Beach streets for vagrants. On this morning, he parked his paddy wagon and walked alone down an alley behind a crumbling Washington Avenue apartment house. He was not wearing his bulletproof vest.
At the rear of the building, he encountered Andres Garcia Marrero, twenty-seven. The Mariel refugee known as El Loco had a history of arrests for weapons, rape, trespassing and resisting police. Kramer felt in no immediate danger. He did not radio for a backup. His rapport with transients and South Beach residents was excellent.
Georgi Caboerte, twenty-four, was in the bakery across the street, preparing the day’s deliveries of fresh bagels, corn muffins and pastries. He heard five shots. An old man, a neighbor, came running across the street yelling, “Call the police! Call the police! A cop is shot!”
Berta McArthur, fifty-four, lived next door to the shooting scene. She heard shots, threw open her window and saw the crumpled officer facedown, blood gushing from head wounds, his service revolver still holstered.
Neighbor Maria Mercedes, fifteen, told me she heard footsteps. Then “Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! I thought it was firecrackers. Then somebody was yelling, ‘He’s dead! He’s dead!’ And I saw cops running.”
Two rescue units, both with doctors aboard, arrived in minutes. The medics all knew Kramer. They tore open his uniform and began frantic attempts to revive him, radioing ahead to Mount Sinai Medical Center. The hospital alerted a trauma team and notified Dr. Mario Nanes, a neurosurgeon, at his nearby home. He sped to the emergency room, arriving only three minutes behind the wounded officer. “Time counts in these cases,” the doctor told me later.
Shot twice in the back of the head at close range and once in the back, Kramer had no pulse or blood pressure. Ten doctors joined a heroic attempt to save him and within fifteen minutes had restored his blood pressure.
A police escort rushed the officer’s mother, Gladys, a small, bewildered woman, into the emergency room. His ailing father, Nathan, a patient undergoing kidney dialysis, checked out of another hospital and hurried to Mount Sinai.
As the doctors labored, police swarmed into the low-rent neighborhood where the shooting took place. SWAT conducted a building-to-building search. A police helicopter swooped low over rooftops.
El Loco was known to sleep on the roof of a block-long pastel building that housed the bakery, an Italian restaurant, a vegetable market, a clinic and a shuttered restaurant. Police had found his mattress and a makeshift lean-to after a small fire a week earlier. K-9 dogs were mustered in the hope they could pick up a scent. Seventy searchers closed off Washington Avenue.
The fugitive, disheveled and dirty, was spotted on a sandy strip of beach at 12:32 P.M., five and a half hours after the shooting. He tried to run but never drew the murder weapon, a rusted Smith and Wesson .38-caliber revolver, or the knife he carried. Eyes vacant and bloodshot, he was whisked away in a patrol car.
El Loco was a bizarre and familiar figure to South Beach residents. Some thought him mute because he rarely spoke. Others said he continually paced Washington Avenue mumbling to himself in high-pitched Spanish.
“He has the IQ of someone you would find in an alley. I don’t know why the hell he did it,” Lieutenant Alan Solowitz said.
Garcia, Officer Thomas Hoolahan said, was simply “tired of being hassled, tired of being arrested, tired of people telling him he would have to go. He apparently felt he had the right to do it.”
Kramer remained on life support, his brain damaged by bullets and bone fragments.
More than one hundred calls jammed the hospital switchboard, many from South Beach derelicts. Some had obviously been drinking. Many were crying. A man who slurred his words left a message. “Tell him all his buddies on South Beach are praying for him.”
I found Roy Howard, eighty-four, at a nearby bar, hoisting his first brandy of the day. “He’s a good cop, everybody knows him,” he told me. The barmaid had once waitressed at a restaurant where Kramer would come in for “soup and matzoh balls.” He loved to eat, she said. “He was friendly, not mean like some officers.”
“He arrested me once for fighting in the street,” Robert Amor, twenty, offered. “He’s a fair man. He’s cool. The guy who shot him had to be insane or something.”
The mayor, the city manager, city commissioners and brother officers joined the grim hospital vigil. “We’re hoping and we’re praying,” Miami Beach Police Chief Kenneth Glassman said.
Kramer died two days later, four minutes after doctors disconnected his life-support system. He was forty-two.
Fellow cops, black mourning tape across their badges, remained at his side in death. Lieutenant Solowitz and several detectives accompanied the body to the Dade medical examiner’s office for the autopsy and then to the funeral home.
“We just didn’t want him alone there in the morgue. It wouldn’t be right,” Solowitz said.
Repose was between seven and nine P.M. at the funeral home. The first mourner, a weeping elderly woman, arrived at eight A.M. Hundreds of people from all walks of life filed past the coffin, where Kramer lay in uniform, flanked by a police honor guard at attention.
Two rabbis presided, but the loss was ecumenical. At Miami Beach Community Church, the city’s oldest place of worship, the Reverend Garth Thompson described Kramer as a “loving person who looked out for South Beach derelicts. He loved these people, and by one of them he was killed.”
Kramer made his usual rounds of South Beach one last time, in a hearse.
The fastest way to find out something is not true is to put it in the newspaper. City officials and cops all announced without hesitation that Donald Kramer was the first Miami Beach policeman killed on the job.
They were wrong.
One of my frequent correspondents among Florida pioneers clearly recalled a Miami Beach policeman killed in a gun battle during the late 1920s. No one at police headquarters or City Hall knew about any such thing. But there it was, in newspaper archives, on hard-to-read microfiche.
The old-timer was right. The first Miami Beach police officer killed in the line of duty fought a blazing predawn gun duel with desperados. He died a hero.
Thieves broke into a Fort Lauderdale auto dealership afte
r midnight on Monday, March 19, 1928. The brazen bandits stole cash and a shotgun, then drove a brand new Hupmobile sedan out the showroom window.
Police set up roadblocks. At 3:45 A.M., three Miami Beach police officers spotted the stolen motorcar traveling south on Washington Avenue toward Fifth Street. They ordered the driver to stop. The passenger in the big, boxy sedan opened fire. The police shot back, in a running gun battle. They lost the faster, more powerful car after a wild chase. The abandoned Hupmobile was found minutes later, its windows shattered by police gunshots.
The occupants had vanished.
Just before dawn, Officer David C. Bearden, husky and handsome, spotted two men walking along Ocean Drive near Twenty-second Street.
He asked what they were doing. They said they had been at the beach.
As Officer Bearden stepped from his car, one of the bandits fired a gun concealed behind a cap he held in front of him. The bullet caught Bearden just above his heart and exited his back, knocking him down.
No bulletproof vests in those days.
The fallen officer drew his own gun and returned the bandits’ fire as they closed in on him. He shot both men, who scrambled into the officer’s patrol car and drove off. Bearden crawled in pain to a police alarm box at Twenty-third Street and the ocean, a block away.
No hand-held walkie-talkies in those days.
Hotel employee Roy Widden, on his way to work, found Bearden slumped at the base of the pole, too weak from blood loss to stand. Following the officer’s gasped instructions, he took the callbox key from his pocket and sounded the alarm.
Bearden was taken to the hospital. At 7:10 A.M., Miami police found the two wounded men sprawled unconscious in a vacant lot.
One died soon after. In his pocket he carried a small metal disc. On it was inscribed: THE WAGES OF SIN ARE DEATH.
The other man, shot in the head, would survive.
Bearden lingered for a day or so. He told his chief on his deathbed that his last wish was to be buried in his native Alabama. He was twenty-four.
On March 21, 1928, a news story reported that Chief R. H. Wood had escorted Bearden’s body to Maplesville, Alabama.
My pioneer correspondent, John Bledsoe, nearly seventy-seven and retired to Okeechobee, was a Miami Beach milkman at the time. “Chief Wood,” he told me, “was a caring man, a good chief who thought a lot of his men, and they thought a lot of him.”
In the musty archives of the old City Hall on Washington Avenue was long-forgotten Resolution 1744, passed on that March 21, over sixty years ago.
Signed by then council president John Levi, it calls Bearden a “gallant officer,” and in flowery odes to his bravery, lauds his “supreme sacrifice … the shining example of his heroism and a quality of courage that would bring glory to any community.”
Officer Bearden had left “his name on the hearts of the citizenry of this city … We shall remember what David Bearden did here. His memory will be as inspiring as the light upon the mountains, or as the sunshine on the sea.”
Sounds like politicians.
They hailed his courage, and swore never to forget his “unselfish devotion.”
Then they did.
There was no other official trace, no record, no memorial.
Intrigued, I looked to Maplesville, Alabama, for more about the forgotten hero. Beardens still lived there, but none remembered the fallen policeman or where he was buried.
How sad, I thought, after calling what seemed like everyone in that small town.
But then I found David Bearden still alive in one heart.
“Everybody loved David,” Ora Carter Davis told me. “It was sorrowful when he was killed. He was a nice boy, he wasn’t rough like a lot of people, and he was nice-looking.”
They were childhood sweethearts.
David lived in Pleasant Grove and came down to Maplesville where they “courted” at Saturday night square dances.
“We thought a lot of each other,” she said wistfully. “But we were kinfolk.” They were first cousins.
In 1919 she met a soldier named Joe Davis, and they got married. She was fifteen. “I married young,” she said, “and David, he just left.”
The girl David Bearden loved moved to a cabin on a creek bank and raised seven children. Her husband had died five years before my call.
Ora Carter Davis said David Bearden is buried in a churchyard at Pleasant Grove. At eighty, she now lived alone, with her memories. “My life has been sad,” she confided.
The deaths of Bearden and Kramer, fifty-six years and nineteen blocks apart, were similar both caught by surprise, both shot at dawn without warning, both in a leap year, both lingering briefly in local hospitals before dying.
“He was a true hero,” Chief Glassman said on reading the old newspaper story, “and it’s only right that we remember him.”
City manager Rob Parkins, a former cop himself, said, “It would be tragic to be killed like that and forgotten.”
David Bearden, dead at age twenty-four in 1928, was remembered officially for the first time in more than half a century.
When I visit Miami Beach police headquarters now I always reread the shiny plaque in the lobby, honoring both David Bearden and Donald Kramer.
Neither is forgotten.
Shot cops are overlooked in many ways. The system slighted Donald Kramer. El Loco never went to trial for his murder.
He never will.
Experts concluded that El Loco was crazy. That should have been no surprise, given his nickname. In 1989, after five years of testing and legal arguments, a judge threw out the murder case against him. El Loco was considered too incompetent to be tried.
El Loco’s public defender said his client was mentally deficient and dyslexic, had only a fourth-grade education in Cuba, was born partially deaf and then further damaged his hearing with a hand grenade. He speaks no English, and syphilis has caused more damage to his brain.
“He’s a mess,” agreed the prosecutor.
Prosecutors translated twenty pages of testimony from an old murder trial into Spanish, had El Loco read it aloud and then asked questions. Their conclusion: He did not understand a thing. Both sides agreed there was no way El Loco could comprehend his own trial.
“He’s as sane as he can be,” insisted the dead cop’s still-bewildered mother. “Our son was our best friend, one of the nicest guys who ever lived. It’s hard to believe that someone like this man can get away with killing him.”
The judge ordered El Loco confined in a maximum-security state hospital, but lawyers for the state objected, arguing that it is unconstitutional to jail someone who is no longer charged with a crime. Maximum-security state hospitals are for defendants tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. Insanity, however, was why El Loco could not be tried. State officials offered to place him in a “campus like” facility from which he would be released when no longer considered a threat.
The Miami Herald reported the Catch-22 situation. Public outrage persuaded the state to relent and lock El Loco in a hospital for the criminally insane. No one knows if or when he will be released.
In the final analysis, nobody is paying for Donald Kramer’s death—except us.
Nearly all cop killers have prior criminal records. They are usually on parole or probation or free on bond. Most often the distance between cop and killer is zero to five feet, nose-to-nose confrontations, not drawn-out firefights. The officer stands little chance.
That was the case with three Metro autotheft detectives who possessed an uncanny sixth sense about stolen cars.
Frank Dazevedo and Thomas Hodges, both thirty-two, and Clark Curlette, twenty-eight, were never off duty, even when away from their office and out of their jurisdiction.
Miami Beach was not their turf, but a tip they had passed to the Florida Highway Patrol had panned out, and three employees were about to be arrested for selling fake licenses right out of the Miami Beach moto
r vehicle bureau. It was a big deal; the FHP state commander had flown in from Tallahassee to wrap up the investigation. As a courtesy, the FHP invited the detectives to attend the bust.
Dazevedo had recently cracked a stolen car ring that specialized in Lincoln Continental Mark IVs. As they stood outside the motor vehicle bureau that afternoon, a light-color Mark IV cruised by in traffic. The three detectives exchanged glances. Their sixth sense said it was stolen. They watched the driver park the Lincoln behind a motel a block away. Two decided to go have a look, while Dazevedo remained with the FHP officials.
Hodges and Curlette clipped their badges to their clothing, drove over to the motel and stopped their unmarked car next to the Mark IV. From inside the room, the driver was watching.
As Hodges walked toward the room, window glass shattered and a shotgun blast caught him in the face and shoulder. The detective, the father of three small children, stumbled back thirty feet and fell, dying.
The man burst from the motel room, firing his twelve-gauge shotgun as he ran. He also carried a .38-caliber revolver. Curlette, still standing next to the Mark IV, was shotgunned in the chest. He died on the parking lot pavement.
A Miami Beach policeman passing on routine patrol had noticed the detectives with clipped-on badges. Now he heard the gunfire and radioed for help. A block away, at the motor vehicle bureau, Dazevedo also heard the shooting and saw his partners down. He asked the troopers if they were armed. Only one was.
Dazevedo sprinted after the man with the shotgun. Fellow detectives agonized later over why he did not wait for help, why he never took cover. Instead he charged in pursuit of the man who had shot his partners. He fired his service revolver, no match for a shotgun. The gunman wheeled and blasted Dazevedo in the face and shoulder with the twelve-gauge. The detective was already dying when the killer shot him again, in the stomach.
An editor shouted across the newsroom to me that a cop had been shot, on the Beach. I snatched up a notebook and started to ask the location. He put down his telephone and said, “That’s two cops shot.”
Never Let Them See You Cry Page 21
