The Fence - Dick Lehr [136]
“That will help me sleep better.” The line was more an attempt at dry humor than the truth. Mike never slept well. He stayed awake worrying about his family’s safety.
In the more than three years since his beating, he still had not explained to his sons what happened at the fence. Police officers are “good, they’re your friends,” he’d always told his boys. “How do you explain to a child that you were beaten and basically left for dead by other police officers? And then other police officers witnessed it and no one has said anything.
“How can you tell a child that?”
No one knew better than Kimberly the continued toll on Mike.
“Before,” she said, “he was this nice, easygoing person who enjoyed doing things with his family. You know, he would joke a lot, he had fun. We did things together.
“I’m referring to the person that he once was. I’m referring to the fun-loving person who wasn’t paranoid, wasn’t depressed, wasn’t irritable, wasn’t difficult to get along with.”
Kimberly’s comments came during her own deposition. The session began at 9:23 A.M. on August 6, a sunny morning with temperatures in the mid-70s, and ended six hours later. The questioning was conducted in the plush downtown offices of the private law firm hired by the city and the police department.
It marked the first time Kimberly had spoken extensively about Mike, and before the first question was asked, Steve Roach sought to assert the ground rules. Given the “abusively long deposition with her husband,” Kimberly was “only going to be here one day. We feel one day is enough.”
“Let’s see how we do,” replied the city’s attorney.
Kimberly began by summarizing her upbringing in New Orleans, her meeting Mike in Atlanta, their marriage, family, and respective careers in Boston. Most of the six hours then became a chronicle of a troubled Mike Cox after January 25, 1995.
He was different now, she said, and seemed depressed: “Lack of appetite, always feeling exhausted, wanting to sleep, not wanting to have company over. Wanting to be alone. Just not participating in daily family life like he used to.”
He used to coach his boys in sports, but had stopped. He used to read to them at bedtime, but now rarely did. “He was much more physical with them before,” she said. “They’re boys, they like to be tough, they like to wrestle, and he doesn’t do that anymore.”
In January they’d celebrated the birth of their first daughter, Mikaela, but, she said, “When he walks in he takes her and hugs her and kisses her, and then usually he gives her back.”
It was all such a sharp contrast to the early days of their marriage, when she was commuting to Philadelphia to attend medical school and they’d not only successfully met the challenges of work and home life, but had grown closer.
Now Mike seemed only partly there. “If we’re having a conversation he’ll walk out of the room in the middle of the conversation. I’m talking about one thing and he’ll leave that subject and go to something else, or he’ll pick up the phone and he’ll, you know, start dialing, calling someone on the phone and, like, Hey, we’re talking.”
He could be quick-tempered and unpredictable. “I hate to seem trivial, but just last night I went to the mall to buy some stockings, and that was a big deal.
“He said, Why did you need to do that? Well, I had to go get some stockings, and he had to have a fifteen-minute, you know, argument over the stockings. To me, that’s crazy.
“Every little single thing, every single day.” Mike was always turning off the kitchen ceiling fan with its four bright lights. “You know, we argue every day about sitting in a semi-dark house because the lights hurt his eyes.”
Like Mike, she worried about their safety, but she thought Mike had become obsessed and hypervigilant. “Worrying about what time I get to work, what time I come home from work, what time the kids get home.
“He’s preoccupied with making sure the doors are locked, re-checking them at night.”
She certainly had her opinion about the source of her