The Fence - Dick Lehr [56]
Rattigan saw there was an opening between two parked vehicles. It wasn’t a full space, but maybe big enough to make it in. He turned sharply to the right to avoid the head-on collision, but the space was too small and he crashed the cruiser into an empty van. The two cops were thrown around the front seat of their car as the air bag exploded. “The cruiser was destroyed,” Rattigan said. He wrenched his neck, twisted his back, and suffered minor burns on his forearms from the air bag, but he didn’t feel anything at first.
Instead, Rattigan leaned hard into his door trying to get it to open. It had buckled and wouldn’t budge. The Lexus slowed to navigate past the crash. Rattigan looked over at the driver, who was not much more than an arm’s length away. “We locked eyes,” Rattigan said. “I’ll never forget looking at that face. He didn’t care.”
While Rattigan was stuck in the car, Freire squirmed out of the passenger’s side. He pulled a 9mm semiautomatic Glock handgun from his holster. “Mark was on him with his gun,” Rattigan said. Freire aimed at the moving car. Rattigan could practically feel his partner’s struggle over whether to shoot at Tiny Evans. The driver was behind the wheel of a getaway car. But Freire did not have enough to go on at that moment: who the driver was and his role, if any, in the shooting. Freire began grunting and growling, as if wrestling with his weapon. “Literally in seconds a thousand thoughts go through you mind,” Rattigan said. “What do you do?”
And in those seconds, the Lexus rolled past them and began picking up speed.
Rattigan pushed his door open enough to be able to see the Lexus’s taillights. Then he watched several Boston police cars go by while the security car stopped to help. Freire was standing over on the sidewalk. “He’s screaming, ‘Fuck,’” said Rattigan, “and I’m like, ‘Fuck!’”
Rattigan slumped in his seat. He and his partner were out of the chase, done for the night. Adding insult to injury, Rattigan watched a resident come storming out of one of the apartment houses to complain about his van. The man even got a camera to photograph the damage.
He never asked about the officers’ injuries.
Making its way past the crashed cruiser, the Lexus picked up speed as it continued down Crawford and turned right onto Elm Hill Avenue. Four blocks later, Tiny turned left onto Seaver Street, a wide, two-lane corridor bordering the northern side of Franklin Park.
The police chase was moving up a notch. While most officers by now knew a civilian, not an off-duty cop, was the shooting victim, they’d all just heard on channel 3 the frantic yelling, the radio static, the sudden radio silence, and then Mark Freire calling for an ambulance for him and his partner. The getaway car meant business.
“The suspects, these are murder suspects,” Mike Cox said. “They’re on the run. They’re obviously scared. One cruiser down, and we’re trying to figure out where the hell they’re going.”
Tiny had exploited the crash to put a few blocks between his car and the nearest police vehicle. Indeed, McBride had fallen off the chase, as had the security company car. But Ian Daley was on Seaver Street driving alongside Franklin Park when he spotted the Lexus as it came down Elm Hill. Daley watched the Lexus turn onto Seaver Street and saw that it was alone.
Daley radioed in the Lexus’s location. He was the first to call in the car’s complete, correct license plate: 676 ZPP. Soon enough, police cars from all over were looking for ways to join what was developing into the largest and longest-lasting police chase anyone in the department remembered. Jimmy Burgio, for one, later said “only on TV” had he ever seen anything like it. Mostly Boston police officers participated, but state troopers and officers from the city’s housing police and the municipal police, nicknamed “munies,” also got involved.
The high-speed chase is one of the ultimate cop moments, carrying the hugest of rushes. But such chases also frequently get