The Fence - Dick Lehr [63]
Mike looked and caught sight of the suspect who bolted from the Lexus’s backseat and was running over to the fence. He took off after the suspect, hard on the man’s heels, barely hindered by the long down jacket and pumping his legs like a football running back.
Mike saw the man throw himself onto the fence and kick his legs up. The section of fencing was missing an iron bar, making the top unstable and barbed. The suspect was gaining traction and tumbling over the top when his brown leather jacket got snagged on one of the sharp prongs.
This was Mike’s chance. “He’s dangling from the top of the fence.” Mike reached up and grabbed a sleeve. He held on to it tightly. He briefly looked at the suspect, but in that moment did not recognize Smut Brown. Mike tried pulling the suspect back, but the physics were against him. The suspect was already too far onto the other side. The last thing Mike wanted to do was let go—he had the suspect in his grip—but he had to.
The suspect dropped onto the hill on the opposite side of the fence and rolled. Mike took a step back. He was thinking about his next move, “whether I wanted to jump over the fence and get cut up or hurt versus trying to find another way.”
The answer was to go straight ahead—up and over.
Mike stepped and reached for the fence. Then from behind, he felt the first blow, “a real sharp, painful blow.”
He turned to his right to see what the hell was going on.
Kenny Conley and Bobby Dwan raced downhill toward the cul-de-sac and saw the snarl of cruisers ahead of them screeching to a halt. Kenny had slowed to get through the bottleneck at the entrance to the dead end of Woodruff Way and then accelerated again.
They were now the seventh or eighth cruiser behind the Lexus. Directly in front of them, they saw another officer from their station—Joe Horton—who was driving a one-man cruiser.
“It was very hectic,” Bobby said. “The sirens were going. Lights were flashing, which if you look at them, they blind you. It was pretty dark other than the lights flashing. There were car doors open from people jumping out and running around.”
Kenny, looking through the chaos, noticed the one suspect exit the rear of the Lexus and run toward the chain-link fence. He slammed the car brakes, and the cruiser began skidding to a stop at the top of the dead end. He did his best to keep an eye on the man running toward the fence.
Kenny was locked in—tunnel vision. In those split seconds, he did not pick up on the commotion Bobby was noticing farther down along the fence. He saw only the suspect on the other side of the fence—a man whose name he would later learn was Robert “Smut” Brown.
Bobby, climbing out of the passenger seat, had glimpsed three or four people over near the fence. The officers had surrounded someone. “I was just thinking they’re cuffing him.” In the other direction, meanwhile, Bobby saw Joe Horton run to the left after another suspect who was already on the ground. Bobby made the quick calculation. The guys at the fence had a suspect and probably didn’t need him. “It seemed to me they were all set.” Horton, in contrast, was running alone toward a suspect. The call wasn’t close. “I worked with Horton,” he said, and so he ran over to assist him.
Kenny hustled to the front of the cruiser and ran into Bobby. Kenny was heading right, Bobby was heading left. They crisscrossed past each other and kept going. “The last time I saw him,” Bobby said about Kenny, “he was at the fence ready to go over.”
Kenny got over quickly. “There was no bar on top,” he said. “I put my feet up and was kind of wiggling and I jumped.” He dropped to his feet and stumbled. Up ahead, he saw the shadowy figure of Smut Brown leap off a little wall onto a street.
Kenny took off after Smut. Smut headed to the right, ran across the street and through a parking lot. He ran behind a building and up a hill through some woods. “He was probably forty feet in front