The Fence - Dick Lehr [66]
By 4 A.M., Mike was wheeled down the hall into the radiology unit for a series of examinations of his liver, spine, facial bones, and brain. The X-rays showed “no evidence of fracture” on his facial bones and nose, while the CAT scan showed that “the surfaces of the brain are clear.” The results were favorable regarding Mike’s neurological condition, although in the weeks and months to come, that would change.
In another bay, nurses were getting Jimmy Rattigan ready to be released. Rattigan had come into the hospital strapped to a backboard, wearing a neck collar; fortunately, neither he nor his partner was injured seriously in the crash with the gold Lexus. They were treated for bumps, bruises, and strained back and neck muscles.
Rattigan watched doctors and nurses attend to Mike; he saw Kimberly and Mike’s mother arrive, and he saw other officers come and go. He could tell everyone was worried. “Michael Cox is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in my life, and one of the nicest guys I’ve ever worked with—always a gentleman, always says hello, never in a bad mood when you saw him. I was kinda worried for him, too.”
Rattigan did pick up one tidbit about Mike’s condition. “I heard before I was leaving that he might have been urinating blood—now that’s definitely not a good sign.”
Rattigan was right—blood in the urine was not a good thing. But unknown to Rattigan, Mike was going to have a lot more to worry about than traces of blood in his urine. Mike’s concerns would soon enough extend beyond the physical to the metaphysical—a Boston police officer’s expectation for justice was about to collide with the police culture of silence.
Having blacked out, Mike had missed the chaos that continued swirling in the compact cul-de-sac at the end of Woodruff Way. By some estimates, more than twenty police cruisers from various departments, several ambulances, and dozens of officers ended up crowded into the dead end. The cruisers’ lights sliced up the sky. “It looked like Christmas,” one of the officers said later.
Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan were among the first to attend to him. Teahan discovered Mike alone on the ground behind Williams’s cruiser, writhing in pain. “He was lying on a good-sized patch of ice,” Teahan said. “He was hurt; he was bleeding.” Teahan also saw the blood, with handprints, spread across the car’s trunk. Kneeling down, he heard Mike moan, “I can’t believe this shit. I don’t need this fucking stuff.”
Despite the cold, Teahan stripped off his sweatshirt and folded up his T-shirt. Gary Ryan used the undershirt like a bandage and tucked it under Mike’s head. Teahan noticed that Mike had begun to shake. “He looked like he was getting cold.”
Other officers, including a couple of munies, gathered around. They began calling for an ambulance. The requests broke an eerie stretch of silence on the police channel 3 after Mike’s final scratchy transmission that the suspects were getting ready to bail. It was a vacuum that left the police dispatcher grasping for straws. “Where are we now?” he’d yelled. “Are we on foot? Could someone tell me? Are we on foot?”
The silence had finally ended with the calls for an ambulance. Even then, the requests lacked the necessary particulars—nothing about for whom, for what, or even where. “I need your location,” the dispatcher said, stating the obvious.
The Woodruff Way cul-de-sac was described.
“What kind of injuries do we have?” the dispatcher asked.
The question hung in the air.
Gary Ryan then ended the suspense: “Officer with a head wound.”
Many of the responding officers did not drive into the cul-desac itself. Two other members of Mike’s gang unit, black officers Donald Caisey and Sergeant Ike Thomas, had circled in and had driven down Mary Moore Beatty Way, the street below the dead end and down a short hill from the fence. Mary Moore Beatty Way was the street Smut Brown had run down after scaling the fence. While they parked, they heard the radio call about an injured officer, but didn’t know what