The Fence - Dick Lehr [68]
He knelt next to his partner. Mike seemed to respond to the familiar voice. In and out of consciousness, Mike finally made some sense on two fronts. One was professional: He began mumbling about the guns thrown from the Lexus, and seconds later the police radio crackled with his information. “The officer who is injured told me the suspects threw some weapons out on Itasca Street,” reported one of the other officers standing there. The dispatcher asked for more details. “Uh, he’s a little bit, uh, hurtin’ right now,” came the reply, followed by “He said two different locations.”
Mike’s second moment of clarity was personal: He asked Craig to call Kimberly. “He kind of moaned it,” Craig said. Craig promised he would.
Craig and the others attending to Mike were growing impatient.
“Get an ambulance down here!” one of them yelled over the radio.
Seconds later: “What’s the deal?”
“C’mon, hurry up!”
Hampered by the bottleneck of police vehicles, the paramedics arrived at 3:03 A.M. Sergeant Thomas watched as they worked furiously to stabilize Mike. “They were cutting his clothes off, taking his clothes off like it was a very, very serious injury,” he said. “They were asking questions, like, ‘Has he been shot?’”
Elsewhere, officers milled around, simultaneously checking on the three shooting suspects on the ground and curious about the damage done to Mike Cox. For their part, Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio pretty much hung back ten to fifteen yards away in front of the Lexus. Williams, at one point, walked over to check on Mike, but Burgio stayed put. One thing on his mind was making sure he was going to get credit for an arrest. “You get written up for that, it looks great in your folder,” he said later.
Mike was moved onto a stretcher. Thomas, the ranking officer, began making some decisions. He talked to Craig Jones about returning to Itasca Street to look for the handguns. He told Gary Ryan to ride in the ambulance with Mike, and he told Joe Teahan to follow in their car. He told them both to contact Mike’s wife. He also made sure they took possession of Mike’s equipment—standard operating procedure. Thomas got Mike’s gun and handcuffs, but they couldn’t find the radio Mike wore clipped to his belt.
Ryan and Teahan began looking around, a search that took Teahan down along the right side of Dave Williams’s cruiser and past the passenger side where Jimmy Burgio rode. Teahan spotted Mike’s radio on the ground in front of the cruiser by the fence. “It was kind of like in front of the car, but up like two o’clock,” Teahan said.
No one was really paying attention to the significance of it, but the radio’s location suggested that, following the first blows, Mike either fell or was pulled from where he’d initially stood at the fence to a spot near the front of the cruiser.
Thomas was not yet focused on the reality that he had a crime scene on his hands—the assault and battery of Boston police officer Michael Cox. Instead, he asked again Teahan and Ryan and other cops standing around, What happened? Did anyone see what happened? He got shrugs. He got silence. “I got no response,” Thomas said.
Thomas might as well have been asking the meaning of life. No one broke rank to offer any information. Instead, an alternative explanation arose, originating in the circle around Mike and then working its way out, where cop after cop grabbed on to it like a raft in troubled waters. The story started with Teahan and Ryan, two fellow gang unit members. They began telling everyone Mike had slipped on a patch of ice. Even while insisting he had not seen anything, Teahan nevertheless was saying, “Michael had fallen and hit his head.” He and Ryan hypothesized Mike had run from his cruiser and “hit the patch of ice and went flying.”
Despite all the police training on the