The Fence - Dick Lehr [69]
“I didn’t want to believe what really happened, happened.”
In denial or worse, Mike’s coworkers launched the bogus story. That Sergeant Ike Thomas did not put the brakes on the rank speculation but instead allowed the smokescreen to gain traction was the first of a series of supervisory failures complicating right from the start any search for accountability.
“That’s the only thing that I had to go on at that point in time,” Thomas said later in self-defense, seeming to abandon altogether the most basic trait of any investigator: skepticism. Thomas even assigned Donald Caisey the job of writing the report about Mike’s injury, and Caisey, notwithstanding his own initial skepticism, went with the storyline of convenience: ice.
The reality was that, in addition to the Lexus and the capture of the shooting suspects, Sergeant Thomas and the others now had a second crime scene requiring clear-cut steps to secure and preserve evidence: taping off the area around the fallen Mike, the cruiser, and the fence; photographing all those areas; seizing flashlights, boots, and clothing of those officers first to arrive to test for trace evidence in the crime lab; notifying immediately the command staff and Internal Affairs; taking statements from the officers at Woodruff Way.
But rather than consider that Mike had been mistaken for a fleeing shooting suspect and beaten to a pulp, Thomas and others in charge steered clear, pursuing instead a kind of supervisory avoidance of the obvious.
“It seemed believable to me,” Sergeant David C. Murphy said later about his embrace of the ice-slip theory. Murphy was the second sergeant to show up at Woodruff Way, while Mike was still on the ground and everyone was waiting for the ambulance’s arrival. He was the patrol supervisor from the Mattapan station. The high-speed chase had cut across Mattapan and ended on his turf, involving a number of his officers, like Richie Walker. Murphy’s job was to help Sergeant Thomas sort out the situation. He had parked his cruiser down on Mary Moore Beatty Way and walked up through the hole in the fence.
Murphy sized up the scene as having three parts that required supervision: the injured officer, the damaged police cruiser driven by Dave Williams, and the shooting suspects. He asked a few questions about Mike Cox and took at face value the speculation about a slip on ice. Not his problem—injuries to an officer were the worry of the officer’s supervisor, Sergeant Thomas. Then there was the damaged cruiser—it was from the Dorchester district. Not his problem again—the vehicle was the worry of his counterpart from Dorchester, a sergeant named Daniel Dovidio. Murphy instructed Dave Williams to radio Dovidio and tell him to come to Woodruff Way.
Murphy then dealt with the three suspects and the Lexus. He oversaw arrangements for transporting Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down to the Roxbury station house for booking, for photographing the Lexus, and for towing the car. Smut Brown had already been taken in a separate police wagon to the station. Murphy then listened to several officers, including Ian Daley, who wanted to talk up their roles in the arrests. “Everybody wanted a piece of this,” Murphy said later. Murphy himself joined the unabashed maneuvering for glory. He later told police officials that down below on Mary Moore Beatty Way he’d helped capture Smut Brown—an embellishment completely at odds with the fact that Kenny Conley apprehended Smut Brown.
With a singular focus