The Fence - Dick Lehr [71]
The message was clear: Protect one another. Dovidio wasn’t done either. Despite the flood of police officers, the sergeant, rather than naming names, was planning to say the only officers at the dead end when he arrived at 3:15 were the two in his charge. It was a fiction that helped clear the stage and create running room for those wishing to be invisible. In a third move, Dovidio decided he was going to try to see that Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio were honored for exemplary police work during the wildest police chase anyone in the department could remember.
Dovidio, all by himself, was the embodiment of the culture of silence and cover-up that was kicking into gear on Woodruff Way. But he was not alone. “Bottom line,” Kenny Conley said later, “is that no one took responsibility for that crime scene.
“The patrol supervisor [Murphy] from B–3 tried to say he caught the guy I cuffed…The anti-gang supervisor [Thomas] never really did what he was supposed to do. Lotta people lied that night. Believe me, Dovidio wasn’t the only supervisor to neglect his duty.”
After Mike’s arrival at the hospital, while much of the city still slept, police were busy at two locations dealing with the chase’s messy aftermath. The critical care unit at Boston City Hospital saw the comings and goings of some of Mike’s coworkers, as they checked on Mike’s condition and heard from doctors Mike had been hit with a “blunt object.” No amount of wishful or deceitful thinking could turn an ice patch into the culprit.
Then there was the Roxbury district station, where the four shooting suspects were taken for processing and where a couple of dozen officers came and went as part of the post-chase debriefing. “There was a lot of activity in the station, a lot of people around,” Craig Jones said. Given Lyle Jackson’s numerous gunshot wounds, homicide detectives had joined the other officers who were congregating, either filing in from Walaikum’s, the chase’s starting point, or Woodruff Way, the end point.
Smut Brown and his three friends were searched, fingerprinted, and handcuffed to the wall in the booking area on the first floor. Smut was the only one to give police his true name. The other three offered aliases they’d used before: Tiny Evans said his name was Anthony Wilson; his brother Marquis said he was Robert White; and Boogie-Down became Darryl Greene. In evidence bags, officers logged their beepers, cell phones, necklaces and rings, Smut’s $795 and Tiny’s $707.
Smut hadn’t been able to talk to the others and still thought Marquis was the victim of the police beating. Marquis was indeed hurting, but his aches came from the hit he took from the skidding cruiser. He was complaining he needed medical attention for his legs. Boogie-Down also wanted to see a doctor. “My right side of my face was scraped and bruised. My right hand was bruised. My lower back was bruised and my legs were hurting.” The two were taken by police escort to Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
In the second-floor “guardroom” a core group of cops was seated at desks to begin the paperwork. It was work with two tracks: one focused on the chase and doling out credit for the four arrests, the other focused on Mike Cox’s injuries. Ian Daley had gotten the job of authoring the official incident report about the chase, known as a 1.1, a reference to the department’s standard Form 1.1, while Donald Caisey of the gang unit continued working on the 1.1 about Mike’s injury.
Police reports are supposed to be objective, reliable, and detailed, but interest in those principles—interest in what truly happened at the dead end—seemed lost as the guardroom was transformed into a creative-writing seminar. Officers huddled for brief chats about their competing versions of events, sometimes leaving the room for private talks, all the while keeping an eye on how the reports were stacking up.
“Everybody was trying to add their little bit to the report—‘I’m so and so, don’t forget me.’ Things like that,” Craig Jones said. The process was neither orderly nor pretty.