The Fence - Dick Lehr [84]
Daley arrived for the interview with an attorney provided by the police union. Although he’d been born in England, Daley, now twenty-nine, had grown up in Boston. Like so many officers involved in the chase, he’d been a member of the force for only about five years—a period during which the department’s shortcomings had been subjected to intense public scrutiny, including the Brighton 13 police brutality trial.
Daley stood nearly six feet tall, but seemed smaller, given his slight build. He took a seat in one of the four chairs at the table in the center of the room. A tape recorder was on the table. Daley appeared uncomfortable. The truth was he’d been struggling. In the weeks since the beating, Daley had sought guidance—quietly and carefully. He turned to another officer from the Roxbury police station, Jimmy Rattigan. Rattigan, the driver of the cruiser that crashed to avoid a head-on with the gold Lexus, was a union representative. Rattigan said, “He approached me; I wanna say three or four, five different times. He even called me at home; he was very upset.” Rattigan liked Daley. “He was a pretty nice guy, never a problem officer or anything, a good officer.” The pressing question Daley had for him: What if—what if someone saw something?
Rattigan’s gut told him Daley was not one of Mike’s assailants, but had information about the beating. “I felt he probably, maybe, observed something.” It was a hunch based in part on Daley’s anguish. “He was really bothered by this, and really worried,” Rattigan said. “If he was any more upset he would have been bawling.” If Rattigan was correct, Daley was caught in a no-man’s-land where no cop wanted to be: torn between telling all and fulfilling his duty as a police officer sworn to uphold the law, and telling little and fulfilling his duty to the unwritten police code of silence. “He wanted to tell me, you could see it,” Rattigan said. “It was in his face.” But Daley never went beyond the hypothetical with Rattigan, and Rattigan told him he needed a lawyer.
The two investigators Hussey and Cruz turned on the tape recorder at 9:20 A.M. Daley began at the beginning of the night, explaining he rode alone that shift in a marked police cruiser known as the Bravo 431 unit from the B–2 station. He described his involvement in the chase for the gold Lexus, and he used a diagram of the dead end at Woodruff Way to indicate where cars stopped. His cruiser was right behind the Lexus.
Daley said he ran to the left side of the cul-de-sac, then to the right, then back and forth. While running up and down the fence, he said, that was “when I saw the person bleeding.” He didn’t recognize the man. “I said, ‘Who are you? Who are you?’” The man did not answer. When the man unzipped his jacket, Daley saw that the man was a cop. He didn’t know the cop and afterward learned his name was Mike Cox.
Daley was pretty much finished. The investigators warned Daley, “If it’s proven you are being untruthful you can be terminated.”
Hussey, for one, was incredulous that Daley had not seen Mike Cox when Mike began chasing Smut Brown toward the fence. Daley had come to a stop right behind the Lexus and Mike’s cruiser. “You never saw anybody run right in front of you?” Hussey asked. “You didn’t see him run right in front of you, is that what you are telling me?”
“Yeah. I can’t see everything.”
“Right in front of you.”
“I don’t know. I said, I don’t know.”
Daley’s answers grew increasingly halting.
“You are not appearing very sure of yourself,” Hussey said.
More than a half hour had passed, and Hussey had heard enough. “What if I told you that Michael Cox described a black male, approximately five-nine—and that someone was going to put handcuffs