The Fence - Dick Lehr [87]
Hussey’s mood swing in part reflected his frustration. The veteran cop kept expecting someone to step up and do the right thing. But no one had. He was going back to people in a position to see something, but kept getting the same evasive bobbing and weaving. He wanted to try Kenny Conley again—the rare interviewee who’d talked candidly. Intuitively, it would seem Kenny saw Mike and the assault. It was just common sense. Hussey said as much to explain Kenny’s callback. “You were in really a great position here to see what went on right at that fence because that is the location, where that guy hopped the fence, that is the location where Michael Cox received his injuries.”
Kenny understood Hussey’s thinking. But he hadn’t seen the beating.
“Do you remember seeing a commotion?” Hussey asked.
It was as if Hussey was pleading: If not the beating, a commotion?
“Out of your peripheral vision?” Hussey asked. “I know you stated before that you were focused on that suspect that hopped the fence. Did you see anybody out of your peripheral vision anywhere near the fence?”
“No, sir.”
The session ended on a testy note. It was clear to Kenny that Hussey’s view had changed. It seemed Hussey no longer believed him. Kenny left headquarters feeling troubled. He had certainly wondered why he had not seen anything besides Smut Brown. The question would haunt him for years to come. Kenny was like most people—like Hussey, even—who figured people see things they’re supposed to see, particularly when the person is a trained police officer. Most people would guess they’d notice a beating, even while in hot pursuit of another person. But what Kenny didn’t realize was this long-held assumption was plain wrong, and that scientific research conducted throughout the 1990s was debunking the popular wisdom about what people “see.” Psychologists had several names for the phenomenon, “change blindness” and “inattentional blindness.” Tests showed that people focusing on one event were surprisingly inattentive to something else in their field of vision that was salient and unexpected. But the research was far beyond Kenny’s frame of reference. All he knew was he had not seen the beating.
Kenny drove to Southie and headed to the basement bedroom he’d built in the house on H Street when he moved back during the summer to save up some money. He needed to get some sleep. The way the interview had gone nagged at him. “I felt at that point I was being blamed for something I had nothing to do with,” he said later.
The follow-up interview with Kenny Conley marked the end of the line for Jim Hussey’s Internal Affairs inquiry. Ralph C. Martin II, the district attorney for Suffolk County—and the first black district attorney in Massachusetts history—was taking over the case. The switch signaled more than the district attorney’s interest in the beating. It indicated Police Commissioner Paul Evans and his command staff were coming around to the gravity of the beating allegations—what one high-ranking police official began calling “among the most serious investigated by the department.” The stakes were much higher than in an Internal Affairs inquiry where administrative sanctions ranged from reprimand to termination. With a criminal probe, officers faced possible jail time. But while the change of course suggested a tougher stance, it also represented the loss of even more time—a recurring theme ever since the night of the beating. Launching a criminal investigation basically meant starting over. Martin’s prosecutors and officers from the police department’s Anti-Corruption Unit would not have the benefit of Jim Hussey’s work. They would never read about Dave Williams getting caught in a lie during Williams’s interview with Hussey and Cruz. They would never read what Ian Daley said, or Richie Walker, Joe Teahan, Gary Ryan, Craig Jones, Kenny Conley, and Bobby Dwan—or Mike Cox for that matter. Being part of an administrative inquiry, evidence developed by Internal