The Fence - Dick Lehr [90]
Bob Peabody noticed the story because he knew Mike Cox. More accurately, he knew who Mike Cox was. Peabody’s kids attended the Park School in Brookline with Mike’s two boys. Peabody’s middle son and Nick Cox were in the same elementary school class. He and Mike traded greetings at school events, but little more. When Peabody read about Mike’s injuries, he made a point of going up to Mike the next time he saw him at the boys’ school to ask if he was doing okay. Mike was polite and friendly enough, but it was a brief, awkward exchange, the kind Mike was trying his best to avoid. Soon enough, however, Bob Peabody and Mike Cox would be having more formal exchanges about the beating.
For Boston Red Sox fans, springtime was always about a fresh start, a new season of hope for winning a World Series and ending the miserable drought since the last national championship in 1918. The baseball strike in 1995 that was threatening to shut down the Major League Baseball season had ended on April 2, and three weeks later the fans piled into Fenway Park for the home opener. The worry was that hard-throwing ace Roger Clemens was out of action with a shoulder strain. The good news was the lineup: Slugger Jose Canseco had been added to provide more home run power, while shortstop John Valentin was maturing into an elite player. Down in the minor leagues, a new infielder named Nomar Garciaparra was impressing with his slick fielding and batting stroke. The Sox took the field and clicked on all cylinders: Pitcher Aaron Sele threw a shutout and Sox hitters drove in a slew of runs in a 9–0 win over the Minnesota Twins.
For Sergeant Mike Cox, the opposite was true about the spring: It was a season of despair and hopelessness. “My wife was saying, ‘I told you this wasn’t going to go away. This is terrible what they did to you. Don’t you see it?’” By the time Jim Hussey was shutting down the IA inquiry, Mike had indeed begun to come around.
“I mean nothing’s happening. Nothing’s being resolved.”
With help from Craig Jones, Donald Caisey, and a few other friends, Mike monitored the department’s faltering Internal Affairs inquiry. He picked up bits and pieces. He learned Dave Williams owned up to lying that he and Jimmy Burgio rode in separate cruisers, but he also learned nothing happened to Williams for screwing up the initial effort to establish the layout of cops and cruisers at the dead end. Williams had a knack for eluding trouble. Just as he was becoming embroiled in the unfolding Cox affair, he appeared to be facing hot water on another front. Two civilian complaints against him for excessive force, still pending from the fall, caught up to him. The cases, at long last, had triggered the department’s new Early Intervention System, the program to monitor officers with two or more complaints. It had taken four months—and only after the Cox beating probe began—when Williams was notified to undergo retraining due to a “potential problem area: physical abuse during arrests.” He was ordered to enroll in a course in “Verbal Judo” while the complaints were under investigation. Verbal Judo was a method for using words rather than force to defuse volatile situations. But Williams quickly learned EIS was more sound than fury. The city thought Verbal Judo was not a proven program and wouldn’t pay for it. Williams never took it or any other course. Instead, he focused his verbal skills on denying the excessive force accusations