The Fence - Dick Lehr [93]
Both knew Mike was lying. It was not a mistake but a new twist in the ongoing harassment—a phony 911 call, almost funny in a perverse way.
Mike understood that inside the department, there was no longer any question about where he stood. Everyone knew he was cooperating. He’d met with Internal Affairs and made it clear he wanted justice.
With that, it seemed to Mike the message behind the harassment was changing. It had gone from being a warning to lie low and not cooperate to a kind of punishment and payback for deciding to push the matter. The new message was: You’re not one of us.
Thoughts like that were taking their toll. Instead of feeling better three months after the beating, Mike was feeling worse. It was blowing his mind—he’d been beaten, he was the victim, and yet he was the outcast.
“What is it about me?”
He found himself obsessed with the question. “What is it about me that these people think that they can just do this? And just walk away, and never admit to anything or apologize.”
He was thinking in ways he never had before. He was never particularly race-conscious growing up, but he began thinking that being black was the only viable explanation for the abandonment that started at Woodruff Way. “They were able to leave me because they thought less of me because of what I am,” Mike said. “It wouldn’t have happened if I were white.”
The thoughts at times had a crippling effect. Mike retreated into himself. He became jumpy and fearful, and, on occasion, Kimberly found him alone, crying. But something else was at work too; at other times the thoughts worked Mike into a rage. “The more I relived what happened to me, the angrier I got,” he said, “and it wasn’t just the beating that angered me. It was the fact that they left…They just left me there like an animal to die, you know, on the side of the highway.”
While the Internal Affairs inquiry was winding down, Mike made a key decision. He contacted the Boston attorney who’d come to the house to talk about possible legal action. During the first visit, Mike hadn’t given Stephen Roach the time of day. But Mike now told Roach to go ahead—Roach could write the city to request a full copy of Mike’s medical records. It wasn’t as if Mike had committed to taking specific action, but he no longer knew whom to trust and he wanted to be ready. He saw no harm in letting Roach make a few preliminary requests for documents.
Mike also agreed to a second request from Roach. He agreed to meet with a psychiatrist. He didn’t believe in therapy, but the lawyer wanted a professional evaluation. Seeing a psychiatrist might also ease some of Kimberly’s concerns. Mike went twice to see an analyst named Dr. Jerome Rogoff—for ninety minutes on April 24 and for another sixty minutes on May 1. Rogoff was a forensic psychiatrist with a drawer full of credentials. He was a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and Law and had taught at Tufts Medical School and Harvard Medical School. He’d treated prison inmates and served as an expert witness in both civil and criminal cases.
Following the two sessions, Rogoff wrote Roach a report that ran six pages. It began with an outline of Mike’s life, saying that Mike grew up in Roxbury in a “stable, intact family.” He noted that his father died of cancer when he was sixteen, “at which point his severe and prolonged bereavement interfered with his performance at school.” By senior year at Wooster, the report said, he’d recovered and finished strong.
The main thrust of the report, however, was not Mike’s past. It was to determine Mike’s “current mental and emotional state.” Rogoff found Mike “guarded and suspicious,” which, noted the psychiatrist, was not typical for him. “He was always preternaturally calm under stress, which contributed to his effectiveness as a plainclothes policeman.” The psychiatrist listed other symptoms all