Pause

I had only been at Ingleside Station for a week and I was working the car sector covering the area in and around Bernal Heights on swing watch - the 1600 to 0200 hours shift. I was alone, despite the general tradition of two-officers per beat/car-sector in the department. This was because of staffing; at the time Ingleside Station was not the source of much of the department’s attention and therefore was not a priority to keep full of warm bodies. Yet for some reason swing watch at Company-H was remarkably understaffed. I had just transferred over from Bayview Station, where I completed my probationary year. During that year, I saw that Ingleside - Bayview Station’s neighbor to the southwest - more or less never had officers assigned to all of its six beats/sectors. This meant the unstaffed sectors, generally the quietest ones, had to be covered by the neighboring sector cars... meaning more work for everybody.

Though limiting in terms of what an officer can accomplish safely by his or herself, as opposed to with a partner, I was rather happy to be working alone as it meant I didn’t have to roll the proverbial personality-conflict dice at the start of my shift, and could stumble my way through the maze of streets that comprised the district. At district stations, easygoing and enjoyable partners generally “partner-up” with another similarly agreeable coworker, pretty much leaving only the non-partnered variety of coworkers up for grabs. These ronins can be very difficult to get along with, doubly so because they always have the oft frustrating task of working with the FNGs, like I was at the time.

Though I had resided in the southern portion of San Francisco for years, Ingleside was for the most part a tangled mess of unfamiliar streets. Luckily, by working the Bernal Heights car, I at least knew the roads that bordered my beat and some of the major cross streets, so I could find my way to any run with a bit of help from my on-board data terminal and my ticket book sized map of The City.

The run came out as an “A,” the highest priority call for service – the latter, lower two being Bs and Cs. It was a 217, a reported shooting on Franconia, in the “one-car,” my sector. The dispatcher hadn’t even said the second syllable of the street’s name before I knew that I had no idea where Franconia was. I grabbed the microphone to my on-board radio, keyed it with a chirp and told the dispatcher I was responding none the less. It was in my sector, and that meant I had better show up. To not do so, especially as an FNG at a new station, would be peer-relationship suicide.

Because it was a shooting and therefore a “hot” and/or potentially “good” call, a number of other units also broadcasted that they too were responding to back me up. I briefly wondered if they were doing so because I was the new guy and still untested in their eyes. A bit of testy bravado reared its head as I felt a mild urge to state over the air that I had come from Bayview, and was therefore theoretically just as prepared to deal with a shooting as anybody else on the watch.

I pushed aside such feelings and hit the next message key on my data terminal, bringing up information such as the call’s location, priority code, nature, time of dispatch, and a brief description of what the call was about. As I thumbed through my map to locate the listed cross-streets, the dispatcher relayed more information.

“Units responding to the 217 on Franconia, be advised that this is an upstairs neighbor calling stating that she thinks her downstairs neighbor shot himself in the back yard. She can see him through the window lying down. He isn’t moving and there’s a gun next to him on the grass.”

I picked up my mic once more and stated, “Henry-one-David copies.”

After tracing a quick route on my map with my finger and hopefully committing the necessary turns to memory, I tossed the map on the empty passenger’s seat of the patrol car and accelerated forward, anxious to get to the call first because it was in my sector, and because some needy part of me wanted to prove myself competent to my new coworkers.

I pulled up in front of the house, the eastern side of which bordered a parking lot. I turned off my patrol car’s headlights and put on the flashing amber overhead lights, a common courtesy to coworkers and/or allied agencies - SFFD, Animal Care and Control, etc. - to guide them in to one’s location, and a good general safety move at night. I exited my vehicle, removing my flashlight as I did so. With my free hand, I told the dispatcher, “Henry-one-David has arrived.”

I walked towards the front door of the house, trying not to take the 911 caller’s words for granted, trying to stay conscious of the possibility that the 911 caller could in fact be the shooter already establishing an alibi. Hell, for all I knew it was a booby-trap and the front stairs of the house were rigged to explode as soon as I set foot on them.

Stranger things have happened to San Francisco police officers.

As I approached the front stairs to the front door of the bi-level Victorian, the dispatcher stated, “Henry-one-David, the 911 caller says to access via the side door that leads to the adjacent parking lot.”

“Check,” I answered in the affirmative.

I walked into the lot, following the pale blue wooden fence to the side entrance to the back yard. I reached for the door’s handle, then remembered my training, remembered that I was alone. I pulled my hand back, took a few steps away from the door, and grasped the top of the fence’s planks with both hands. I pulled myself up, peering into the yard beyond.

“In here, Officer!” A female voice called out as she quickly pulled open the side door, cordless phone in her free hand. She was white, in her twenties, and seemed at first impression to me like a student at the Academy of Art. Two Valencia Street hipster-type roommates emerged into the parking lot behind her.

I dropped down from the fence, and approached the trio, not in any way getting any vibe that would lend to the belief that this group had shot-gunned their downstairs neighbor to death and then had the presence of mind to call 911 to cover the whole thing up. The two men remained silent, wide-eyed as if slapped by the cold hand of the reality of urban living.

“He’s right in here,” she said, gesturing through the gate into the yard with a bizarre, sheepish expression displayed on her face.

I walked through the gate, passing the caller and her comrades. I heard the latch shut behind me, but I paid it no mind, my attention diverted to what was before me: prone in the middle of the immaculately manicured grass and well-landscaped backyard the motionless body of a young man in his early twenties - around my age at the time - lay staring up vacantly at the full-moonlit clouds, arms and legs splayed out like an X, a twenty-gauge shotgun laying across his left thigh. The harsh contrast of violent death and idyllic urban garden an eerie, surreal and disturbing sight still frozen in my memory.

“We just heard a bang, and looked out the window and... there he was,” the girl said.

I approached the body, and knelt down beside him. His front teeth were chipped and his head was positioned in such a way that it seemed he’d likely had the barrel in his mouth, angled in such a manner that the blast went through the back of his head, which was hidden by the ground. I was relieved. Shotgun suicides can be horrific - I’d seen them before - and were the shotgun in this instance a larger gauge, the dead man’s head likely would have been mostly blown away. Though I could see bits of skull, brain and blood on the grass to the rear of his head when I swept my flashlight’s beam across it, I still felt compelled to check the pulse in his neck. It was absent, as I expected. In retrospect I think my urge to touch the dead man was an effort to make the scene more real, to focus my attention to the tasks at hand and to pay my respects to the departed.

I keyed my mic. “Henry-one-David,” I said quietly, for some reason, like I didn’t want to wake him. “Can you send me an ambulance, no hurry? I’ve got an approximately twenty-two year old male with a gunshot to the head. No pulse and he’s not breathing.”

“Ten-four,” the dispatcher answered.

“Deck, you got sufficient help?!” a fellow officer broadcasted, asking if I was okay, obviously worried that I was by myself at a homicide scene.

I looked up at the three silent bystanders, who stared transfixed at the still body before them. “Ten-four; I’m okay. Appears self-inflicted, initially.”

I interviewed the three upstairs neighbors as the SFFD wailed to the scene in the background, dramatically. They all said the same thing: they heard the shot, looked out the back window and saw the body. The two men didn’t know anything else. The female 911 caller had this to add:

The deceased had recently moved in after going through a bad breakup, about three months prior. A child custody dispute of some sort was involved. His recycling bin was mostly empty bottles of booze and mixers, more each week it seemed. He was nice, charming and quiet, with an air of sadness about him. He spoke of his daughter often, and his face brightened when he talked about seeing her, spending time with her. He played the guitar. He smoked pot now and then. He rode a skateboard to and from the corner store and grocery store. He loved the Beastie Boys. He was slowly building a play-space for his daughter in the living room with the left-over cash from rent, food, utilities and child-support. He didn’t have a car. He mostly rode MUNI.

More of my coworkers, the SFFD engine company and paramedic ambulance arrived. I told the fire personel to tread lightly at the crime scene. After my supervisor arrived, and after Homicide had been notified, we entered the deceased’s apartment and searched it. The closet door was slightly ajar. A Playstation game’s pause screen was displayed on the TV. I smelled incense that had recently been burned. It was like he paused his game just a short while prior to my arrival, picked up his shotgun out of the closet, walked into the back yard, stuck the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and that was it – the end result of thousands of days of growing up and being alive. I found a note on the table in the breakfast nook next to an empty pint of vodka. For some reason, I read it out loud to the other officers in the room around me. That was a mistake.


To My Dearest Daughter Angela,

You’re probably too young to understand this, but I just want you to know that your daddy loves you. I’m sorry I can’t be there for you as your life goes on. Your mommy and me weren’t perfect together, but we made you and you are perfect. It’s just better this way, with me out of the picture. You won’t have my flaws. You are my everything. I love you so much and I will always watch over you.

All my love,

Your Dad


At the end of my shift, when I’d finished the report, I drove home trying not to look at the night sky, the moon still setting aglow the wispy traces of clouds above. When I got home, I walked directly to my kitchen and poured myself a few fingers of whiskey. I drank it down quickly, trying unsuccessfully to get that poor dead dad’s face out of my head, wishing I hadn’t read that damn note.