Never Let Them See You Cry (25 page)

The consequence was a life sentence.

A week after the arrest. Highway Patrolman Don Boniface, a colleague of the murdered trooper, answered his door. There stood five neighborhood youngsters he had known for years. “Here's the money,” one said. “Go get yourself a bulletproof vest.” They handed him a bulky sack containing seventy dollars in nickels, dimes and quarters and fifty dollars in one-dollar bills they had painstakingly collected.

These were kids he had spanked, taken home and lectured. He had coached some of them in Little League and, when they grew up, had issued traffic tickets to a few. The youngest contributor, age three, had donated her candy money.

The six-foot, two-hundred-pound trooper had to duck back inside for a moment in order to maintain his tough-guy composure. The kids wanted Boniface to buy his vest at once and said that any money left should help buy vests for other troopers. They warned that if they ever caught him not wearing his, he would be fined five dollars.

Sounded right to me.

Bulletproof vests work. A lot of cops don't like to wear them, especially in the summer—but there are police officers in Dade County and a growing legion throughout the nation who would be dead today without them.

Metro-Dade Officer Michael Cain stopped at one
A.M
. to check a suspicious man in the shadows behind a convenience store. When he stepped out of his cruiser, the man walked quickly around the building. Cain followed. The man was waiting. “I heard a pop and saw the muzzle flash,” Cain told me. The bullet slammed into his midsection. I've been shot, he thought, but I'm still standing.

The vest held.

The impact, however, nearly knocked him off his feet. Staggering back, he fired at the fleeing man, who got away.

“I've been hit,” Cain radioed. “But I'm okay.” He asked everybody speeding to his aid to slow down. No sense in anybody being hurt.

This was the third time he had been shot at, the first time he was hit. The bullet had ripped through five layers of the twelve-layer Point Blank bulletproof vest. The flattened slug left a small, neat hole in his brown uniform shirt and a painful red bruise over his liver, but the skin was not broken.

The $242 vest was Cain's second in six years. He wore out the first one. He had almost stopped wearing it after suffering heat stroke while chasing a suspect four years earlier. But now, from a wheelchair in the hospital where he had been taken for observation, he said: “The vest is cumbersome. It's heavy. It's hot in the summer and it's warm in the winter. But I wish all my friends would wear them.”

When Miami Officer Nathaniel Broom was shot, his bulletproof vest was hanging in his locker at headquarters blocks away. Had he worn it, it might have saved his life.

A steel-jacketed, hollow-point bullet fired from a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson pierced his heart. The fatal impact hurled him back, off his feet, and a second slug slammed through the sole of his shoe.

He was twenty-three. He had stopped a green Volkswagen Beetle headed the wrong way on a one-way street in Overtown. He had been a Police Explorer and served as a military policeman, but Broom was still only eight months out of the police academy. His partner was also a rookie, two months out of the academy. They had no way of knowing the Volkswagen was stolen—or that the driver who jumped out and ran was armed.

Broom bailed out of his patrol car and darted after him, across a busy intersection. Two months earlier, Broom had stopped a stolen motorcycle several blocks from where he had stopped the Beetle. The driver also ran. Broom won a commendation for chasing him down, which may explain, in part, the young officer's zeal this day.

By the time his rookie partner wheeled their patrol car around. Broom was out of sight, pounding down an alleyway after the suspect. The alley stretches between an aging church and a two-story structure with businesses at street level and apartments above. It is a dead end. The fleeing man tried to escape through an adjacent shop. An employee saw him and shouted to a fellow worker.

“I looked in his face, and he looked in mine,” one of them said later. The cornered man turned and drew a black revolver. “He fell back behind the building for cover. He had the gun in his right hand, balanced it with his left, took his time, aimed and fired. I was astonished. I haven't seen anything like it since Vietnam. Then he jumped the fence and ran.”

From his vantage point, the man I spoke to could not see the gunman's target but was sure from his reaction that the victim had fallen. He ran into the street and heard a shout, “Somebody just shot a black policeman!”

It took several minutes for his partner to find Broom, sprawled in a clump of weeds behind the building.

It was too late. They tried anyway. In the emergency room they opened his heart to try to clamp the aorta and saw that nothing could be done.

His brief career had been so outstanding that Broom had been scheduled to be a training officer for the next academy class.

More than 150 Miami police, joined by more than fifty Metro officers, searched buildings and fields with helicopters and dogs, stopping dozens of suspects. They found guns everywhere, in a dumpster, near an expressway embankment, in a patch of weeds. Guns are not unusual in that neighborhood.

Miami's crime rate was the nation's highest at the time.

It was not a cop, a chopper or a dog that cornered the killer—it was a machine, a half-million-dollar Rockwell computer system put online by police six months earlier. Forty-eight minutes after the shooting, fingerprints lifted from the Beetle were fed into the computer. It instantly compares a print with hundreds of thousands on file. Within minutes, the computer spit out the name of car thief Robert Patten, age twenty-seven. Such an accomplishment would be a lifetime task for technicians comparing fingerprints.

Witnesses identified photos of the rail-thin six-foot, 120-pound suspect as the cop killer. The murder weapon was found hidden at his grandmother's home. Cops staked out a motel where Patten's girlfriend and infant daughter were staying. Police hoped he would appear, and he did. He tried to run, but they tackled him.

His girlfriend told me it might have been all her fault. They'd had a jealous spat before dawn. “I kicked him out,” she said, “and told him he couldn't see his baby no more.” Now more forgiving, she called him a “gentle man who goes to the park and plays John Denver songs on his guitar for the children.”

Police called him something else: a career criminal. His mother washed her hands of him, saying he had been nothing but trouble all his life. Nathaniel Broom worked a paper route, bagged groceries, graduated from high school and enlisted in the army while Robert Patten was stealing, using drugs, dropping out and building a police record. The gun was stolen, and he was on his way to sell it when he drove the wrong way down a one-way street.

This cop killer was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to die in the electric chair. That's not the end of his story.

To while away his hours behind bars, Robert Patten ran a personal ad in a supermarket tabloid. He and a Rhode Island woman exchanged photos and letters and fell in love. She moved to Florida, and they were married—presumably, to live happily ever after, or at least until his appeals run out. A color photo was published of Robert Patten and his new bride, grinning and cuddling in front of a gaily decorated Christmas tree: Merry Christmas from Death Row.

Too bad Nathaniel Broom, the young black cop killed by a white car thief, will never marry or see another Christmas.

Courage is “being scared to death
—
and saddling up anyway.”

—J
OHN
W
AYNE

The stories I most love to write chronicle the daring and the noble deeds of Miami's real-life heroes. The best and the bravest among us are not necessarily cops or firefighters; they are often ordinary people who do the extraordinary when they must.

Take bus driver George P. Brown, who was tooling along the airport expressway, following another empty bus back to the barn after an uneventful day. An inner tire on the other bus blew out, and fire began to fall from the wheels. Brown leaned on his horn, drove up alongside and shouted to the other driver, who pulled over where the expressway curves above a low-income residential neighborhood, where dozens of children play on streets that deadend at the highway. Brown maneuvered his lumbering vehicle through traffic and parked it across the expressway to create a barricade. A security guard stopped to help as the two bus drivers scrambled down the embankment to call the fire department.

What Brown feared happened as they returned: Flames ate through the brake linings, and the burning bus began to roll backward, rapidly picking up speed. A Miami policeman came charging up the side of the hill carrying a fire extinguisher—too late. The flaming bus careened off the security guard's car and crashed into Brown's bus, setting both afire, but no one was hurt. No one knows where the burning, driverless bus would have gone had it not been for Brown, but in its path were houses, traffic and children.

George P. Brown never read about the technique he used in any driver's manual. He improvised.

Take the Miami banker faced by a man brandishing a gun and what appeared to be a bomb. The man demanded fifty thousand dollars. The banker coolly reached into his desk drawer for a revolver. “If you blow us up, we go together,” he announced. “Put the gun down, put the bomb down, and raise your hands.” The robber folded first. By the time police and the FBI burst into the bank, he was spread-eagled against the wall. His .357 magnum was loaded, but his bomb was only a cardboard Kotex box rigged with wires and a light switch.

For years I have tried to figure out what makes a real hero and what they share in common. Real heroes think about the safety of others first, not what might happen to themselves. Unlike Hollywood heroes, real heroes are usually unimpressive in appearance and diminutive in stature. None looks like Rambo.

Take Manuel Rodriguez. He was in a nearby Burger King when a van struck a light pole and overturned. The driver, who delivered fruit and vegetables to Miami Beach hotels and restaurants, was pinned underneath. His two small stepchildren were hurled through the windshield.

Rodriguez, twenty, heard the crash and came running. So did Dan Jacobson, forty, a photographer, from his studio across the street.

The driver's feet protruded from under the truck. There seemed little hope he could still be alive. Rodriguez prayed in Spanish as he tried to pull the truck off the man. Jacobson screamed for jacks.

Rodriguez, five feet seven inches tall and an insulin-dependent diabetic, yelled for help. Motorists came running, with sticks and jacks from their cars. When Miami Beach Police Officer Rick Trado arrived, a dozen people were straining to lift the truck. They managed to hoist it high enough for Trado to scramble beneath. The truck gushed gasoline, and Trado cut his hands on broken glass crawling to the unconscious driver. Then the truck started to slip and the would-be rescuers struggled to hold on to it. Trado wanted out of there. He looked back in alarm and saw “this guy put his shoulder under it.” It was Rodriguez, praying aloud, “Lord, give me the strength! Give us the strength!”

Rodriguez put his back under the truck and groaned, shouldering the weight until Trado dragged the driver to safety. Shaken and trembling afterward, all Rodriguez could remember was praying.

The truck driver died later, but not because no one tried to save him.

Some people resist rescue, and an unpredictable public often refuses to help.

Taxi driver James Pearl, slightly built at 130 pounds, fought for fifteen minutes to save a stranger as people ignored his pleas and slammed doors in his face. A station wagon weaved all over the street in front of Pearl and another cabbie just after dark. Drivers slammed on brakes and leaned on horns as the drunk rammed a parked car head-on. The man was a menace. Pearl stayed to help, as the other cabbie left to report the accident. The intoxicated driver climbed out of his damaged station wagon and fell down, staggered to his feet and fell again. A car almost hit him. Pearl dragged the man out of traffic and asked a truck driver to help him put the drunk back into his car. The trucker refused. Pearl asked other motorists to help him get the man out of the street because another car had just missed him. They drove away. Pearl tried to lead the man to safety, but “he lurched away so hard he nearly fell in front of another car.”

The driver stumbled up one street and down another. Pearl followed, seeking help from six or seven passersby, all of whom ignored him. He knocked at a house and asked a woman to call police. She slammed the door. He shouted to a security guard at a nearby office building. The guard called the police, but the drunk wandered behind an apartment house three blocks from the accident, staggered out onto a boat dock and plunged into the water before they arrived. Pearl lay on the ground in the dark, reaching out to the thrashing man who did not even seem aware he was in danger. Pearl found a pole and shoved it into the water. The man did not take it. Pearl told me later that he was screaming louder than the police sirens—people
had
to hear him—but no one came until after the officers arrived. He knew it was too late. Police and firemen fished the dead man from the water.

“People don't care,” Pearl told me in despair. “Next time I'll know better.”

People are unpredictable. You never know when you can count on them. Sometimes, when least expected, they perform like champs. Other times, when they are needed the most, they slam doors or walk away. Sometimes you are forced to go it alone.

A hapless fellow taken hostage in the lobby of a run-down South Beach hotel was held at rifle point for ten hours by a troubled Vietnam veteran who demanded to talk to the Secret Service. For more than six hours, his plight was ignored. “Call the police,” he pleaded with a young woman passing by. “I'm being held hostage.”

“That's your problem. Call them yourself,” she said and flounced off.

The rifleman slid a threatening note out under the door of the room where he and his hostage were barricaded. A tenant read it, shrugged it off and failed to report the crime. When they were finally notified, police set up a perimeter, sent in two SWAT teams, diverted traffic, evacuated neighbors and rushed in negotiators. They were disappointed. Before they could mount a rescue effort, the hostage, who had despaired of rescue, saved himself. He talked his captor into boiling eggs for lunch, hurled the pot of scalding water on him and ran for his life.

At the other extreme are citizens who seize the initiative and become involved, sometimes in packs, eager to right wrongs and pursue justice. Thomas Hill, twenty-five, a salesman and former high school track star, heard screams and ran after the two robbers who had mugged a woman in front of a downtown Sears store. The victim ran after them too. So did another Sears employee. A passerby came running and joined the pursuit.

Everybody pounded down the pavement, the woman screaming, the men shouting, the robbers sprinting. The chase streaked by a rooming house, where thirty residents lounged on the porch. One leaped to his feet and shouted that the fleeing suspects were the same men who had robbed him earlier. Pursuers poured off the porch and the impromptu posse grew to thirty irate citizens, who cornered and captured the pair at a dead end under the expressway.

The robbers were delighted to see Major Philip Doherty, the first policeman to arrive. “Several citizens were sitting on them to hold them down. It was heartwarming,” Doherty said, pleased. “Young, old, black, white—everybody in the neighborhood joined in.”

Some tragic heroes sacrifice everything for someone else. On the way home after a Saturday night date, Susan Schnitzer and her fiancé saw an accident on the rainswept expressway. He wanted to drive on, to notify police, but Susan, a slim blond nursing student, insisted they stop. He trotted toward oncoming traffic to wave motorists away from the wreck. She ran to help the severely injured driver.

The accident victim lived, but Susan Schnitzer died moments later, hit and carried 140 feet on the hood of a car occupied by two teenagers returning from a high school prom.

Most heroes give no thought to their own safety, especially when the person in danger is someone they love. Take the fifty-nine-year-old man, a poor swimmer at best, who charged fully clothed into an OpaLocka lake to save his drowning son, age eighteen. They died together.

“He could have used his fishing pole to reach for the kid,” a perplexed cop told me later. But people panic.

That father-son drowning was the second in two weeks. A forty-five-year-old man and his son, eight, fished at a remote rock pit. Scuff marks on the bank indicated that the boy, who could not swim, fell in first. His father plunged into water thirty-five feet deep to try to save him.

The world is full of courage of all kinds. You see it in stouthearted children, as well as in the frail and elderly. Most behave heroically because their character does not allow them to do anything less. Few expect thanks.

A short, stocky truck driver was there for Metro Police Officer Milan Pilat the day his worst nightmare came true.

When Pilat approached an illegally parked car, the driver hastily stuffed several tinfoil packets into a cigarette pack, leaped from his car, punched the cop in the face and ran. The officer tackled him after a fifty-yard chase, and the two grappled on the ground. A crowd formed, and people in it tried to free the suspect, kicking and striking the officer, who clung stubbornly to his prisoner and the incriminating cigarette pack. The mob grew to 150 unruly people. Far from the safety of his patrol car and its radio life-link to help, knocked to the ground, battered and kicked, this cop was in trouble. He shouted in vain to passing traffic. As the crowd surged in, there was the piercing sound of air brakes. A huge dump truck stopped on a dime, and the driver jumped out.

“He was just a little guy, really—but everybody backed off,” Pilat said. Shoving people away, the trucker asked the cop if he was all right. Pilat staggered to his feet, still clinging to his prisoner. Backup officers arrived fast, summoned by the trucker on his CB. Cut and bruised, his face battered, Pilat handcuffed his prisoner, turned to thank the trucker, and found him gone.

He had driven away without leaving his name.

You never know when you might be called upon—or if you will rise to the occasion should it occur. One moment you can be taking a nap and the next one of America's most wanted fugitives may be in your living room. How would
you
handle it?

Linda Major had a pounding headache that day. Though it is impossible to rest in a house full of children, she kept trying. But Major was disturbed again, this time by five-year-old Thomas, who bustled breathless to her side. “Mama, I just saw the police running after a man!” Trying to ignore him, she told him to hush.

“But,” he persisted, “the man is in our house.”

He was.

Through the back door that one of the children forgot to lock had barged a stranger, a fugitive charged with gunning down a New York City policeman. Object of a nationwide manhunt, he too was breathless. Cops with shotguns were right behind him.

The stranger strode through the house as the family watchdog, a poodle named Monique, dove behind the kitchen stove. Major's kid sister, thirteen, hit the floor. Her children, ages four, five and six, and their cousins, ten and twelve, were speechless. “Be cool,” the stranger warned. “Be cool.”

Major did not wait to find out what that meant. She looked out a window and saw police shotguns. Shouting, “My children are coming out!” she herded the youngsters toward the door. “Run to your grandfather's house. Now!” she told them.

“For the first time,” she said later, “they did just what I asked them to do.”

Six sets of skinny legs churned in all directions. Major saw the children all pounding to safety down the street, then dashed out her back door, shouting, “He's in the house!”

The fugitive had apparently planned to hold hostages, but Linda Major was too quick. When he refused to come out, police sent in a German shepherd named Thunder, one of their K-9 officers. Monique the poodle continued to cringe behind the stove as Thunder padded purposefully through the house, found the fugitive and sank his teeth into him.

The children later chattered nonstop about the big guns brandished by police. Monique, still cringing, had to be dragged from behind the stove to join in a family portrait shot by a
Herald
photographer. Major told me the excitement had cured her headache and promised to listen the next time five-year-old Thomas had something urgent to say.

Bravery comes in all colors and descriptions, and physical heroics are not always required. Sometimes just doing the right thing, even making a simple telephone call, takes courage.

Soon after the Miami riots, a young woman lost her way, took the wrong expressway exit, tried to turn around and found herself in a strange, riot-torn neighborhood late at night. At a red light, two men with guns ran up beside her Volkswagen. One reached through the window, jammed his gun to her head and cocked it. They forced their way into her car, took her money and ordered the terrified woman to drive them to an apartment complex parking lot. They took her jewelry, raped her and decided to kill her by locking her in the trunk of her car and shooting through the metal. She pleaded for her life as they forced her, naked, into the tiny trunk. When the lid would not close, they tied it to the bumper with one of her garments.