We Are the Cops (27 page)

We get in trouble just for doing our job these days. The department – and I think this goes for lots of departments – they don’t want you chasing cars because of the liability.

The state troopers, their policy is that they enforce all laws – misdemeanour and felony. They will pursue you until the wheels fall off.

There’s been pursuits in Tennessee that have gone all the way to the state line and they notified Kentucky state police that they were coming into Kentucky – you know, ‘be prepared’ – and Kentucky’s like, ‘Ten-four. But make sure you back off at least a quarter mile.’

So Tennessee backs off, lets the suspect keep going on the interstate and there sits Kentucky, just the other side of their state line, shotguns ready. And as soon as the car comes through, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM! They just unload on the car.

So there you go; they can all do it but we can’t.

Let me tell you about police work – it’s 80 per cent boredom, 19 per cent paperwork and one per cent panic. Wait, change that. It’s 80 per cent paperwork, 19 per cent boredom and one per cent panic.

I
briefly considered placing this account in either the ‘On The Job' or the ‘Officer Down' chapter. Frankly, neither felt even remotely appropriate. Clearly it was no ordinary day at work - even by police standards. Dozens of officers were killed in an instant and many more have gone on to succumb to their injuries and illnesses in the years since. And even today, there are officers who are still fighting to survive the effects of that single tour of duty.

37 officers from the Port Authority Police Department along with 23 officers from the New York Police Department died on 9/11 in New York. Other officers from federal, state and local departments were also killed. One of the flight attendants of United Airlines flight 93 that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania was a former police officer, who had resigned from her force to become a flight attendant just a few months before the attacks. And there was a federal officer amongst the passengers. No police officers were killed at the Pentagon.

There are countless stories from that day, this is just one of them. It's
the story of a cop - a New York detective - who came into work one morning, and did his job.

I was there at 9/11. I almost got killed. The morning it happened, we were in work at 7am and normally we'd put the TV on but for whatever reason, we didn't that morning. I was working on a report; there were two murders, two days apart where the same gun had been used. I had very little computer skills at the time and we were still typing on carbon paper. I was struggling to do this report when somebody rang us and said, ‘Do you know a plane just hit the World Trade Center?'

It was a gorgeous day and I remember riding into work that morning and thinking, ‘Why am I here? I should be out on my boat.' And then you think, ‘What idiot would hit the fucking building on a beautiful day like today?'

The initial stories were that it was a small plane or it was a news helicopter or maybe even a big plane. They told us to get ourselves down there but I went back upstairs to get something. There were about maybe eight or ten of us in the office at that time and they had all driven off before I came back down. I had the keys to another car so I jumped into that and I got myself down there.

I worked in an upper part of Manhattan, so I knew how to cut through Central Park and how to get to the Trade Center quickly, avoiding the avenues. By the time I got to 59th Street and Columbus Circle, it was coming out over the radio – the police radio and
the news radio – that a second plane had just hit the other tower. So at that moment you know that this wasn't an accident. There can't be two pilots that are that fucking stupid in one day; it's just impossible. So you knew something had happened.

Anyway, I got down there, parked the car and spent the next couple of hours trying to get back with all my people. The thing is, the police radios weren't working, because the transmitter was up on one of the towers. The cell phones weren't working either, so you'd have to use a hard line. I was right across the street from where the fire department was initially set up and the mayor and the police commissioner were there too.

I managed to get to a phone and called the office. They told me to call back in fifteen minutes. The guy in the office was keeping a log about where I was and where everybody else was and he was going to try and get a meeting point for us.

The fire department then decides that they're going to get closer and they're going to set up their Ops Centre in the lobby of one of the towers. There was a priest that turned up; the guy had on fire boots and jeans but he had on the black shirt with the white collar and I go, ‘Look at this guy! A priest! A fire priest!' And I kind of had a little laugh about it. And then he put his jacket on that says ‘clergy' and off he went. Within two or three minutes after he had walked off, he became the first casualty for the fire department. One of the bodies that came down from the top of the tower landed on him and killed him.

People called them ‘jumpers' but that word is a bit of a misconception. They weren't necessarily jumpers as much as people
hanging on to the outside. It wasn't like they made a conscious decision, like, ‘Alright, I'm getting outta here and this is the only way.' Because you're not going to make it, you're not going to survive that jump. If you do look at the pictures that they show, it's just people hanging onto the outside and either they're overcome by the smoke or they're overcome by the heat or just… that's it, they let go. It wasn't like someone said, ‘Get out of the way! I'm jumping.' I didn't see people physically stepping up and going, ‘This is what I'm doing', like a jumper would.

Anyway, so we're still standing across the street and I'm seeing bodies coming down and when they hit, it was kind of like seeing a car crash – you don't want to look but you have to. And here comes the body, it's coming down and then it hit the ground and its head would go twenty feet this way and his shoes would explode right off. One particular guy was coming down and he was facing upwards and his arms were tethering. He hit a lamppost and split in half and when he hit the ground he just splattered and I just said to myself, ‘Good God!'

I decided that, when we got this thing under control, I wanted to go over there. I just felt somehow compelled towards that particular person, you know? I thought that I'd try to get his property and give it to his family or… well, I don't know what I thought.

At some point, some boss comes over and told us – all the detectives – to follow him and we went into this particular building, which I believe was the World Financial Center and we went out the back door, by the Hudson River. We walked along the river to just south of the towers and stood under this bridge. We
were standing under that just to keep out of the way of the glass that was breaking and the bodies that were coming out. I went to go use the telephone at the Marriott hotel because I had to call my wife to tell her where I was – to say that I was all right – and I told her what had happened; she was unaware because she didn't have the TV on.

She said, ‘Don't go in the building.'

I said, ‘No, I won't go in the building.' In the ‘93 bombing, some cops that went into the building got smoke inhalation. So I decide that I'm just going to wait for the fire department to put it out and then go in.

So we're all standing there and I went back to use the phone to find out if there was any update on where all the guys from my unit were but they couldn't find anybody and said, ‘Call back in twenty minutes.'

Then, as I was halfway between the Marriott and the bridge, there was a noise that can't be described in any way other than it was the loudest noise I have ever heard in my life. You knew that it was not a ‘look and see' noise; it was just ‘RUN!'

I made it about a block – not even. It happened so fast. I was halfway down the block and my phone fell out of my top pocket from when I was running. So I turned to get my phone and then I saw that cloud you see in the news, coming at me. Within a second this stuff just overcomes you – this rush of air and dirt and dust. You didn't know what it was at the time, you just figure, stay low to the ground, stay low to the ground. You could feel a heat coming over you and it went from daylight to absolute black;
you couldn't see a thing. But as I was running I kind of had an idea that I wanted to go into this one particular building, because I had seen the doors and thought I could get out of the way. So I crawled along the ground – in blackness – and found the kerb, found the building, found the door. I was throwing up because this stuff was getting in my mouth – it was thick. I was pulling it out in chunks, coughing, throwing up – it was shit. But when I found the door to the building, it was locked. I go, ‘Fuck me! I'm going to die here today. This is unbelievable.'

So I kept moving south, along the wall, because I couldn't see – it was black. I had to use the wall and as I was going, there was an alleyway and in that alleyway there were about thirty people and somebody had a flashlight and you could just barely make out a silhouette and I'm coughing and I'm throwing up and it was just sick. And a guy in the alley says, ‘Cover your mouth! Cover your mouth!'

And I'm like, ‘Oh, fucking good idea! Why didn't I think of that?' But you're just thinking about surviving, you didn't know what had happened or what to do.

It took about five or ten minutes before there was just barely enough light to see and I said, ‘I'm a police officer.'

And another guy goes, ‘I am too.'

And another goes, ‘So am I.'

So there were three of us in there and I said, ‘Look, we've got to get out of here; we've got to get these people out of here.'

So we made a human chain and there was some lady that was hurt, so we told these guys that they had to carry her. As we
went down the street there was an ambulance and the crew were out of the ambulance, trying to shake off the dust, because they had their air conditioning on and everything got sucked into the vehicle. They were getting saline solution and passing it to us so we could wash our faces and gargle, trying to get this shit out of us and not really knowing what had happened or what to do other than we had to keep going south.

We found another building and we went in there to use the phone and to clean up in the bathroom and as we're getting squared away, they have the TV on – they have the news – and as we're watching what's happening a guy comes in with a bullhorn and screams, ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! THE OTHER BUILDING'S GOING TO FALL! THE OTHER BUILDING'S GOING TO FALL!'

‘Fuck that!' I said. ‘I'm staying right here; I don't want to be out in that again. If the building falls and lands on me, I'll take my chances.'

I just knew that I did not want to be out in that again because, you know, you didn't even know what it was. You come to find out later that it was the whole building imploding inwards and it was all the concrete and all the asbestos and all the dirt.

So now the second building's down and we're like, ‘Alright, we gotta get out of here.' But we wanted to stay away from the police plaza and we wanted to stay away from Wall Street, you know? You figure that maybe there's going to be more attacks, with what's going on.

We're just south towards Battery Park and then you hear this
roar of a jet and you go, ‘Fuck! Again?' And then you come to find out that it's the military jets.

We ended up in the fish market and they had hoses and we're using hoses to clean off and again to gargle. Plus they let us use the phones. Eventually we got a muster point where we all went to and that was it.

Later that day and that night, when we were able to go back over there and see the area where we had been standing when the first building had come down, the whole top of that building had fallen into the building where we had been standing and the glass atrium was all collapsed; it was all gone. Every one of us that was standing there would have been dead. If some guy didn't say, ‘Let's go over here,' we would have all been dead.

One way or another, every single person in that police department somehow, some way, ended up either digging down there or working down there – even if it was just directing traffic. At some point you were going to be there. I would know guys who would work their whole day and then they would go there and work for five or six hours – digging, helping.

During the initial searches after the buildings had collapsed, you never saw a desk, a chair or a filing cabinet; you never saw anything that looked like anything. It was just dust, debris, wire, concrete, parts of planes, parts of this and parts of that. I mean how many desks and chairs do you think were in those buildings? 110 storeys but there was nothing. It was surreal.

The only people that were going down to the site were police. We were working twelve to eighteen hours a day. They eventually
shut the road, the West Side Highway. There was no traffic into the city for the first couple of days, so you were the only people on that road and when you're going down there, there'd be folks lining up with water bottles and flags and banners and waving to you. It was incredible, the people that turned up and the support. It was an amazing first week, almost a month. Even bad guys weren't really bad. It's like it just stopped and everybody was supportive.

They had us posted on the Intrepid – that's the aircraft carrier by 42nd Street. We were using that as a temporary headquarters. We were working from either 4pm or 6pm, ‘til like 6am or 8am the next morning. I didn't know what was going on; you're kind of in a zombie state, so to speak. You're just getting on with it. But it was surreal. You'd come in and you'd be on the flight deck of this thing and you'd get your daily briefing and your assignment of jobs that you had to do that day and then you'd look to where the towers used to be and all you saw was the smoke billowing.