Too Close To Home

   In some cases, there is no suspect to interrogate because the killer has taken the easy way out after slaughtering innocence. I had several of these cases and one of them hit me particularly hard. It continues to haunt me.

   The radio dispatcher sent us on a mutable homicide call when I was a Sargent in that division. As directed, I drove to a dumpy old trailer-park where everyone rented, nobody owned. It was three o'clock in the afternoon. Kids were everywhere. Playing in the yards, standing by their bikes. Their lives were interrupted by a stream of ambulances, firetrucks, and police cars clogging the roads.

   There was a uniform cop standing on the front porch of a sorry-looking house trailer that had probably outlived its warranty by twenty years. As I walk from my car toward the crime scene, the patrolman put his right hand down by his side and flashed three fingers. 'Three bodies.'

I nodded in acknowledgment as I pull down my rubber gloves. I kept a box of five-hundred in the car and usually started the week with fifty pairs in both pockets of my suit coats. I went through them fast.

   The first victim was inside the door on the kitchen floor. An adult female propped in a sitting position against the cabinet. She was wearing shorts and a halter-top, no shoes. There were multiple gunshot wounds to her chest. Another in what would have been her face. Her mouth was open, her eyes were closed. Her hands were turned with her palms up. As if praying for divine intervention or peace at last. Next to her on the floor were several expended bullet casings from a semi-automatic pistol. These indicated that the shooter reloaded the gun. He could not confirm that because he was dead and lying within six feet of her.

   He was approximately the same age as her with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The gun was a few inches from his hand on the floor where I would expect it to be in a murder-suicide scenario. Don't tell Holly-Wood, but after someone shoots themself, the muscles relax and the gun falls. It is rare to find the weapon still in hand. The shooter suicide victim's right temple had tattooing or stippling, which is burned flesh and blueing caused by muzzle flash and gunpowder from close range gunshots and super-sonic projectiles entering flesh and bone.

   Done with him, I look around. The patrol cop from before had come in and was standing behind me.

   "You said three bodies."

   "Back bedroom." He said. His tone was partially sullen and meant to prepare me for the worst. As if he could protect me from such evil. He didn't need to say anymore but he did, knowing that I had children.

   "It's a kid."

   I have been a cop a long time by then. Still, my gut seized up.

   "How old?" I asked.

   "He's little."

   'Fuck'.

   I didn't want to go down that hallway, but I went. He was no more than five years old and wearing his mickey mouse pajamas, clenching his stuffed animal to his chest. He had four close-range gunshot wounds to the head, which was grotesquely distorted. The explosion blew his left eye out to the mattress which was soaked in blood. Flies buzzed around the bed.

   How the fuck could someone do this to a little kid? How could you do this to your child? What could a kid possibly say or do, at age five, to warrant such a violent death? Nothing, nothing at all. His father did this to him.

   We found the usual rambling suicide on the kitchen table in cursive handwriting. Left by our "Hero" father. "Can't go on", "Life is so hard", quotes from the bible, "He wanted to take them to heaven with him".

   I have read so many of these that it felt like the same guy wrote the same thing every time. But this one will stay with me because of the boy in the bedroom. Day or night, it doesn't matter. I still see him on that blood-soaked mattress. I still smell the coppery smell of fresh blood. My son had those exact mickey mouse pajamas. He wore them out because he loved them so much.

   Kids got to me more than any other victims. They always seem to be around the same age as my kids. Their rooms had the same posters, had the same closets, and the same clothes. They wore the same sneakers. My son and daughter will tell you today that I was a loving dad who hugged them a lot. Often, for what to them, seemed like no reason.

   What they didn't know was that every time I saw a child, I saw them as well. And a lot of the time, when I came home after cases like these, I would hug them just to make sure they are still there and uninjured.

   It can twist you up to see what humans are capable of doing to children and themselves. And particularly to those who trust them and love them.