The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (20 page)

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A.M
., Mike was wheeled down the hall into the radiology unit for a series of examinations of his liver, spine, facial bones, and brain. The X-rays showed “no evidence of fracture” on his facial bones and nose, while the CAT scan showed that “the surfaces of the brain are clear.” The results were favorable regarding Mike’s neurological condition, although in the weeks and months to come, that would change.

In another bay, nurses were getting Jimmy Rattigan ready to be released. Rattigan had come into the hospital strapped to a backboard, wearing a neck collar; fortunately, neither he nor his partner was injured seriously in the crash with the gold Lexus. They were treated for bumps, bruises, and strained back and neck muscles.

Rattigan watched doctors and nurses attend to Mike; he saw Kimberly and Mike’s mother arrive, and he saw other officers come and go. He could tell everyone was worried. “Michael Cox is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met in my life, and one of the nicest guys I’ve ever worked with—always a gentleman, always says hello, never in a bad mood when you saw him. I was kinda worried for him, too.”

Rattigan did pick up one tidbit about Mike’s condition. “I heard before I was leaving that he might have been urinating blood—now that’s definitely not a good sign.”

Rattigan was right—blood in the urine was not a good thing. But unknown to Rattigan, Mike was going to have a lot more to worry about than traces of blood in his urine. Mike’s concerns would soon enough extend beyond the physical to the metaphysical—a Boston police officer’s expectation for justice was about to collide with the police culture of silence.

Having blacked out, Mike had missed the chaos that continued swirling in the compact cul-de-sac at the end of Woodruff Way. By some estimates, more than twenty police cruisers from various departments, several ambulances, and dozens of officers ended up crowded into the dead end. The cruisers’ lights sliced up the sky. “It looked like Christmas,” one of the officers said later.

Joe Teahan and Gary Ryan were among the first to attend to him. Teahan discovered Mike alone on the ground behind Williams’s cruiser, writhing in pain. “He was lying on a good-sized patch of ice,” Teahan said. “He was hurt; he was bleeding.” Teahan also saw the blood, with handprints, spread across the car’s trunk. Kneeling down, he heard Mike moan, “I can’t believe this shit. I don’t need this fucking stuff.”

Despite the cold, Teahan stripped off his sweatshirt and folded up his T-shirt. Gary Ryan used the undershirt like a bandage and tucked it under Mike’s head. Teahan noticed that Mike had begun to shake. “He looked like he was getting cold.”

Other officers, including a couple of munies, gathered around. They began calling for an ambulance. The requests broke an eerie stretch of silence on the police channel 3 after Mike’s final scratchy transmission that the suspects were getting ready to bail. It was a vacuum that left the police dispatcher grasping for straws. “Where are we now?” he’d yelled. “Are we on foot? Could someone tell me? Are we on foot?”

The silence had finally ended with the calls for an ambulance. Even then, the requests lacked the necessary particulars—nothing about for whom, for what, or even where. “I need your location,” the dispatcher said, stating the obvious.

The Woodruff Way cul-de-sac was described.

“What kind of injuries do we have?” the dispatcher asked.

The question hung in the air.

Gary Ryan then ended the suspense: “Officer with a head wound.”

Many of the responding officers did not drive into the cul-desac itself. Two other members of Mike’s gang unit, black officers Donald Caisey and Sergeant Ike Thomas, had circled in and had driven down Mary Moore Beatty Way, the street below the dead end and down a short hill from the fence. Mary Moore Beatty Way was the street Smut Brown had run down after scaling the fence. While they parked, they heard the radio call about an injured officer, but didn’t know what to make of it. Caisey climbed the hill ahead of Thomas and saw Teahan and Ryan huddled over Mike. Hurrying over, he was shocked. “His injuries were very similar if not exactly like injuries obtained when someone is shot in the head. Clumps of blood coming out of his nose, out of his mouth, blood everywhere. Real thick blood.”

Caisey leaned down. “Have you been shot?”

Mike heard the question, but no longer knew up from down. “I don’t know.”

Thomas, meanwhile, was making his way through the hole in the fence to gain access to the dead end. The shining cruiser lights made it hard to see. But once he adjusted his eyes he noticed the empty Lexus and three black men in handcuffs on the ground by the curb. Then he recognized Ian Daley walking quickly in his direction. Thomas and Daley knew each other pretty well; earlier in their careers they’d worked together in Dorchester at the C–11 station. They’d socialized on occasion and played basketball. But it had been a few years since they’d hung out.

Daley motioned at Thomas. “Ike, Ike,” he said.

“What’s up, Ian?”

“Ike, you guys really ought to wear jackets.”

Thomas was thrown. Jackets? It was like a non sequitur. He’d just arrived and was quickly trying to take stock of all the activity and figure out who was hurt—and Daley was in his face animatedly insisting the gang unit’s sartorial choices were lacking.

“I’m like, ‘Okay, What are you talking about?’”

Daley could have given Thomas some context—told Thomas that for a few scary moments he’d had his handgun trained on Mike Cox, admitted he’d tried to arrest Mike. But Daley didn’t do that. “You guys really ought to wear jackets because some people don’t know who you are.”

Thomas didn’t have time for guessing games. He spotted Teahan and Ryan kneeling behind a cruiser and went over. That’s when he saw Mike. From the vague radio transmissions, the sergeant had not gotten the sense an officer was badly injured. But Mike looked seriously hurt. Thomas asked Mike what happened. “He tried to talk,” Thomas said later, “but he couldn’t. Nothing was coming out.” Richie Walker then came over and stood behind Thomas. Walker had himself just returned to the dead end. From his car, he’d run through the hole in the fence, banged up his knee after slipping, and then hustled after the suspect later identified as Smut Brown. He was the officer who retrieved Conley’s flashlight. Walker asked how Mike was doing, but Thomas waved him off. The supervisor stood up and was asking out loud: What happened? What happened?

“We found him like this,” said Ryan and Teahan.

Their response didn’t answer the question.

Seconds later, Craig Jones was also hovering over his battered partner, a sight that took his breath away. From the point where he’d knocked down Tiny Evans on the left side of the cul-de-sac, Craig had run to the front of the cars and followed Richie Walker through the hole in the fence. “I assumed he was chasing somebody.” Craig tripped going through the hole and slipped on the hill. Instead of joining the foot chase, he’d turned around and gone back to the dead end. He saw that Tiny, Marquis, and Boogie-Down were on the ground in handcuffs in front of the Lexus. To Craig, this was great news. Craig saw Dave Williams at the front of the Lexus. Excited by the successful climax to the long chase, Craig raised his hand and slapped Williams’s—a congratulatory high-five between two towering black cops.

Craig had then noticed Tiny was yelling for him, squirming and trying to get to his knees. Craig went over and pushed Tiny down. He ordered Tiny to stay put. When Tiny didn’t and said he needed to talk to him, Craig leaned down and punched him hard in the face. “He fell on the ground,” Craig said. Tiny stayed put this time.

Craig was charged up. Cops and cruisers were everywhere, the sirens and lights a kind of sound and light show providing an exclamation point to the capture of shooting suspects. “My adrenaline was going.” But the satisfied feeling was short-lived. Gary Ryan came over and told him, “Your partner is hurt.” Craig followed Ryan to the rear of the cruiser. “Mike was a mess.” The blood was all over Mike and splashed across the cruiser’s trunk. The cuts, the bruises. Mike’s head misshapen by the huge bump. “Never seen anything like it.” Craig’s soaring feelings had ended in a crash landing.

He knelt next to his partner. Mike seemed to respond to the familiar voice. In and out of consciousness, Mike finally made some sense on two fronts. One was professional: He began mumbling about the guns thrown from the Lexus, and seconds later the police radio crackled with his information. “The officer who is injured told me the suspects threw some weapons out on Itasca Street,” reported one of the other officers standing there. The dispatcher asked for more details. “Uh, he’s a little bit, uh, hurtin’ right now,” came the reply, followed by “He said two different locations.”

Mike’s second moment of clarity was personal: He asked Craig to call Kimberly. “He kind of moaned it,” Craig said. Craig promised he would.

Craig and the others attending to Mike were growing impatient.

“Get an ambulance down here!” one of them yelled over the radio.

Seconds later: “What’s the deal?”

“C’mon, hurry up!”

Hampered by the bottleneck of police vehicles, the paramedics arrived at 3:03
A.M
. Sergeant Thomas watched as they worked furiously to stabilize Mike. “They were cutting his clothes off, taking his clothes off like it was a very, very serious injury,” he said. “They were asking questions, like, ‘Has he been shot?’”

Elsewhere, officers milled around, simultaneously checking on the three shooting suspects on the ground and curious about the damage done to Mike Cox. For their part, Dave Williams and Jimmy Burgio pretty much hung back ten to fifteen yards away in front of the Lexus. Williams, at one point, walked over to check on Mike, but Burgio stayed put. One thing on his mind was making sure he was going to get credit for an arrest. “You get written up for that, it looks great in your folder,” he said later.

Mike was moved onto a stretcher. Thomas, the ranking officer, began making some decisions. He talked to Craig Jones about returning to Itasca Street to look for the handguns. He told Gary Ryan to ride in the ambulance with Mike, and he told Joe Teahan to follow in their car. He told them both to contact Mike’s wife. He also made sure they took possession of Mike’s equipment—standard operating procedure. Thomas got Mike’s gun and handcuffs, but they couldn’t find the radio Mike wore clipped to his belt.

Ryan and Teahan began looking around, a search that took Teahan down along the right side of Dave Williams’s cruiser and past the passenger side where Jimmy Burgio rode. Teahan spotted Mike’s radio on the ground in front of the cruiser by the fence. “It was kind of like in front of the car, but up like two o’clock,” Teahan said.

No one was really paying attention to the significance of it, but the radio’s location suggested that, following the first blows, Mike either fell or was pulled from where he’d initially stood at the fence to a spot near the front of the cruiser.

Thomas was not yet focused on the reality that he had a crime scene on his hands—the assault and battery of Boston police officer Michael Cox. Instead, he asked again Teahan and Ryan and other cops standing around, What happened? Did anyone see what happened? He got shrugs. He got silence. “I got no response,” Thomas said.

Thomas might as well have been asking the meaning of life. No one broke rank to offer any information. Instead, an alternative explanation arose, originating in the circle around Mike and then working its way out, where cop after cop grabbed on to it like a raft in troubled waters. The story started with Teahan and Ryan, two fellow gang unit members. They began telling everyone Mike had slipped on a patch of ice. Even while insisting he had not seen anything, Teahan nevertheless was saying, “Michael had fallen and hit his head.” He and Ryan hypothesized Mike had run from his cruiser and “hit the patch of ice and went flying.”

Despite all the police training on the scene, despite the first impression of the paramedics, Donald Caisey, and others that Mike had been shot, the ice-slip theory quickly became gold. For those who’d beaten Mike or witnessed the attack, it provided cover for their crimes. For those who were not culpable but sensed trouble, it was a safe haven from having to consider wrongdoing by fellow cops. Mike’s injuries were accidental—what could be simpler than that? The explanation was neutral and nonincriminating: textbook see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil. Even Craig initially went with the seductive but absurd concoction.

“I didn’t want to believe what really happened, happened.”

In denial or worse, Mike’s coworkers launched the bogus story. That Sergeant Ike Thomas did not put the brakes on the rank speculation but instead allowed the smokescreen to gain traction was the first of a series of supervisory failures complicating right from the start any search for accountability.

“That’s the only thing that I had to go on at that point in time,” Thomas said later in self-defense, seeming to abandon altogether the most basic trait of any investigator: skepticism. Thomas even assigned Donald Caisey the job of writing the report about Mike’s injury, and Caisey, notwithstanding his own initial skepticism, went with the storyline of convenience: ice.

The reality was that, in addition to the Lexus and the capture of the shooting suspects, Sergeant Thomas and the others now had a second crime scene requiring clear-cut steps to secure and preserve evidence: taping off the area around the fallen Mike, the cruiser, and the fence; photographing all those areas; seizing flashlights, boots, and clothing of those officers first to arrive to test for trace evidence in the crime lab; notifying immediately the command staff and Internal Affairs; taking statements from the officers at Woodruff Way.

But rather than consider that Mike had been mistaken for a fleeing shooting suspect and beaten to a pulp, Thomas and others in charge steered clear, pursuing instead a kind of supervisory avoidance of the obvious.

“It seemed believable to me,” Sergeant David C. Murphy said later about his embrace of the ice-slip theory. Murphy was the second sergeant to show up at Woodruff Way, while Mike was still on the ground and everyone was waiting for the ambulance’s arrival. He was the patrol supervisor from the Mattapan station. The high-speed chase had cut across Mattapan and ended on his turf, involving a number of his officers, like Richie Walker. Murphy’s job was to help Sergeant Thomas sort out the situation. He had parked his cruiser down on Mary Moore Beatty Way and walked up through the hole in the fence.