I Will Find You

ONE

SHIT MAGNET

The Colorado Springs Police Department was still an old-school force when I joined it in 1973. Most of the officers were military veterans with at least ten years on the job. College degrees were rare. Brawn, quick fists, and street smarts were the primary traits needed for advancement.

Rookies didn’t get weeks of classroom training before hitting the streets like they do now. Instead they paired you with a veteran partner who showed you the ropes. They had the new guys ride with partners for just two or three weeks until we got to know procedures and the city. Most patrol officers cruised solo, but we didn’t get our own patrol cars until we earned them by proving we could survive on the street. There wasn’t a written test for that. Usually it meant getting bloody.

I earned my patrol car about two weeks into the job. We were dispatched to the White Spot, a twenty-four-hour drive-in and eat-in restaurant on the city’s West Side where trouble was always likely. The typical crowd was drunk and disorderly. After midnight, it was all downhill from there.

My training partner and I were dispatched around 1 a.m. on a call from a cook who said, “A cop is getting killed in here.” That got our attention. Upon arrival, yours truly ran inside the joint only to find this mountain of a guy slowly strangling one of our officers on the lunch counter. The cop’s face was turning blue.

I waded in with my adrenaline pumping from a volatile mix of fear and anger. I grabbed a fistful of the bad guy’s greasy hair and slammed his face onto the lunch counter with my full weight behind it. In my fury, I had not observed a stainless-steel cream dispenser on the countertop. I did not intentionally flatten the dispenser with his face, but that was the result.

Facial bones and cartilage were crushed. Blood spurted everywhere. I thought I had killed him. Everyone else thought the same.

I backed off. The restaurant went dead silent. My partner called for an ambulance. I checked the cop who’d been taking a beating. He was battered and gasping for air, but he’d be okay.

His assailant would need facial reconstruction. When he looked in the mirror and saw the scars, he would not remember me fondly.

Had I gone too far? I wondered if I’d just ended my career before it officially began. I shouldn’t have worried. The captain of patrol thought it was really cool that a rookie had so boldly rushed in to assist another officer. The fact that I had smashed in the bad guy’s face was worth extra bonus points.

The next day, without fanfare, I was awarded my own patrol car. My reputation as a head-banging street cop was made. The White Spot incident grew into an urban legend of sorts. That was helpful, but it also tagged me with a reputation for attracting trouble. That pattern continued for my entire twenty-three years and six months on the job.

Even as a rookie, I was always getting shot at or attacked by drunks. None of the other cops wanted to be around me. “You’re a shit magnet,” they’d say, and they were right. Take for instance my first fight call at Fred’s Bar, another West Side dive.

Fred’s, which is now blessedly out of business, served the cheapest beer to the lowest of lowlifes. The dump dated back to World War II. They hadn’t wiped down the bar since V-J Day. The charming clientele was known for sucking down beer and pissing it out without ever leaving the bar. I’m serious. The regulars didn’t mind the filthy decor or the reeking odor because they contributed to it.

I was dispatched to Fred’s one night on a fight call. Standard operating procedure would have been to wait for backup, a cover officer, but chairs and tables were flying and the situation was already out of hand. So, I went in as the Lone Ranger. And who did I find inside the bar kicking everyone’s ass? A linebacker-sized Native American wearing red patent leather shoes and tossing people around like rag dolls.

He was a beast.

“You are under arrest!” I announced.

The beast responded not as I’d hoped.

One giant hand grabbed my crotch. The other wrapped around my neck. He then hurled me like a sack of potatoes through the front picture window of the bar with such force that I flew over the sidewalk and bounced off the side of my own patrol car parked on the street.

I was still lying in the gutter, checking for broken parts, when my backup arrived. He surveyed the scene, chuckled, and inquired, “Do you think you need some help here?”

“Yeah, I think so,” I mumbled.

We didn’t have Tasers back then, unfortunately. Instead, we entered Fred’s with nightsticks drawn. By my estimate, we swung and connected with our mighty nemesis at least fifty times.

We didn’t hurt him. He just got tired and gave up.

A few months later, I met his more-evil twin. The radio dispatcher said there was a fight in the men’s room of the bus station. I’d grown smarter. This time I waited for reinforcements.

Again we encountered a Native American of impressive stature, probably six feet five inches and 280 pounds. When we entered, he was calmly coiffing his dark locks in the mirror. At his feet were three guys bleeding and unconscious.

He didn’t acknowledge our presence until we drew our nightsticks.

Then he looked up and said, “Does your mother know you boys are out?”

That comment was my first hint that we were in for the fight of our lives. By the time we locked the cuffs on him, my uniform shirt was in shreds and I’d lost about three handfuls of hair. We brought him down, but we paid for it.

After a while, my shit magnet reputation spread beyond the police department and into the community at large. One night a neighbor, who also belonged to our Catholic parish, came knocking. I opened the door and he handed me a package.

“Everybody in the church got together and bought you this,” he said.

It was a bulletproof vest, one of the first developed for police work. My neighbors and fellow parishioners were very kind. They didn’t want me to die on the job. I wore that vest even though it was heavy and uncomfortable. I didn’t want to disappoint my benefactors.

WILD WEST SIDE

My assigned patrol area, the West Side, was a hot zone. You won’t find it on the travel brochures showing Pike’s Peak, the Garden of the Gods, or Red Rock Canyon. It was not the new and shiny part of Colorado Springs. While there is a great deal of natural beauty within its boundaries, the city had its fair share of crime and violence.

In those days, especially, Colorado Springs retained some of its Wild West heritage, thanks to a diverse and particularly well-armed population that included residents of an army base, two air force bases, the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Cheyenne Mountain nuclear bunker, the U.S. Olympic Training Center, and more conservative evangelical churches than you could ever count.

My first patrol area, the West Side, had more bars than churches. Sleek Olympians and shiny military brass were not among the patrons. Most West Siders were born there and they would die there, often prematurely. There were good, hardworking people in the neighborhood, but I never got to meet them unless they’d become victims of a crime. Otherwise, I only met the dirtbags, the crazies, and the drunk and disorderly.

I’d been a cop for all of ten days when I was dispatched on a domestic disturbance call at 2 a.m. These are always volatile situations. You never know what you are rolling up on when drinking, drugs, and weapons are in play. This seemed like a low-grade squabble at first, though the presence of a Great Dane wandering around the front yard did catch my attention.

The complainant wife announced from the front porch that she wanted her husband arrested. I asked if she had a particular reason, preferably one punishable by law.

“We are getting a divorce. That’s my dog. He wants it, but it’s my dog. He won’t let me take it.”

When she saw that I wasn’t impressed by that scenario, she tossed out another mitigating factor: “He has a gun.”

I called for backup.

Hubby then joined us on the porch. He did not have a gun, but he and the ex-to-be resumed their vitriolic debate over the not so Great Dane, who appeared to be embarrassed by its warring owners.

I was already feeling sorry for the dog when my backup came around the corner with lights flashing. My sympathies intensified when the Great Dane dashed out into the path of the oncoming patrol car.

The big dog was dead on impact.

“I’m so sorry ’bout your dog, ma’am,” my fellow officer said as he stepped out of his squad car.

The dead Dane made their marital dispute a moot point. The couple fell silent.

Such was life on the West Side. Most residents abandoned hope before it abandoned them. This was fitting because that section of Colorado Springs, the original center of an old Gold Rush boomtown, had a history of abandonment.

The original section of town was called Colorado City. It was a shithole, but so were most Old West towns. Still, its glory days lasted less than a week.

Historians will tell you that Colorado City was named the territorial capital on November 5, 1861, at a meeting of the legislature in Denver. When the legislators actually ventured into the crappy little town for their first official session, they looked around and decided they’d made a mistake.

They were so appalled, they packed up and left. Five days later, the legislators named Denver the state capital.

DYING FOR A FIGHT

By the time I arrived, Colorado Springs had swallowed up the original site of Colorado City, which became the woeful West Side neighborhood. You may think I’m exaggerating the neighborhood’s lowly quality of life, but how many knock-down, drag-out brawls have you been to in a funeral home?

It was a Saturday morning. I was on patrol around 10 a.m. and I thought my morning would be peaceful at least until the local lizards crawled out of their hangovers. I thought wrong.

I was dispatched to join the other West Side patrol officer who had responded to a “disturbance” call at the local mortuary. I pulled up behind his squad car. He was standing outside the funeral home. There was nothing going there.

We walked up to the main doors, opened them, and gazed upon a mourning crowd like no other. About twenty men and women in their funeral finery were engaged in a riotous, rolling fistfight, going at it like packs of rabid dogs. Sport coat sleeves were ripped off. Ties were flying sideways. Purse strings were being deployed as garrotes for choking.

After exchanging WTF glances, my fellow officer directed my gaze to the center ring, where there stood an open casket with not one, but two occupants. The undead one was kneeling on the corpse of the not-so-dearly departed, hammering punches into his pasty face. Bam! Bam! Bam!

Maybe the assailant thought, no blood, no foul? Whatever the case, there would be no resting in peace for this deceased dude. I couldn’t help but bust a gut laughing for a second, then we rushed in to save the dead from further abuse. By the time we cuffed his aggrieved attacker, the dead guy’s jaw was shattered and one eye was drooping from its socket. The carefully applied funeral home makeup was smeared all over the fists of the postmortem mugger.

We made the executive decision to go with a closed-coffin ceremony from that point. Our backup arrived and cops streamed into the funeral home doors. We subdued all of the other grieving friends and family members trying to kill each other. One of them had a skull fracture thanks to being hit with a metal folding chair.

During our follow-up interrogations, we learned that early in the service, several mourners had shouted out epithets cursing the deceased as a no-good son of a bitch. Hell was suggested as his final destination and, as a result, hell was unleashed. Even the most decorated veterans among my coworker cops said they’d never seen anything like that. Privately, the brawling mourners reminded me of my own family of battling Bohunks back in Pennsylvania.

THE BALKAN WARS IN COAL COUNTRY

My boyhood home was in Herminie, Pennsylvania, a little coal town outside of Pittsburgh where many of my family members worked and sometimes died in the deep shafts underground. The Ocean Coal Company owned the two local coal mines, creatively naming them Herminie No. 1 and Herminie No. 2.

The entrance to each shaft was surrounded by company housing, cheaply built brick duplexes. If you took a job with Ocean Coal, you were awarded one side of a duplex. Your rent came directly out of your paycheck, as did the grocery bills from the company-owned store. They owned your soul.

Herminie’s Main Street was lined with bars, thirteen of them in a town of two thousand coal-stained souls. When workers surfaced blinking and coated in coal dust each day, they headed first to the bars. Eventually they stumbled home to wash up and sleep it off. Most miners were immigrants who had few other options for employment.

My grandparents came from their native Slovenia to the United States in 1913 to escape the turmoil that led to World War I. They were among the few Kendas to make it out. The Nazis killed most of them in World War II. In my grandfather’s native village, Čezsoča, on the Soča River, there is a war memorial, an obelisk built to commemorate members of the local resistance who were assassinated by the Germans. The Germans lined them up and machine-gunned them. There are seven men named Kenda on that obelisk.

My paternal grandfather was among the many Slovenian immigrants drawn to the Pittsburgh area by coal jobs. I never knew my grandfather Josef. He was killed in a mine cave-in in 1933. He was an experienced miner and, the story goes, he was working one day when he sensed that a collapse was coming. He could have saved himself, but he ran to his sons—my father and my uncle—and shoved them out of the shaft. Then the walls collapsed on my grandfather. He was killed saving his boys.

Whenever the story of his death was told to me as a child, it was always emphasized that my grandfather was so acutely aware of conditions in the mine that he alone felt the collapse coming. As a young fan of Sherlock Holmes, I was already aware of the importance of being observant of your surroundings. This frequently told family story sealed that in my mind. It probably helped me become a better detective because I trained myself early on to make note of everything around me, just like the grandfather I was named after.

I suppose you could say that was something positive to take away from such a tragic family event. My father, on the other hand, took his usual dark and negative approach. He actually blamed his brother, also named Joe, for my grandfather’s death. He said his brother was lazy and their dad always felt he had to stay on him. My father decided that my grandfather was in that dangerous section of the mine on the day he died because he had to motivate my “lazy” uncle.

As a result, my dad and his brother never spoke to each other after my grandfather was killed. Uncle Joe was not even permitted in our house. When I grew old enough to realize I had an uncle in town whom I’d never met, I began visiting him. He welcomed me, but said my father wouldn’t let him come around us.

My father was tough, stubborn, persistently sullen, and unforgiving. My mother was Irish, born Virginia Morrissey, which you’d think would give her at least a sense of humor, but she took on the Bohunk mentality after marrying my father. It leaked into her within minutes. She became just as unforgiving and vindictive as him.

My mother was especially mean to the two women who dared to marry her sons and steal them away from her. For my wife, Kathy, the shunning began as soon as we started dating. You see, Kathy was not my mother’s choice. I chose her, and that pissed off Mom for the rest of her life.

It didn’t help that I met my future wife while on a blind date arranged by my mother and her best friend. I was a sophomore at Greensburg Central Catholic High School when my mom pressured me to take her friend’s daughter to a basketball game, even though I didn’t like her, or basketball.

The friend’s daughter was a nice enough redheaded girl, another Bohunk offspring like me. I had no reason to truly dislike her, other than the fact my mother had matched us up. My mind and my eyes wandered during our date. I was sitting in the stands at the game with her when I looked up and spotted the prettiest young lady I’d ever seen in my life.

I remember the moment like it was yesterday. She had blond hair and blue eyes and she was wearing a camel-hair skirt and camel-colored vest and a white blouse. I thought, Wow, who is that? And before I knew it, I’d left my date on the bench and walked up the stands.

Then I started talking to the love of my life, Mary Kathleen Mohler. We’re still talking, most days. We dated all through high school and then married after Kathy graduated from Duquesne University with a nursing degree on December 26, 1967. My mother never got over it.

She held a grudge until the day she croaked—forty years after our wedding. As we were leaving Mom’s funeral, I looked at my wife and said, “You are in luck: Your mother-in-law no longer hates you, because she is dead.”

DIPLOMATIC DESIGNS

I had to negotiate my way around so many volatile and warring personalities growing up that my first career choice was international diplomacy. It seemed like a logical move at the time. I majored in political science as an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh. Then I attended Ohio State University, thinking I’d get a master’s degree in international studies. I had romantic notions of being the suave chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy in Paris, but the State Department had other ideas when I applied. They told me it was more likely that I’d end up pushing paper somewhere in the wilds of Africa. Worse, they said I couldn’t take Kathy because it was too dangerous.

I was already souring on the thought of working for the foreign service when I attended a State Department briefing for potential employees. The briefing was led by a noxious CIA guy whose worldview was considerably darker than mine at the time. I had served in the Air Force Reserve while in college and I had a patriot’s view of my country. I thought the United States was the benevolent guardian of liberty around the world.

The CIA man made my country sound more like a manipulative and exploitive bully. All he could talk about was overthrowing governments, protecting our sources of oil, and assassinating anyone who stood in the way of our need to dominate the globe. His vision of America was not the same as mine. I’m a right-or-wrong, black-and-white kind of guy. I wanted no part of his predatory worldview.