Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper - Rilegato

Moose, Charles A.; Fleming, Charles

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0525947779 ISBN 13: 9780525947776

Casa editrice: E P Dutton, 2003

Riassunto

The Montgomery County police chief at the head of the recent manhunt for the serial snipers who shot random victims during a three-week period between Maryland and Virginia recounts the tense days and nights of his team's investigation and the massive efforts by law enforcement and civilians that ultimately led to the snipers' capture. 100,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Charles A. Moose is the chief of police in Montgomery County. Charles Fleming is the author of the national bestseller High Concept and the New York Times bestseller The Goomba's Guide to Life. Fleming has worked as a staff reporter for Variety and Newsweek, and has been a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Playboy, Time, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and other publications.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

INTRODUCTION

My name is Charles A. Moose. I have been a police officer, at the writing of this book, for more than twenty-eight years. That’s more than half of my life. It’s the only real job I’ve ever had.

I didn’t start out wanting to be a police officer. In the town where I grew up, at the time when I grew up—in Lexington, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 1960s—all a young black man wanted from the police was to be left alone. I was afraid of them. I never had any interaction with them. I was never arrested, or even harassed. That’s because I knew enough to stay away from all the places where I’d run into them. I wasn’t a criminal. My family wasn’t victimized by criminals. I didn’t go near the Do Drop Inn, which was a nightclub in our part of town, where the criminals hung out, so I didn’t see firsthand any of the arrests that I heard about taking place there.

I didn’t know the police. I never met a police officer or a sheriff. But I knew they were bad. I believed they were associated with the Ku Klux Klan. I believed they beat up black people, and put them in jail, and worse. I believed they were involved in cross burnings and lynchings. I believed they made up cases, falsified evidence and told lies. If you were black, and you were arrested, God help you.

When I was a senior in college, I started planning to go to law school. I still had no contact with the police, and I didn’t know anything about the law, but I knew which side I wanted to be on: I wanted to be on the side of the people defending themselves against the police. So I took a class in criminology. I thought it would help me be a better defense attorney.

Then I got tricked into meeting a recruiter from the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon. One of my professors told me he’d let me skip a test if I went and met with the recruiter. I was always eager to skip a test, so I went. I met the recruiter and took a qualifying examination. I passed. That led to my being offered a job. I took the job, thinking only that it would give me a perspective on the police that would be useful for my work as a defense attorney. It was a look at the inside. I’d see how the police made up cases, falsified evidence and stretched the facts.

I was hired by the Portland Police Bureau on an eighteen-month probation, which was standard for all new recruits. This meant going to the police academy, getting trained, being partnered with another officer, then learning how to be a patrol officer on your own. I told myself I would do the eighteen months. Then it would be on my résumé. I would have the credit for becoming a police officer.

But something unexpected happened to me. As a police officer, I got a close look at crime, and the people doing the crime and the people being victimized by crime. I saw people taking advantage of other people. I saw people hurting other people. I didn’t see the police hurting them, even though I didn’t see the police doing all that much to help them, either.

And I saw that I had the opportunity to do something about that.

The power goes out in a thunderstorm, and you’re driving by the JCPenney in your district. You find the back door kicked in. Inside, you find people stealing everything in sight.

You get a call on a “rape in progress.” You go in, and find a guy who’s been raping and beating an old woman, and he’s running out the back door.

You get a child abuse call, and find someone who’s been trying to have sex with babies.

You get a call on a burglary, and the victim is a poor black woman. This isn’t some rich suburban family, where the thief has stolen the woman’s diamonds and pearls. It’s a poor black woman who lives in government housing, and the thief has stolen her cheap costume jewelry and her TV set and her food stamps.

And here was the big surprise to me: The people doing this terrible stuff were black people. It was real black-on-black crime. It’s not what I thought. It wasn’t black people being victimized by the police. It was black people being victimized by criminals, and the criminals were black people, too.

The crime was very real to me. These were innocent people, and they were being hurt.

Two things became apparent to me, right away.

First, these people looked like me, and they needed help.

Second, the police were not the bad guys. The criminals were the bad guys. But the police were not working very hard in the black community. Someone needed to help these people, and the police were not really doing all they could. There was a sense, at that time, in that city, that black people must want the environment they lived in—because they kept living there.

It was an awakening for me. The way I had been seeing the world was wrong. I made a decision. I told myself that I was not going to make up anything. I was not going to falsify any evidence. I was going to make arrests, and I was going to make them solid, and I was going to make them on really bad people who needed to be put away.

I decided to be the best police officer I could be, and see what happened.

What happened was I stayed in Portland. I stayed a police officer. I became a sergeant, then a lieutenant, then a captain, then a deputy chief, then the police chief. I was the police chief for six years. I left the job to move to Maryland, to become chief of police for the Montgomery County Police Department. I had been there more than three years when the serial sniper started shooting. I became the head of the task force whose job was to capture the killer.

This book is the story of how I got from the beginning to the end of that journey. It’s the story of how a black boy from the segregated Deep South became the police chief of two predominantly white communities. It’s the story of how a person raised in a town where a black man could be beaten or killed for even looking at a white woman could grow up to be happily married to a white woman. It’s the story of how a rookie police recruit with no plans to become a police officer became the head of the largest single manhunt in American police history. It’s the story of how I went from being lionized for helping bring the snipers to justice to being vilified for writing a book about it.

It’s the story of the changes—the changes in me, the changes in law enforcement, the changes in my country—that made this journey possible.

1. This Doesn’t Happen Here

I was in my office, at the Rockville, Maryland, headquarters of the Montgomery County Police Department, when the first call came in. It appeared to be a homicide. The call came in from Captain Barney Forsythe, who was a thirty-year veteran of the police force and the director of the major crimes unit, at around 6:30 P.M.

“Chief, we have a homicide,” he said. “And it’s a little out of the ordinary.”

It was Wednesday, October 2, 2002. I got a second call a few minutes later from the media office, from Captain Nancy Demme, a veteran undercover plainclothes officer whom I had recently made the public information officer for the force.

The few known facts were the same. A middle-aged white man had been shot once in the back, in the parking lot of the Shoppers Food Warehouse, in the community of Wheaton, at 2201 Randolph Road. There were no witnesses. There were no suspects. The shooting had taken place at 6:02 P.M.

It sounded strange. We don’t get a lot of murders in Montgomery County, especially compared to Portland. That was a city of five hundred thousand residents, with a murder count that ran as high as seventy killings a year. Montgomery County was almost twice that population, and rarely had more than fifteen killings a year.

Besides that, the details were unusual for Montgomery County. We don’t get many killings on the street. We don’t have drive-by shootings. There have been bodies dumped in the street, in the night, and found in the early morning hours. But for someone to be shot, in public, on the street like that—that was strange.

I asked Captain Forsythe the usual questions. Did anybody see anything? Was there some kind of a fight? Did we have anybody in custody? Did we know the guy? In other words, was there a criminal record or profile of the victim?

The answer to all those questions was “No.”

He added one unusual detail. He said it appeared that a rifle had been used—a high-powered rifle.

There was one additionally unusual factor. Forty-five minutes earlier that evening there had been an incident near the Shoppers Food Warehouse. Two miles away, and less than an hour before, someone had shot a bullet through the plate glass windows into a Michael’s craft store, at the Northgate Shopping Center, at 3800 Aspen Hill Road. No one was injured. The call on the shooting had come in just before the call from the Shoppers Food Warehouse. There didn’t appear to be any connection.

The shooting at Shoppers was so near the District 4 police station that two police officers heard the sound of a shot fired and responded on foot. One of the officers got to the victim and began CPR—to no avail. They had the location roped off and secured within minutes. Forsythe got the call not long after, from his deputy, Lieutenant Phil Raum, who told him there was a homicide.

Forsythe asked a series of questions: Was it a smoker?—his slang expression for “smoking gun.”

Raum said it was not a smoker.

“Was it a robbery?”

Raum said it wasn’t.

“Was it a carjacking?”

Raum said it wasn’t.

“Was it a domestic dispute?”

Raum said it wasn’t.

Forsythe said, “I’m on my way.”

One of my assistant chiefs had already been at the scene. John King had spent the day at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He was there as part of an eleven-week training program the bureau does for a select group of police officers. It’s the same program I’d participated in as a lieutenant from Portland. King had come home for the evening to see his family—he and his wife and three children live in the Montgomery County town of Damascus— and was driving back to Quantico. For sentim...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: E P Dutton
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0525947779
• ISBN 13: 9780525947776
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 336