Tales From the Laurel Police Department
This continuing series is an uncomplicated string of personal war stories from my time at a small municipal police department between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., told without a lot of extravagant details; just the facts, ma’am. Other cops will appreciate the bare-bones setups of my individual anecdotes. But I do try to explain some of the procedures for the general public who has little understanding of why we do some of the things we do.
The men and women I worked with are the finest you will find in any police agency anywhere. Some have since retired or moved on to other agencies, and some are still there fighting the good fight. Hopefully, this bit of sucking up will make up for any inconsistencies in my memory of the events in which some of these great guys made an appearance. They will no doubt recognize their own first names and possibly the fictitious names of some of our less-than-law-abiding customers.
So grab yourself a cup of java or crack open a beer and get comfortable. You’re in a room full of cops talking shop. And the attitudes, sometimes smart-ass, sometimes despairing, that go with it. In our town, on my shift, this was policing in the last decades of the 20th century.
To get right into it, one night we had a guy—well, we didn’t really have him until he was dead, but he was the focus of the call. There was a house party on Kalmia Drive. A whole-house party. The place was packed full of teenagers with the music up high and people coming and going and general neighborhood chaos. You would think we would have been called for the noise or traffic or whatever else neighbors can think of to ruin someone else’s good time. But for some reason, maybe they invited all the nearby neighbors, too, we didn’t get a call until someone got stupid.
I mean, kudos to the ones who kept it under control enough that people on Belle Ami or Laurel Oaks didn’t complain. But when guns and kids and alcohol are involved, it won’t be long until we get involved, too.
Apparently one kid in the basement got upset over who knows what and decided he would express himself by pulling out a pistol and firing a shot into the ceiling. You know, like in the movies. Except, in the movies there’s no one above the ceiling.
You can tell where this is going. Kid #2 is sitting upstairs in the kitchen, in the middle of wall-to-wall kids, remember, so he has no idea there’s been some kind of drama downstairs. Suddenly a bullet comes up through the floor and into the underside of this kid’s jaw and into his head, killing him instantly.
Now we get the call. Shooting on Kalmia Drive. When we arrive there are still about a hundred kids milling around, some who still don’t even know there was a shooting. We get inside and determine that 1) there’s nothing we can do for Kid #2, and 2) this is a huge party and we need to start corralling witnesses.
First rule of witness interviews: keep them all separated. Well, good luck this time. It took our squad and probably the next overlap squad to shuttle all the useful witnesses to the station until detectives took over. Then it took as many guys as we could spare from securing the scene to babysit all these kids at the station so they didn’t talk to each other. We had every space we could find filled with (hopefully) quiet witnesses and our guys playing hall monitor to keep them shut up.
Of course, the shooter was long gone but everybody knew each other, and him, so it was a quick case to close. Accidental, yes, but chargeable definitely. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. So does stupidity.
A call came in one day for a “suspicious odor” at Middletown high-rise apartments. God bless our dispatchers who can take the grimmest phone calls and package the details into something innocuous to put over the radio so the listening public won’t really know what’s going on. But the guys in the patrol cars know exactly what is meant by “suspicious odor.” All the way across town the Beat 1 guy is whispering, “Please, oh please, be cooking odor...”
But life is cruel and it wasn’t curry on the stove. The Beat 1 officer had a guy, dead as a door nail, sitting on the floor in his galley kitchen about six floors up in the high rise. A galley kitchen is a long, narrow space-efficient kitchen usually with all the appliances, cabinets, and countertop on one side and a blank wall or half wall on the other. In this apartment the space was really efficient: there was just enough room for this guy to stand at his sink and die and slump straight down into a sitting position with his feet against the cabinets and his back against the wall. Without too much detail that would risk losing readers, suffice to say we surmised he had been dead about three days.
As a full-service agency we have the luxury of a detective division, so as patrol officers we just need to secure the scene and call CID to do the real work. Natural-cause, unattended deaths are not all that involved, however, so it’s also a good learning experience for new guys. And when it’s time to help the funeral home or removals contractor to move the body, new guys get even more experience. This one was going to be a challenge, with the position and state of decomposition of the body.
While awaiting the arrival of CID, the building’s resident manager asked if there was anything we do about the original cause of the call—the unbearable odor. Initially, it was only noticeable to neighbors passing by in the hallway because the apartment was all closed up. But once we arrived and opened the door, the smell permeated the whole floor. We had opened the apartment windows so we could do our own work and, of course, that drove the smell further throughout the building.
The resident manager deployed a decomposition deodorizer, something I’d never heard of but certainly a sensible tool for landlords everywhere. Detective Pollack called it a “Decomp Bomb,” but by whatever trade name it was a both a blessing and a curse. The manager set one or two off at the ends of the hallway and it did mask the smell pretty effectively, but with an almost equally sickening sweet smell of something akin to bubble gum. It may have smelled differently to different people but to me it was bubble gum.
She also sent her maintenance guy to ABC Rental on Second Street to pick up two 4-foot diameter industrial ventilation fans to place in the stairwells at each end of the hallway. We obtained a smaller fan from Laurel Fire Department to put in the apartment window and between all of them it wasn’t long before people in the parking lot six stories below were looking up with squinting eyes and pursed lips and scurrying away.
I still hate the smell of bubble gum.
I see a pattern here. So enough with the dead body talk. Okay, this one’s not about dead bodies. Well, not directly.
When the midnight shift is dead (see what I did there?), we as a squad will usually get together for breakfast around 4:00 AM at someplace quiet and deserted. That means the Tastee Diner. By then the place is deserted and it’s usually just us and the waitress and cook. One night, or one morning depending on your perspective, we were enjoying our bacon and eggs at the Diner and the place is totally empty. The waitress keeps the coffee coming and we can relax. Life is good.
Then we had a guy walk in and he sits at the table right next to us. Pretty nervy. He could have sat anywhere in the restaurant but it was obvious he wanted to eavesdrop on some juicy cop talk. At first our conversation dropped low because, you know, who knows what he’s trying to pick up? So, I lean in and suggest to the other guys, “So let’s give him an ear full.”
Our conversation immediately turned to the most horrendous discussion on dead body calls we’d been on, with the most gruesome details we could recall. Some of it was even true.
Our breakfast was delicious. I’m not sure the guy enjoyed his.
A “zap letter” is an official written reprimand that goes in your personal file. No one likes to get one and it’s usually not something chargeable as an infraction, more like an observation by command staff that may or may not affect one’s eligibility for promotion. But more often than not, a zap letter isn’t worrisome. Don’t take it seriously, it’s just chickens—t. Here’s an example.
Chief Kaiser would occasionally start his day early and cruise through town to see how his midnight shift was spending their early morning hours. As usual, and against departmental policy, a couple of us would be having coffee or breakfast somewhere minding our own business. At that time, it was against patrol policy for more than one guy at a time to be off the road for a meal break. But, like PFC Dub said many times, departmental policy was “more of a guideline than a rule, right?”
So, PFC Steve and I were sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts having coffee and soup—not donuts: that’s a vicious stereotype I firmly deny. In walks Chief Kaiser. We knew we’d probably hear about it later from our lieutenant but surprisingly he just sat down with us and had a cup of coffee. Generally, just a nice visit with the troops and then he went to the station to start his day. As he drove up Second Street past the Tastee Diner, there were Cpl. Joe and Sgt. Steve also having their breakfast at the diner.
The whole midnight shift was off the road. One hand not knowing what the other hand was doing it was sheer coincidence that all of us were out of our cars eating at the same time. We all got a zap letter in our file.
When I was a dispatcher, we had a drive-up window that looked out on the east parking lot of the police station. You could see all the way across B Street to A Street. One Sunday morning we had a guy passed out drunk in the back of a car on A Street. He and his friends had been out the night before and he was too drunk to get out of the car, so they let him sleep. Then his buddies came over to get help rousing him because they couldn’t wake him up, so I sent the Beat 3 car to help.
From my window I could see a blue Volkswagen Beetle where they were gathered around with our beat officer, but before long he called for a detective to respond to the scene. The kid had died overnight of alcohol poisoning. His so-called friends’ poor judgment had left him in the back seat of the VW and that’s where he expired. With rigor mortis in full set our guys had a heck of a time unfolding him from the back of that Volkswagen. That was a real tough lesson to learn for those guys.
I never felt too bad about losing a fast chase. Of course, there’s the adrenaline flow throughout the pursuit and every second you think, “He’ll give it up any time now...” Now remember, this was back when chases were still fun. Generally, there was less traffic to contend with and less nit-picking by command staff on “why didn’t you break it off sooner?” or “why were you so far outside our jurisdiction?” and so forth. But generally, a good time was had by all. You flipped the lights and siren on and called for the world on the radio.
Sometimes the world showed up. Sometimes they didn’t. Maybe it was because I was way down in the Laurel Lakes area that day, which was pretty low-crime so not as heavily patrolled, but for whatever reason backup was scarce and I was on my own.
I had a guy in what turned out to be a stolen car. We started around Cypress Street and Oxford Drive, and something drew my attention to this white compact car, some minor infraction like a stop sign violation or speed that made me want to pull the guy over. Well, flipping on the overhead lights is faster than running the license plate through the computer, meaning through Communications: we only dreamed of computer terminals in our cars. But he told me right away the car was stolen when he sped up and tried to lose me around Laurel Lakes.
Somewhere around the business parks near Laurel Lakes Court, Communications confirmed the car was stolen. The kid turned up toward the senior apartments and I knew it was a dead-end, so this chase was about over. The apartments were still under construction and he slid to a stop right beside a big dumpster on his right side, with me hot on his tail. I knew he’d be bailing out, so I thought I’d block his door shut with my cruiser. I slid to a stop right alongside him with inches between us. Just as he threw open the driver’s door.
My brakes were good but not that good, and my cruiser hit the open driver’s door and folded it right up against the front fender of the other car.
“Oh well. The owner almost got his car back intact.”
This was in summertime so both of us had our windows all open. When I came to a stop I looked right at this kid, a teenager, through my passenger window and, grinning I said, “Aha!” As in knightly chivalry, “Fairly won! You are mine now!”
But he grinned back and obviously had other thoughts. Quicker than you can say, “Bob’s your uncle,” he wriggled out of his window and squirted right across his hood disappearing into the bushes toward Shannon Avenue, all before I could even get my seatbelt off.
The last I saw of him was his young butt scrambling over a 6-foot privacy fence. I radioed his description and direction of travel but we never got him. We got the car, though. Kind of.
Not every police report ends with the initial description of the basic events. When there’s a probability of additional supplementary reports the typical closing line of the report narrative is, “Investigation to continue.” I hope these anecdotes haven’t offended too many readers of this venture from The Laurel History Boys. And hopefully there will be more to come. Thanks for your time.
Investigation to continue...
Rick McGill grew up in Laurel and worked at the Laurel Police Department from 1977 to 2001. He authored two history books: Brass Buttons & Gun Leather, A History of the Laurel Police Department (soon to be in its 4th printing), and History of the North Tract, An Anne Arundel Time Capsule. In 2001 he retired to Montana and worked as a military security contractor for Blackwater Worldwide making 12 deployments to Iraq and Pakistan from 2004 to 2010. He is now a Reserve Deputy Sheriff in Montana.
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