Late 80′s.
It was after my morning coffee and before the morning tea break on a quiet Sunday morning. You know, some one told me very early in the piece that nothing ever happened on Sundays.
Breath of Life Part 2
After the part time death of the junkie at the doss house, I increased my efforts to find whoever was killing off these druggies. My experience was that Rumanian dealers get a bit of a kick out of giving near pure heroin to druggies just for the hell of killing some of them off. They found it amusing but practically no one else did. So that’s what I thought we were up against.
Millie and the mad woman
Early 80’s. I was with one of my favourite mates to work with, he was happy, knowledgeable, a bit reckless but really cared. He eventually went mad from it but that’s another story. Anyway we got called to the hospital to get briefed by a doctor wanting to bring in a psych patient who hadn’t been taking her medication. He had all the forms signed, a syringe of drugs and the family on side. It was going to be easy he said. Why did he bring the drugs and what does he want us for if it was going to be easy I thought to myself. My mate was driving (no one ever liked me driving, ever throughout my whole career) and the Doc was in the front. We parked near the patient’s house and were around the back. Force of habit. I saw there were 8 or ten stairs from the level of the backyard to the kitchen and there was no handrail on the stairs. It was a council house not particularly untidy, not overly neat.
Jerusalem
1996. A man lost his 21 year old daughter, (I don’t wish to say who the man was but he was a person, someone alive and loving, someone who cared and loved, cried, tried and would have died for his daughter, the girl in this story. A fellow policeman). The girl had been run over at a intersection, at a shopping centre, hit by a car and thrown to the road. It wasn’t the drivers fault but that fact didn’t really help anyone. It was just after lunchtime , the sky had been lightly overcast and it was cool with a bit of a breeze from the south. A mild winter weekend.
Peer support
Mid 90’s. I had to tell a family that their husband and father had died on the way to work one morning and he was at fault. He’d looked away from the road while getting an apple from his lunchbox and driven under a truck, effectively but not neatly decapitating himself.
