406: OFFICER NEEDS ASSISTANCE - Memoirs of a San Francisco Police Officer by Raymond Petersen

Author:Raymond Petersen [Petersen, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography : General Social Science : General True Crime : General
ISBN: 9781634906395
Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.
Published: 2015-07-28T07:00:00+00:00

Don’t Take My Husband!

While patrolling late one Saturday night in our radio car, Tim Thorsen and I suddenly heard loud screaming, origin unknown. Tim and I crossed the Harrison Street/24th Street intersection, and began training our sights on a nearby block, on which sat several apartment buildings.

We quickly determined the screaming was coming from one of several tiny apartments on that block. Just as we pulled over to the curb, an elderly Hispanic woman—a textbook Latin grandma type—ran over to our patrol car and screamed very excitedly, “A woman is being beaten! Come quickly with me! I’ll show you where!”

We jumped out of the car and followed the woman up a nearby apartment staircase.

“There!” the woman gasped, pointing up to one of the units on the second floor. As soon as she said that, we could hear muffled noises coming from inside the apartment.

The apartment door was closed, so I began banging on it.

“Police!” I shouted. “Open up!”

After long, tense seconds, the door finally opened. Standing before us was a weeping young Hispanic woman, carrying a small, crying, five-year-old boy who clung to the woman’s torn nightgown. The woman was bleeding from her mouth and nose. Her face was very swollen, her eyes almost shut.

“Come in,” the young woman said softly, through her tears. We walked past her into an apartment that was very neat and tidy—except in the kitchen, which undoubtedly was the scene of the altercation. On the kitchen table—not far from a crucifix on the wall—sat the woman’s husband, dressed in nothing but a T-shirt and boxer shorts. By the looks of him, the woman had landed a few good punches of her own. The man’s lip and shoulder were bloody.

In very broken English, the woman mumbled, “My husband and I . . . We had fight. He was hitting me.”

Tim and I separated the woman and her husband and attempted to ascertain what had happened. Because Tim had been in the Marine Corps and later went to seminary, he was good in these kinds of situations. His interrogation style was gentle yet firm. And it didn’t take us long to determine we had encountered a typical domestic dispute—one fueled by too many beers.

“Look,” I said after we had brought the husband and wife back together into the kitchen, “you’re both in trouble. But we can help you get out of this trouble, if you’ll leave for the night,” I said, pointing to the husband. (We could not arrest him for assault, because his wife refused to press charges.)

As soon as I suggested the husband leave for the night, he went crazy.

“I no leave my home! No way!” he screamed, lashing out at Tim and me. As he grabbed for Tim, I jumped him. The next thing I knew, the woman was attacking me from behind with a wooden folding chair. The sharp blow across my back sent me crashing to the kitchen floor.

And then it got worse.

In the next split-second, the five-year old child, who previously

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