Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  “I don’t get it,” Christy said. “Which is it?”

  David pointed out, “You really can’t hear the ‘don’t’ and the emphasis is on the word ‘kill.’”

  Christy suggested, “Maybe the message was really ‘don’t kill’ but they had a technology glitch.”

  “Don’t even go there, Christy,” Phillip objected. “When you’ve been in the system as long as I have, you learn that technology glitches are convenient excuses. Transcriptions from cassette recordings made during my hearings omit key testimony because they say they can’t make it out. Or when I want some video to prove a bogus disciplinary ticket, the prison security camera I want the footage from is always broken. They can say they meant ‘don’t’ yet it clearly came out ‘kill.’ We know what we heard. And this scheme fits with the rogue COs and the targeted inspection.”

  “Why would they want to kill my dad, then?”

  “Because your dad wants to eliminate solitary confinement. He kept shoving the Mandela Rule in the face of the state. He wants to change the system, so he’s now an enemy of the system. The system wants to kill him before he kills it.”

  David’s cell phone went off. “Hold on, it’s Jim Fletcher. Maybe he has some information for us. I’ll put it on speaker. Hello, Jim.”

  “Hey, David. I saw the SWAT team raid on the TV news this evening. What was that all about?”

  “Oh yeah? What did the TV news say?”

  “They said it was a false report. They said your telephone number was spoofed with an untraceable burner cell phone paid for with cash.”

  “Figures.”

  “Anyway, I was able to FOIL the state inspection files and found yours in the bunch. Are you sitting down?”

  “Yeah, what did you find out?”

  “Well, the inspector’s signature was illegible, but I was able to trace the badge number to an inspector by the name of Ken Broome. At first I thought someone used his badge number and impersonated an inspector, because he works out of the Central New York Region. He doesn’t do inspections in Albany County—you know, where Karner is located—the Capital District Region. But I saw he did other inspections in Albany that day in the other files that came up in the FOIL. However, it was just for that one day. In all the other files I looked at, I didn’t find a single inspector who inspected across regional lines. Come to find out, he was only assigned to the Capital District Region for that one day.”

  “Is there a reason they assigned Ken Broome to hit the shop that day?”

  “I asked the same question and the Bureau of Licenses said they didn’t have any answers. But then I remembered that the Central New York Region office covers Syracuse and I recalled that’s where Phillip was from, and that’s where Police Officer Pete Carlson was murdered back in the 1980s—”

  “Don’t tell me there’s some connection between Pete Carlson and Ken Broome?”

  “Not directly, no. Ken Broome was born after Pete Carlson died. But get this. Wanda Carlson—Pete Carlson’s wife—her maiden name is Broome. It turns out that Ken Broome is the son of her brother. Ken Broome is her nephew.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I don’t get why the family is going after Phillip—an innocent man.”

  “Maybe they don’t think he’s so innocent.”

  “If that’s the case, why didn’t they object to Phillip’s release?”

  “I don’t know. That’s a good question.”

  “You got anything else?”

  “Yeah, one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, what prompted the investigation was a written complaint…”

  “A complaint about what? We hadn’t had one customer before the inspection.”

  “It’s not unusual for a competitor to complain—you know, to kill off the competition.”

  “What competitor complained?”

  “It was an anonymous note so we don’t know. But I did notice something unusual about the complaint.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was typewritten.”

  “Yeah, that’s a little out of the ordinary.”

  “One more thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “The typewriter they used had a malfunction. The uppercase letters strike lower than the lowercase ones. It’s out of adjustment.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, if you come across anything else, Jim, give me a call. I appreciate your efforts. And send me a copy of that complaint, please.”

  “You bet.”

  David said, “Enjoy the rest of your evening,” before hanging up.

  As the call progressed, the color drained from Phillip’s face. When David spoke, a new, shocking truth revealed itself to Phillip. The truth was always shifting, re-creating itself for Phillip since he got out. To him, the truth was as fickle as a weather forecast—something he never needed to concern himself with while sealed in the box.

  Once he heard the voice in his head out loud and once David and Christy said they heard the voice too, anything seemed possible to Phillip. A memory bubbled to the top and surfaced in his mind. This wasn’t a new experience for Phillip. Memories lost long ago had suddenly reappeared to him since his release—the Syracuse daily newspaper as a kid, his parents’ Plymouth station wagon, Manny Romano the barber, the beatings from his father. But this new memory trumped all others. It was triggered when Jim said, “Maybe they don’t think he’s so innocent.”

  The memory was from 1985, a few months after he had been released from his latest stint at Hillbrook Juvenile Detention Center. Phillip recalled hanging out with his buddies at their alma mater, Hennington High School, in the Northside section of Syracuse. They were all dropping acid, looking to escape the dreariness of the city. It was Phillip’s first trip. He felt a buzz as the LSD flowed through his system, making his clammy hands twitch and tense jaw relax. He felt a surge of energy and an increased awareness of everything around him. Then it all faded to a blur until he realized he was back at Lookout Point, where Onondaga Creek meets Onondaga Lake near the inner harbor in Syracuse. His friends had ditched him while he was tripping and he was alone in a scary place.

  At 3 a.m., Lookout Point was small, dark, and unfamiliar. It was a desolate patch of scrubby grass with three graffiti-laden park benches. In front of him, a bunch of deadwood garbage was piled up on the small beach. The lake reeked from sewage and water pollution, courtesy of Allied Chemical and other companies. On either side of the park, there was dense brush and trees. Railroad tracks ran in back of him along the shoreline. He didn’t know his way out of Lookout Point. He had never been there before. There was a walkway under the railroad bridge that seemed to go in a direction toward Syracuse. He believed it was his only way out, but the total blackness under the bridge freaked him out. There were no lights anywhere except the faint twinkling across the lake. He lay down on one of the park benches to calm himself, hoping to sleep it off into the morning sunrise. But his anxiety and discomfort only increased as he closed his eyes. He was all by himself and on a bad trip.

  Then suddenly a bright beam of light burned his eyes. Someone leaned over him holding a flashlight, trying to rouse him off the bench. At about that same moment, a freight train thundered over the bridge above. The effect was like the flashbang that went off in the shop. Phillip lost it. His dangling hand grabbed a plastic six-pack ring lying on the ground as he yanked the man over the bench onto the pavement.

  The dropped flashlight rolled to one side and spilled a glow that shone on the young man’s face, making it look ghostly in the black hole of the park. Phillip sat on the intruder as he pushed the six-pack ring down hard on his neck. It felt as if someone had hijacked his body, his hands, and given them superhuman strength.

  The plastic ring stretched; he pushed it as hard as he could—squeezing every last ounce of life out of the man. He could hear him gagging, then gurgling, eyes bulging, trying to
fight back. He clawed at his attacker’s hands, but Phillip quickly got the man’s arms pinned to the pavement with his knees. When he went totally limp, the flashlight beam showed Phillip that he had killed a uniformed police officer. He ran into the darkness under the bridge clutching the six-pack ring in one hand, past the patrolman’s empty police car with its door ajar and lights still flashing.

  Sitting there with David and Christy, he wondered just for a second if he had imagined it all. But the more he thought about it, the more details of the slaying ran through his head. He remembered running through the streets of Syracuse in his new Air Jordans, trying to find his way home. He remembered disposing of the plastic six-pack ring in a full waste can waiting for early morning garbage pick-up near Schiller Park. No, he didn’t think it was his imagination running wild. Right then and there, Phillip Dawkins believed he wasn’t innocent after all. He truly believed he had murdered Police Officer Pete Carlson.

  Now Phillip felt as if he was strapped to a boulder and dropped into the ocean’s deepest trench—sinking rapidly, drowning. A single pillar of innocence had supported everything Phillip believed about himself, what he was and had been, for as long as he could remember. In an instant, that prop now crumbled to dust. Staring back at him in the barbershop mirror was the face of a killer. The core of his essence, his soul, evaporated in a flash. Here he was—a killer—and yet he was a free man. The thought made him tremble. The guilt was overwhelming, crushing him. He couldn’t breathe. He wasn’t any better than the COs or the system. I should be in prison, behind bars, someplace where I can’t kill again. But he couldn’t face the prospect of returning to the box. He felt himself sinking, deeper and deeper, into his own wretchedness. The breathing exercises he had taught himself failed when it came time to think positive thoughts. He needed to blurt it out before he bugged out or passed out, “I killed Officer Pete Carlson.”

  Christy looked at his dad, his eyes wide with dismay.

  “You did what??” David shrilled, in total disbelief.

  “I’m afraid you heard me right. I . . . killed Officer Pete Carlson.”

  “Come on, Phillip, what’s going on here?”

  “I’m so sorry, but I’m serious.”

  “And this just occurred to you now?”

  “I’m just remembering now what I used to remember. It just surfaced in my brain. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

  “I don’t know what to think, Phillip. One day you’re innocent; the next you’re a killer. Are you sure it’s not just one of your bad dreams? Has your imagination gotten the best of you?”

  “No, it’s too real to be that. I’m sure of it.”

  “But Phillip, your DNA wasn’t under Carlson’s fingernails. They conceded that you were innocent. They let you go because you were innocent.”

  Phillip considered that evidence but chose to believe his own memory instead. “Look, I told you before, I may be a lot of things, but I’m no liar. I killed that police officer.”

  “But you lied to me before about not killing him?”

  “I didn’t lie then because I didn’t know any better. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  “If you killed Carlson, then how did that other person’s DNA get under Carlson’s fingernails?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it could have been planted into the evidence long after the murder.”

  “But, why?”

  Phillip was so consumed by his own guilt that he hadn’t considered asking why the system might have released him. “David, do you remember what Ken Broome said to you at the end of the inspection?”

  “I’m not sure. Something about your innocence.”

  “Right, he asked you if you really thought I was innocent, because he didn’t. Not for a second. He said eventually you’d figure it out, but it will probably be too late and it would serve you right.”

  “Yes, I remember him saying that now.”

  “Don’t you see what’s happened? They planned to put us in the middle of a SWAT raid. They set me up to be a nut job who took you hostage. When they raided the place, they were going to kill me in a hail of gunfire. They’d say they were justified afterward, because of the phone call. Something tells me I wouldn’t have been the first person mistakenly gunned down by a SWAT team because of a prank call. Both Carlson’s family and the system would be rid of me then. There’s no death penalty in New York; so I can accept that Pete Carlson’s family might be angry with me. They want to see me dead—even solitary might be too good for me in their eyes. They knew the system hadn’t succeeded in breaking me, so they didn’t object to my release. They didn’t demand a new trial. The system couldn’t break me on the inside, so they raised my hopes and set me up to fail on the outside—to break me and then kill me.”

  “Why didn’t they just simply kill you on the first day they released you?”

  “That would look too suspicious, too coincidental. Besides, I think the system wanted me to take you out for being such an effective advocate against solitary. Then the plan was to take me out, one way or the other. If I killed you, they’d have legal justification to gun me down. If I didn’t kill you, they’d take you out and claim it was an accident. You know, death due to friendly fire. Any which way you cut it, they’d get rid of two problems in one fell swoop.”

  David wondered if Phillip had a point or if he was drowning in his own paranoia. “Who is the system in our case?”

  “Specifically, I’m not sure. But the system is the system. It is what it is.”

  David rolled his eyes. “It is what it is, then it isn’t what it isn’t—”

  “Exactly.”

  “What? What is that supposed to mean? When you say ‘it is what it is,’ that’s circular doublespeak to me. It applies to everything. Anyway, if you’re right, it looks like the Carlson family is involved somehow.”

  “Yes. Agreed.”

  “Maybe it’s just the Carlson extended family at work?”

  “It’s possible, I guess.”

  “If you’re right about all this, that means we’re still in danger.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid that’s probably true.”

  “Phillip, I know it’s been difficult to be on the outside when you’ve been in prison for almost all of your adult life. You’ve said that you adjusted to the box and that you realize that a lot of thought processes you developed in the box don’t work in the world outside of prison.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Is it possible, Phillip, that deep down inside you want to go back to prison because you know how to function there? Do you think you might have imagined that you killed that police officer so that you could go back to prison, back to the world that you know where you have a certain comfort level?”

  Phillip knew David had a point. He knew that he had often felt like prison was the more comfortable option. He missed the other inmates because at least he had something in common with those men. But he didn’t want to go back to solitary—he wanted to be with the general population. That’s where he belonged. Generally, cop killers landed in general population. But he knew if they put him back in prison, they’d put him in the box again. That’s what the system had planned for him all along if it couldn’t kill him on the outside.

  He realized now that the system built up his hopes for life as a free man, only to make it just as bad, or worse, than life in the box. That way, if the system took him back in and locked him back in the box, it would break him for sure—make him bug out—because he would have lost all hope for a better life. “No, because if I go back to prison, they’d put me in the box again. I can’t go back to the box now. I know that much. So I couldn’t just be imagining I killed that policeman to make myself go back to something I hate more than anything.”

  David heard what Phillip said, but he wasn’t convinced one way or the other. He didn’t know what to think. “Okay, I had to ask that question. I mean, you’ve proclaimed your innocence to me on several occasions.”


  “I really believed I was innocent until now. If I remember correctly—and it’s coming back to me now—I think I professed my innocence from day one in prison because, you know, that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. I just wanted to fit it in. You don’t want to stand out in prison. I didn’t testify at trial because my lawyer pled insanity to get me off. But I wasn’t crazy. I was just a doped up kid, trying drugs and acting stupid. That one night I was dropping LSD, I lost it and I killed Officer Carlson. But I must have believed my own lies about my innocence back then or come to believe them somehow while in prison. You know, maybe I convinced myself that I was innocent to survive. The thing about pain is that it’s always fresh when you remember it. So if I could forget the pain I caused that family, I had a better chance of surviving. Maybe that way, they couldn’t break me. I didn’t have much to dream about while I was in prison. My only dream, up until I learned of my release, was to make it from one day to the next and hope for a better life in the general population.”

  Christy hadn’t flinched at Phillip’s admission. “I can’t believe you killed someone, Mr. Dawkins.”

  Phillip could see that Christy was disappointed in him. “You both have to understand one thing. I’m not the same man who killed Officer Carlson. That was thirty years ago. I didn’t know he was married; I didn’t know he had three kids at the time. Just thinking about that now makes me sick. How could I do such a thing to that poor woman? How could I leave those kids without a father? I feel horrible about what I did. I’d like to find some way of paying that family back, but I feel as though I’ll never be able to earn a nickel at this rate.

  “Maybe everyone would have been better off if they fried me in the electric chair. Maybe the death penalty would have been a favor to me and everyone. What’s the purpose of my life now anyway? Endless harassment and torture for taking a life? What’s the point of that? Do people really want to support that with their tax dollars? If they want me to live, why can’t I be allowed to try and do some good with my life to offset all the pain I’ve caused?