by Barry Fixler
So I did the same thing when I got in front of my parents’ house. I said, “I am fine. I have all my body parts. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for, and I made it home in one piece.”
36
A Body Bag
for Barry
I only found out after two thugs tried to rob my jewelry store that two vehicles and four people were involved. One never made it out of my store. His other three “buddies” left him lying there with one of my bullets in him and tried to save their own asses.
The mutt in the black trench coat who had jammed the gun in my face only made it out of the store because he wore a bulletproof vest that stopped one of my rounds, even though the shot knocked him to the ground. He drove away in a second car that I never saw. The cops caught the guy that I saw leave in the brown minivan not long after on Route 59. A retired detective heard about the holdup on the police radio in his car and then saw the van. The detective chased him into a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot.
The guy jumped out of the van and ran zigzag trying to get away, and he ripped surgical gloves from his hands as he ran. Later on, the cops ask him why he had rubber gloves, and he told them, “Oh, I was supposed to get rid of the jeweler, and I didn’t want to get his blood all over me.”
They had a body bag for me. Two of them confessed to that. Out of four guys, two confessed that they planned to kill me.
I had a choice of pressing charges of attempted murder or first degree armed robbery, and I chose first degree armed robbery because that holds up better in court.
The guy from the minivan ran into a Wendy’s to hide, and when he walked back out, Clarkstown police were waiting and surrounded him, weapons drawn. He spilled his guts, and it didn’t take long for cops to track the other two to Danbury, Connecticut, and arrest them.
My main concern at the time was the guy face-down on the floor in the front doorway of my store, half inside and half on the sidewalk. I kept my pistol trained on him and cursed.
“You think you guys are good enough to get over on me?! Who the fuck do you think you are?! You think you can rob me?”
Three police cruisers raced into the shopping center parking lot. A woman cop exited one of them with her weapon drawn, though she didn’t aim it directly at me.
“Put your gun down!” she yelled at me.
“I’m the good guy!” I responded. “He’s the bad guy!”
My adrenaline was pumping, and I didn’t see the cop behind me.
“Put your gun down!” the woman officer ordered me again. That was when I became aware of the cop behind me.
“OK, at least put your gun up in the air,” he told me.
I did, and he leaped and grabbed me in a bear hug while another cop approaching from my front lunged and took hold of my pistol hand and pried the pistol away. The officer who had me in the bear hug released me then.
“Do you have a weapon?” he barked at the robber face down on the ground.
“Yes I do,” the guy answered. The officer straddled and cuffed him, and then rolled him over and, sure as shit, there was a pistol that the cop immediately took away.
Word came through their radios that the guy from the minivan had been spotted in a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot, and with my situation under control, most of the officers headed for there, but it didn’t take long for Detective Bill Fritz to show up with a notepad, just like you see on TV. Only five minutes or so had passed since the shootout.
“OK Barry, we’re married to each other right now,” he told me. “Tell me the story. Give me descriptions. Give me every detail.”
He questioned me in his car because my store was now a crime scene. I remember being cold because it was mid-February. A crime scene van pulled in and those officers started blocking off the area with their yellow tape.
I noticed that people passing by in cars were slowing down to see what had happened, and before long, a black car caught my eye.
“I can only advise you,” Fritz said to me. “I can’t tell you what to do, but I can only advise you not to talk to the press.”
“Why would the press come down here?” I thought, and about then, I saw a black car pull in and stop, and my wife jump out. I thought that the police had called her, but really, she had been on her way to a doctor appointment and had just seen my store covered in crime scene tape. She was hysterical.
“Lady, you can’t go in there!” an officer said, holding her back.
“Fuck you!” she screamed. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”
She was too upset to get the words “I’m Barry’s wife” out of her mouth.
I saw all of that happening from the car in which I was answering Fritz’s questions, and I got out and told the one cop that the hysterical woman in front of him was my wife. He bent like a soft banana.
“Ohhh, it’s your wife.”
By then, paramedics were attending to the thug in my doorway, and by the way they treated him, you’d have thought he was the president of the United States. That bothered me some, a criminal who had meant to kill me being treated that way, but authorities told me later that it was just policy.
It took me awhile to remember the videotape device in my store. It captured everything that went down, and when the cops played it later in the day, they kept saying, “Wow! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“Let me see!” I said. “Let me see!”
“Barry, you can’t.”
“Why? It’s my tape!”
“You have to go in front of a grand jury, and you have to tell them what happened from memory. The tape would influence you, and it is evidence now.”
I accepted that, but something else bothered me, and a little later, I called the detective aside.
“Detective, can I talk to you privately?”
A friend of mine had come in the store the day before with his girlfriend, and she had new breast implants that they both wanted to show off, which she did. So my camera not only had captured the robbery, it also recorded this woman baring her breasts and shaking them at the camera.
“Detective, the whole world is going to know that this girl was shaking her breasts at the camera, and my wife will think I’m involved.”
He laughed and told me to relax; they wouldn’t show that. I didn’t force the girl to stop or anything. I am a male. But after everything that had happened, I could just imagine the shit hitting the fan over the “Big Tits at Barry’s Show.”
I didn’t understand at first when the detective advised me not to talk with the media because I didn’t think anyone would care. I soon found out otherwise.
Every TV station in the area called the next day wanting interviews, even offering me transportation. But I heeded the advice and said no. There were too many ways that whatever I said might be turned against me. Still, the video found its way onto national TV, and my store became a popular stop-off for friends and well-wishers.
Someone from Veterans Affairs even called and offered me counseling. He said, “You know, Barry, we can sit down and talk about this over coffee and some cake, and you can tell me everything that happened. You can vent.… Would you like to discuss it?”
I was gracious and thanked him for calling, but I really thought, “You think I’m upset about shooting the mutts that tried to rob me?! Fuck them! I don’t care about them!”
A cousin even said, “After what you just did, you need to go to counseling. You have to talk to a psychiatrist. You can’t just shoot people like that.”
But the cops all told me that I did a good job, and some of them even came to tell me their stories about being in similar situations. I guess they felt comfortable about it.
The shootout generated plenty of traffic through my store, but almost no sales. I did hardly any business for that month, but a year later, on the anniversary of the hold-up, it helped give me the idea on how to help a Marine sergeant who was severely wounded fighting for our country in Iraq.
He was returned to the States and placed first in a Veterans Affairs hospit
al, and then a private hospital. The government didn’t follow through on promises to help the Marine and his family with their overwhelming needs, and he basically was left to rot. I learned about him and decided to help.
I looked at my record sheet and saw that I’d made almost no money the month of the shooting, February of 2005, and I survived, so I decided that I could do it again. I would take the money that my store made in February of 2006 and donate it to the disabled Marine. That’s what it boiled down to.
CALLS TO DUTY
37
An Honorable Burial
My father, Louis Fixler, inspired me to become a Marine, and after he died on August 31, 2008, we didn’t hold an overly religious Jewish service because that just wasn’t his personality. He wasn’t religious.
He was ninety years old and proud to be an American and proud that he served the country that took him in. When my wife Linda and I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for the services, we asked the funeral director if there was any way that we could give him a military burial.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Fixler,” the funeral director told me before chapel services, “but that’s impossible. We need at least two full days of notice to contact the Army and arrange something like that. We could have if we had known from the beginning, but it is Labor Day weekend, and it’s just too late now.”
I walked away a little disappointed, but it was the day of the funeral, after all. Linda stayed behind and she and the lady continued to talk.
“You’re not Jewish?” she asked Linda, and Linda said, no, she was Italian.
“I’m Sicilian,” the lady said. “I’m also Sicilian,” Linda answered, and they exchanged high-fives, two women with Italian roots surrounded by a room full of Jewish people. They moved to the edge of the room and continued to talk as friends and family members paid their last respects to my father.
Maybe only an hour passed, and the funeral director came over to me and said, “Barry, bring your car behind the chapel. You’ll follow the hearse and lead the procession. It’s not far to the cemetery.”
I was walking out when I overheard the lady whisper to Linda, “I have a surprise for you.”
We arrived at the gravesite to see four uniformed Army soldiers standing at attention. They probably were annoyed at being called to do that on such short notice, and I’ll never know how they made it that quickly, but they did. They presented my mother with an American flag, just like you’d see at the funeral for a president.
I couldn’t express enough gratitude.
“Thank you very much,” I told them. “This is a great honor. My father is a survivor of Pearl Harbor, and I am a Vietnam combat veteran, and right now you are honoring two veterans who fought for this country. I thank you for this honor.”
“No, we thank you,” the sergeant said, and you had to be me to experience the emotion that passed between us. I saw tears in their eyes, just like in mine.
I was proud of my father, and I always wanted him to be proud of me.
38
The 9/11 Cross
Being a Marine carries responsibilities that last a lifetime, and you never know when or from where a call to duty might come.
I was having a bad day in my jewelry store. I was so busy that I needed my bench jeweler to come up to the counter to help me with customers, and that wasn’t going very well. My reputation means everything, and I try to give all customers the time and attention that they deserve.
A bench jeweler is a person who actually makes and repairs jewelry, and mine wasn’t happy about being called into customer service. It showed in his attitude. His tone made it clear that he didn’t want to be there, that he didn’t want to talk, and he could have cared less whether or not he made a sale for me. He was just going through the motions, and I didn’t want my customers to sense that. He actually was representing me, and most of my business comes from my hard-earned reputation; most people don’t know me personally, but they know my reputation.
People were all over the store looking at jewelry while I showed engagement rings to a couple who had made an appointment, which is time consuming. I was explaining the value of diamonds, the types of mountings, the styles of engagements rings, but all the while I could hear the bench jeweler basically giving my customers the brush-off. He was going through the motions, more people were coming in, and I was getting pissed. I felt the pressure. I was having a bad day.
On top of everything, a conservative looking middle-aged lady with gray hair wandered in, and for the longest time, she just stood there waiting for someone to notice her.
Finally, I excused myself briefly from the engagement couple and walked over to the woman.
“Yes, can I help you?”
She extended her hand and opened it to show me what appeared to me to be two charred nails.
“Sir,” she said sweetly, “can you just fix this for me? It’s a cross. Could you weld it back together?”
I just looked at her. “Why would you want to do that? It’s garbage! It’s crap! What would you want to do that for?”
She was quiet at first, and then said, “I’d like to have this repaired and put into a cross.”
I snapped back at her: “This is going to cost you twenty-five dollars. It’s not worth twenty-five dollars! I have to charge you twenty-fve dollars.”
I snapped at her. I was very rude, but she said, “Okay, alright.”
So real quick, I grabbed a pen and a work order and I had her fill it out. When she finished, I took the work order and charred nails and put them in an envelope, and then gave her a receipt and she left. That was it.
I went back to what seemed like more urgent matters: taking care of the engagement couple, intervening to smooth things over when I heard the bench jeweler being rude, and basically trying to meet the needs of a store filled with customers.
Finally, around 5:00 p.m., the dust started to settle and I had a little time to think.
“Barry! You just let that sweet, gray-haired lady fall through the cracks and you snapped at her! That’s not you!”
I became very concerned and annoyed at myself, and I looked for her repair envelope.
Sure enough, I found it, and I called her immediately to apologize.
I’m sorry that I don’t remember her name, but let’s say it was Mary.
A woman answered the telephone and I said, “Hi. My name is Barry. May I speak to Mary please?”
“This is Sister Mary.”
That threw me off. She was a nun. She was dressed conservatively when she came in the store, but nothing about her had indicated that she was a nun.
“Hi, Sister Mary, this is Barry the jeweler. I’m calling to apologize to you that I was rude to you when you were in my store.”
“Yes, I know,” she said, “and I’m sitting here writing a letter stating that I have never met a mean Marine before you.”
She said that she had heard that I am a very patriotic Marine, and she just wanted to come in specifically to do business with me.
I didn’t know that, of course. I apologized again. “I’m so sorry that I snapped at you. The repair job will be ready in a week.”
Her tone turned pleasant and she accepted my apology.
When she came back a week later to pick up her cross, I had it welded together and polished. It looked great. Now it looked like a cross.
Sister Mary looked very pleased. “Well, how much?” she asked.
“No, after what I did to you, I’m not going to charge you,” I answered.
Then she told me the story behind the cross, and why she had come to me, a jeweler who also was a Marine who fought for our country.
“This cross is sacred,” she said. “It came from 9/11. I found it on the ground next to a church and it was burnt. The heat made it fall apart, but the two pieces stayed together, so I picked them up and brought them to you to make whole again.”
I was overwhelmed. This was something very important, sacred, and I had almost blown it.
Saving Faith
in America
A Marine from near where I live was shot in April of ’05 in Iraq. It was a miracle that he made it home, but when he did, the U.S. government didn’t take care of him. I learned about him through my wife, Linda, who is a nurse at Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, New York, where the Marine was transferred. I went to see him, as one Marine to another, to give my thanks, and through his parents found out that the Department of Veterans Affairs was sweeping him under the rug.
That was when I made him my cause, and more people than I could have imagined made him theirs, too. Americans do care. They proved that to me, and they proved it to the young man and his parents.
We focused on one wounded Marine then—his name, his face, his family—but those things aren’t so important now because he is well known and has an active base of supporters. However the story of this wounded Marine is important because there are thousands of wounded warriors and families of heroes out there who are in need of help but suffer silently in a state of virtual anonymity.
The Marine was shot in the head by friendly fire during an early morning mission. A .30-caliber bullet lodged in his head. He actually died on the battlefield and was revived by his fellow Marines, his parents said.
He was a corporal at the time, and six other Marines from his sniper team were on the roof of a building where the Marines were holding an Iraqi family that they had been tasked with placing under protective custody. Reports indicated that 150 or more insurgents were in the immediate vicinity and a tank crew that was supposed to be supporting the sniper team somehow mistook the Marines on the roof for bad guys.
Combat is chaotic and mistakes—friendly fire incidents and collateral damage—are inevitable
Tragically, the U.S. tank shot the Marine in the head twice, his parents said. One bullet entered and exited his jaw. The other bullet entered his head and made a mess of his frontal lobes as it traveled through his brain, eventually lodging in the other side of his skull. Another Marine heroically used his own body to shield his comrade while the radio operator called to stop the friendly fire.