Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

  As I headed for the elevator, somebody called after me, “Three cops shot.”

  I sped across the causeway, tuning the police scanner in my car to the Miami Beach frequency. In the confusion, a policeman had left his microphone open. The enraged, almost hysterical shouts of cops in pursuit of the killer were chilling. The fear, the fury and the stress in their voices were terrifying. Beach task force officers were sweeping across a stretch of ocean beach. They had the killer cornered, surrounded in a dense clump of vegetation, palms and sea grapes. Screaming obscenities, they ordered him to surrender. I heard the shot that killed him and nearly drove off the road.

  He had shot himself in the head as cops closed in. They half-carried, half-dragged him out of the undergrowth as I pulled up.

  “Somebody call an ambulance for this piece of shit!” somebody shouted, but it was too late. They were all dead: three cops and their killer.

  As their three children played nearby, Hodges’s wife, Karen, saw TV news bulletins reporting the shotgun murders of three Metro detectives in Miami Beach. She knew that her husband and his two partners had gone to Miami Beach that day. The knock at the door found her gripped by a growing fear.

  “I thought it could be them,” she quietly told me later.

  The partners who shared a sixth sense about stolen cars were right. The Lincoln was stolen, from Palm Beach, the license plates from Fort Lauderdale.

  Cops are human. You know that, but sometimes it slips your mind. That is why it is devastating to see a cop cry.

  As a rookie reporter covering demonstrators at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, I met undercover officers Harrison Crenshaw, Jr., and Gerald Rudoff. A salt-and-pepper team—Rudoff white, Crenshaw black—with the Metro Organized Crime Bureau, they wore beards, beads and hippie hats and infiltrated protest groups. Crenshaw and Rudoff were responsible for the firebombing convictions of Black Afro Militant Movement (BAMM) members and the indictment of the Gainesville Eight on charges of planning to disrupt the convention.

  They were as close as brothers. When Crenshaw married a legal secretary named Margaret she half-jokingly asked if Rudoff was joining them on the honeymoon. Promoted to sergeants and no longer partners, they still spent time together. Until late one night, in an unmarked car on his way home from a fruitless stakeout, Crenshaw stopped a Buick. The driver had a gun. They scuffled, and five shots were fired. One dented the gold badge in Crenshaw’s pocket. The fatal bullet struck him in the chest.

  The shooting happened in front of the home of Metro Officer Simmons Arlington, thirty-one. He heard the shots, ran outside and found Crenshaw in the street. He cradled the dying policeman in his arms.

  A petty criminal named Charles Vassar, twenty-two, was arrested the same night.

  Rudoff broke down in unashamed sobs. “Harry didn’t make mistakes,” he told me. “We were involved in many, many explosive situations that we managed to walk away from without anybody getting hurt. Somebody caught him off guard.”

  Rudoff rushed to his partner’s neatly fenced, sunshine-yellow and white house and took Margaret to her parents. Later that night somebody broke in and ransacked the dead cop’s home.

  What occurred between Crenshaw and his killer was never clearly established. We will never know for sure. After a court hearing, at which he was ordered to stand trial, Vassar hanged himself in his cell.

  Three days after Harrison Crenshaw’s death, Officer Simmons Arrington, in uniform, on patrol, was dispatched to a routine neighborhood dispute. A resident complained that a man named Sam Smith threatened him. Smith was seated in a car when Officer Arrington arrived.

  “I’m the man you’re looking for,” he called out. As the officer walked toward him. Smith fired a shotgun at point-blank range.

  Seventy-two hours earlier, Arrington had cradled a fellow policeman who died in his arms. Now he too was dead.

  Cops who survive shootings sometimes lose heart and want out of police work. Who could blame them? Few are like Everett Titus, determined to come back, against all odds. A Metro cop, he risked his own life to save one.

  A young man, troubled at nineteen and bent on suicide, braced a rifle against his own stomach. He had seen his father shotgunned seven years earlier by a neighbor. Now he wanted to die.

  “He was definitely going to shoot himself,” Titus said later. “He’d taken up the slack on the trigger. The only way to stop him was to take the gun away.” As they scuffled, the rifle barrel swung toward the doorway. “My partner was coming in. I knew it would have shot him. I pushed the gun down.”

  It fired. The shot shattered Titus’s thigh, blasting away three inches of bone. Doctors wanted to amputate, but he fought them. Three doctors said he would never use the leg again, so he found a fourth doctor. The new plan was to let the fragmented stubs of bone heal and then perform a bone graft with metal plates.

  The bone graft never took place. There are no metal plates in his leg. Titus returned to work, despite the doctors who said he would never walk or be a policeman again, despite the wheelchair, despite the brace, despite the cane, despite the doctors’ orders.

  His comeback was excruciating. He lay in traction, forty-pound weights attached to either side of a pin through his leg. Amazingly, the shattered stumps, three inches apart, began to shoot calcium, like a cobweb building. It took half a year, but the bone regenerated. Muscles written off as destroyed began to rebuild. His secret may have been the daily swimming in a therapeutic pool.

  Titus is the father of five. His wife discovered she was pregnant with their youngest while he was hospitalized, still uncertain if he would ever walk again. “She came running into my room all smiles,” he said. Soon after his release from the hospital, he discarded his wheelchair. They strapped his brawny six-foot four-inch frame into an ankle-to-waist brace, but it made him feel handicapped, and he swore not to wear it anymore. He took it off, stood up and walked. He could have retired, but this was a man who left a junior executive position with Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co., and took a six-thousand-dollar-a-year pay cut to be a cop.

  One year after the shooting, Everett Titus went back to work.

  And the man who shot him? Just before the case was to go to a jury, the defendant won a dismissal on a legal technicality and walked free.

  “Too bad,” Titus said, “because the boy really needs psychiatric help. I don’t feel bad for myself. I did what I thought was right I’d do it again. I get paid for that. I only feel bad for my family.

  “I’d been shot at at least four times before I got hit. Every police officer and his family realize he can be shot. It’s just something that happens.”

  Patrol is the most dangerous job for a cop. Men and women in uniform are easy targets. Other police officers may encounter hazards—but not with the same frequency as patrolmen. Growing numbers of police shootings are drug related, but most shot cops are gunned down during routine traffic stops or while handling domestic disturbances.

  The day after Police Memorial Day on May 15, a nationwide observance of officers fallen in the line of duty, three more Metro cops were gunned down—patrolmen. This time it was at a Liberty City intersection. The shooter was a lovesick husband stalking his estranged wife.

  They had married young—too young. The bride was fourteen, the groom seventeen. Now, three and a half years later, she wanted out. He was AWOL from the army, wearing a red warm-up suit, carrying a satchel, and lurking in the pine trees near the house where she lived with her mother, her 79-year-old grandmother and her 101-year-old great-grandmother.

  When his wife arrived in her best friend’s car at two P.M., he opened fire. The wounded driver stumbled out and fled. Another teenage girl also ran. The terrified wife scrambled from the backseat to the front and tried to drive away. He overtook her at the comer, caught her by the throat, jammed his pistol to her head and forced his way into the car. The couple struggled as the car bucked and lurched down the street. Nei
ghbors called police.

  Officers Keith DiGenova, twenty-seven, his best friend, William Cook, twenty-five, and Robert Edgerton, thirty-nine, arrived first.

  Another officer had been dispatched but the call was “shooting in progress,” and they were closer. The time was 2:10 P.M., forty minutes before shift change, five minutes before they would have begun to clear out of Liberty City to start back to the station. Each was in his own patrol car.

  A pharmacist who lived nearby heard the fracas and approached the car, now stalled in the intersection. The terrified wife begged him to call police. The husband waved his gun and ordered him away. The pharmacist saw DiGenova’s approaching patrol car and flagged it down.

  “That’s the car, the one in the intersection,” he said. “He’s got a gun. The man inside has got a gun.” Cook and Edgerton arrived moments after. A reserve officer was riding with Cook.

  While police distracted her husband, the wounded wife fled the car. Officer DiGenova, his service revolver in his hand, reached in the open passenger window to disarm the driver. The reserve officer, on the driver’s side, tried to hold on to the man, who was struggling and screaming threats.

  DiGenova’s upper body was completely inside the passenger window when the driver suddenly broke free and shot him point-blank in the face. DiGenova’s service revolver dropped onto the car seat as he crumpled to the pavement.

  In the seconds that followed. Officer Edgerton shot the gunman through a vent window, holstered his gun and rushed to help DiGenova. The wounded man was out of ammunition, but he found the fallen policeman’s revolver on the seat beside him and used it to shoot both Edgerton and William Cook.

  Robbery Detective Dan Blocker had also responded to the shooting call. He took cover as the gunman stepped away from his car, firing at him.

  Blocker took careful aim and killed him.

  Officer Cook was dead, hit under the arm, a quarter-inch above his bulletproof vest. Edgerton had not been wearing a vest. Shot in the chest and right arm, he survived his serious wounds and returned to work. DiGenova suffered permanent brain damage and will never wear a badge again.

  The shooting provoked angry controversy among cops.

  Maron Hayes, fifty-nine, a painter and plasterer, had seen the whole thing. “I don’t see how the policemen let him shoot them,” he said. “The police were standing outside his car with their guns on him. There was one officer at each door, one pointing his gun at the windshield and one at the back. They said, ‘Freeze, drop your gun!’ He shot one more time at the woman. Then he shot him three policemen. None of them policemen should have been shot—not one. I don’t know why they didn’t shoot him first.”

  Police thought they knew why, and were mad as hell. With a chance to shoot the gunman, DiGenova had tried instead to disarm him. “He should have shot the son of a bitch,” Homicide Sergeant James Duckworth told me. “The logical policeman of a few years ago would have shot him through that open window. It’s just a shame that policemen nowadays can’t be policemen.”

  He claimed the officers lost life-saving seconds because recent brutality charges had made them hesitate to use force. The charges stemmed from a wrong-house raid. White Metro cops were accused of beating a black schoolteacher and his family, whom they mistook for drug suspects.

  Duckworth, now investigating the case of three white cops shot by a black man, believed that the officers all felt, “I don’t want to be the next one sued.”

  There is no way to know what the officers were thinking.

  A number of other Metro cops had not hesitated or held their fire since the wrong-house raid: One had shot a pistol-waving man outside a bar. An off-duty officer had killed an unarmed college football star in a bar brawl, and a third, also off duty, did not hesitate to shoot dead a neighbor’s pet pony that had wandered into his yard.

  But Dade cops, angry and in mourning, charged that the tragedy illustrated a grim truth: “Shoot and you’re brutal; don’t shoot and you die.”

  Nobody ever said police work was easy.

  The only people not bitter were the bereaved family of William Cook. As a teenager he had come home from college classes and announced, “Mom, I’m gonna be a police officer.” He was so proud of the uniform, family members said, that you could slide down the crease in his pants. He had been a Boy Scout and a trumpet-playing member of a state-champion high school band. An avid amateur photographer, he had hoped to someday work in the crime lab. He was on a waiting list for the transfer when he died.

  He had just switched to days from the night shift, eager for Saturdays and Sundays off. The upcoming weekend was to have been his first. He had planned to shoot nature photos in the Everglades. He and his young wife, Karen, had no children, but he played Santa Claus at Christmas for his little niece and nephew.

  “When they needed somebody to handle a domestic disturbance, they would call Billy,” his mother told me. “He had such a wonderful way of talking and smoothing things over.”

  Cook stopped by to see his widowed mother every day. When he did not that day, she was uneasy. She telephoned his wife at four P.M. Karen assured her that Billy was fine and must have had a late call. The worried mother put down the telephone and stepped out onto her front porch. Two policemen stood there.

  “Is it my son Billy?” she asked. They nodded.

  She had pinned on his silver badge at the police academy graduation six years earlier. He promised that day, “Mom, I’ll always make you proud of me.”

  He did.

  And Billy would have been proud of his family. Through tears, Julia Cook, sixty-three, encouraged others to follow her only son’s footsteps into the profession he loved.

  “We’re not bitter against police work,” his sister, Nancy Colamatteo, told me. Neither was the family bitter toward the man who killed her brother. “He had to be crazy,” she said. “If he had known Billy, he wouldn’t have shot him.”

  “If the man who shot him could have spent a day with him, he would have loved him,” said her husband, Jim Colamatteo.

  The most gigantic manhunt in Miami history was launched for the tollgate killer of young Florida Highway Patrolman Bradley Glascock. Again my telephone rang in the middle of the night. A trooper had been cut down at 2:50 A.M. by a motorist stopped for failing to pay a ten-cent expressway toll.

  I knew Glascock. He had studied for the ministry before joining the highway patrol. He was twenty-four.

  The killer was at the wheel of a borrowed car, a faded 1969 Cadillac Eldorado, when the well-built six-foot four-inch, 214-pound trooper stopped him just past the toll plaza. The motorist was armed with a stolen gun. He was wanted on a bench warrant for driving without a valid license, and he was also a mule—a low-level courier for narcotics traffickers.

  To the trooper, the roadside stop seemed routine, but when he asked for a driver’s license, the motorist opened fire. The trooper reached for his own gun, too late.

  A .38-caliber slug shattered the trooper’s heart. Another severed his spinal cord. Either would have been fatal.

  A young man eager to learn about law enforcement was riding with the trooper that night, as an observer. He snatched the shotgun from its rack in the patrol car and fired four times, blasting out the back window of the Cadillac and slightly wounding the fleeing killer.

  The bloodstained car was found abandoned a short time later. The killer was quickly identified as Felix Ramon Cardenas Casanova.

  A short, muscular twenty-nine-year-old fisherman known for carrying guns and fighting in bars, Cardenas had a tough-guy reputation at Miami riverfront hangouts. An old enemy, wounded by him in a 1973 bar fight, evened the score by supplying his name to detectives.

  Only five feet five inches tall and 146 pounds, Cardenas was a man with a past: drug charges in Tampa, a murder arrest in Nassau and the Miami barroom shooting.

  Miami Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez, Miami’s SWAT team, motorcycle crews, a Metro helicopter, detec
tives, and police dogs searched for the wounded cop killer. Hospitals were on alert. So was every Florida fishing port. Boats along the Miami River and a twenty-one-block area near the airport were searched door to door by more than a hundred police officers.

  Scores of cops volunteered free time to join the manhunt. One brother officer gave even more: Rookie Trooper John Rambach volunteered for twelve hours, then went home to his modest apartment, discussed it with his wife, Debbie—and wrote a check for most of the trooper’s monthly take-home pay. The parents of two little girls, Debbie and John Rambach posted five hundred dollars as a reward for information leading to the killer’s arrest. If the money went unclaimed, they said, they wanted it used to buy bulletproof vests for other troopers.

  The Florida Legislature had twice considered and rejected the purchase of protective vests for troopers. At that time the vests cost $82 to $110 each.

  “There are so many out there who don’t have vests—and have wives and kids,” Debbie Rambach said softly.

  Her husband religiously wore his, a gift from his father, a Jacksonville police officer.

  Their gesture touched readers. Money began to pour in from the public, to buy bulletproof vests and to increase the bounty on the killer’s head.

  Most manhunts wind down as the trail grows cold, but this one accelerated, leapfrogging all over the state. Roadblocks were set up in Naples, on Florida’s west coast, after a hotel employee reported a guest who resembled Cardenas; a lookalike was snatched off a Little Havana street; Southern Bell employees chased a suspicious car; residents willingly permitted SWAT teams to search their homes. Three days after the killing, police seemed no closer to an arrest despite more than a thousand tips. Many had not slept since the shooting.

  “You feel so helpless,” said one trooper, wearing the black-striped badge of mourning. “Everybody’s on edge because of lack of sleep—and anticipation.”