Never Let Them See You Cry

by Edna Buchanan

The driver stumbled up one street and down another. Pearl followed, seeking help from six or seven passersby, all of whom ignored him. He knocked at a house and asked a woman to call police. She slammed the door. He shouted to a security guard at a nearby office building. The guard called the police, but the drunk wandered behind an apartment house three blocks from the accident, staggered out onto a boat dock and plunged into the water before they arrived. Pearl lay on the ground in the dark, reaching out to the thrashing man who did not even seem aware he was in danger. Pearl found a pole and shoved it into the water. The man did not take it. Pearl told me later that he was screaming louder than the police sirens—people had to hear him—but no one came until after the officers arrived. He knew it was too late. Police and firemen fished the dead man from the water.

  “People don’t care,” Pearl told me in despair. “Next time I’ll know better.”

  People are unpredictable. You never know when you can count on them. Sometimes, when least expected, they perform like champs. Other times, when they are needed the most, they slam doors or walk away. Sometimes you are forced to go it alone.

  A hapless fellow taken hostage in the lobby of a run-down South Beach hotel was held at rifle point for ten hours by a troubled Vietnam veteran who demanded to talk to the Secret Service. For more than six hours, his plight was ignored. “Call the police,” he pleaded with a young woman passing by. “I’m being held hostage.”

  “That’s your problem. Call them yourself,” she said and flounced off.

  The rifleman slid a threatening note out under the door of the room where he and his hostage were barricaded. A tenant read it, shrugged it off and failed to report the crime. When they were finally notified, police set up a perimeter, sent in two SWAT teams, diverted traffic, evacuated neighbors and rushed in negotiators. They were disappointed. Before they could mount a rescue effort, the hostage, who had despaired of rescue, saved himself. He talked his captor into boiling eggs for lunch, hurled the pot of scalding water on him and ran for his life.

  At the other extreme are citizens who seize the initiative and become involved, sometimes in packs, eager to right wrongs and pursue justice. Thomas Hill, twenty-five, a salesman and former high school track star, heard screams and ran after the two robbers who had mugged a woman in front of a downtown Sears store. The victim ran after them too. So did another Sears employee. A passerby came running and joined the pursuit.

  Everybody pounded down the pavement, the woman screaming, the men shouting, the robbers sprinting. The chase streaked by a rooming house, where thirty residents lounged on the porch. One leaped to his feet and shouted that the fleeing suspects were the same men who had robbed him earlier. Pursuers poured off the porch and the impromptu posse grew to thirty irate citizens, who cornered and captured the pair at a dead end under the expressway.

  The robbers were delighted to see Major Philip Doherty, the first policeman to arrive. “Several citizens were sitting on them to hold them down. It was heartwarming,” Doherty said, pleased. “Young, old, black, white—everybody in the neighborhood joined in.”

  Some tragic heroes sacrifice everything for someone else. On the way home after a Saturday night date, Susan Schnitzer and her fiancé saw an accident on the rainswept expressway. He wanted to drive on, to notify police, but Susan, a slim blond nursing student, insisted they stop. He trotted toward oncoming traffic to wave motorists away from the wreck. She ran to help the severely injured driver.

  The accident victim lived, but Susan Schnitzer died moments later, hit and carried 140 feet on the hood of a car occupied by two teenagers returning from a high school prom.

  Most heroes give no thought to their own safety, especially when the person in danger is someone they love. Take the fifty-nine-year-old man, a poor swimmer at best, who charged fully clothed into an OpaLocka lake to save his drowning son, age eighteen. They died together.

  “He could have used his fishing pole to reach for the kid,” a perplexed cop told me later. But people panic.

  That father-son drowning was the second in two weeks. A forty-five-year-old man and his son, eight, fished at a remote rock pit. Scuff marks on the bank indicated that the boy, who could not swim, fell in first. His father plunged into water thirty-five feet deep to try to save him.

  The world is full of courage of all kinds. You see it in stouthearted children, as well as in the frail and elderly. Most behave heroically because their character does not allow them to do anything less. Few expect thanks.

  A short, stocky truck driver was there for Metro Police Officer Milan Pilat the day his worst nightmare came true.

  When Pilat approached an illegally parked car, the driver hastily stuffed several tinfoil packets into a cigarette pack, leaped from his car, punched the cop in the face and ran. The officer tackled him after a fifty-yard chase, and the two grappled on the ground. A crowd formed, and people in it tried to free the suspect, kicking and striking the officer, who clung stubbornly to his prisoner and the incriminating cigarette pack. The mob grew to 150 unruly people. Far from the safety of his patrol car and its radio life-link to help, knocked to the ground, battered and kicked, this cop was in trouble. He shouted in vain to passing traffic. As the crowd surged in, there was the piercing sound of air brakes. A huge dump truck stopped on a dime, and the driver jumped out.

  “He was just a little guy, really—but everybody backed off,” Pilat said. Shoving people away, the trucker asked the cop if he was all right. Pilat staggered to his feet, still clinging to his prisoner. Backup officers arrived fast, summoned by the trucker on his CB. Cut and bruised, his face battered, Pilat handcuffed his prisoner, turned to thank the trucker, and found him gone.

  He had driven away without leaving his name.

  You never know when you might be called upon—or if you will rise to the occasion should it occur. One moment you can be taking a nap and the next one of America’s most wanted fugitives may be in your living room. How would you handle it?

  Linda Major had a pounding headache that day. Though it is impossible to rest in a house full of children, she kept trying. But Major was disturbed again, this time by five-year-old Thomas, who bustled breathless to her side. “Mama, I just saw the police running after a man!” Trying to ignore him, she told him to hush.

  “But,” he persisted, “the man is in our house.”

  He was.

  Through the back door that one of the children forgot to lock had barged a stranger, a fugitive charged with gunning down a New York City policeman. Object of a nationwide manhunt, he too was breathless. Cops with shotguns were right behind him.

  The stranger strode through the house as the family watchdog, a poodle named Monique, dove behind the kitchen stove. Major’s kid sister, thirteen, hit the floor. Her children, ages four, five and six, and their cousins, ten and twelve, were speechless. “Be cool,” the stranger warned. “Be cool.”

  Major did not wait to find out what that meant. She looked out a window and saw police shotguns. Shouting, “My children are coming out!” she herded the youngsters toward the door. “Run to your grandfather’s house. Now!” she told them.

  “For the first time,” she said later, “they did just what I asked them to do.”

  Six sets of skinny legs churned in all directions. Major saw the children all pounding to safety down the street, then dashed out her back door, shouting, “He’s in the house!”

  The fugitive had apparently planned to hold hostages, but Linda Major was too quick. When he refused to come out, police sent in a German shepherd named Thunder, one of their K-9 officers. Monique the poodle continued to cringe behind the stove as Thunder padded purposefully through the house, found the fugitive and sank his teeth into him.

  The children later chattered nonstop about the big guns brandished by police. Monique, still cringing, had to be dragged from behind the stove to join in a family portrait shot by a Herald photographer. Major told me the excitement had cured her headache an
d promised to listen the next time five-year-old Thomas had something urgent to say.

  Bravery comes in all colors and descriptions, and physical heroics are not always required. Sometimes just doing the right thing, even making a simple telephone call, takes courage.

  Soon after the Miami riots, a young woman lost her way, took the wrong expressway exit, tried to turn around and found herself in a strange, riot-torn neighborhood late at night. At a red light, two men with guns ran up beside her Volkswagen. One reached through the window, jammed his gun to her head and cocked it. They forced their way into her car, took her money and ordered the terrified woman to drive them to an apartment complex parking lot. They took her jewelry, raped her and decided to kill her by locking her in the trunk of her car and shooting through the metal. She pleaded for her life as they forced her, naked, into the tiny trunk. When the lid would not close, they tied it to the bumper with one of her garments.

  A middle-aged couple in a nearby apartment saw and heard what was happening. The man kept watch as the woman ran for the telephone. “Get here now!” she told police. They did, just in time. The witnesses who saved the woman were black. So were the rapists. She was white.

  Proof again, as Homicide Sergeant Mike Gonzalez said that night, that “there are still some good people in the world.”

  Age is no barrier to bravery; quite the contrary, the simple act of aging often takes valor. Ethel Lottman, a no-nonsense Miami Beach widow, seventy-two, handled her heart condition, her arthritis and a homicidal maniac with the same aplomb.

  A young bank teller was the innocent victim. Hunting an apartment near the bank where she worked, the woman had arranged a 10:30 A.M. appointment with a landlord. As she walked briskly toward the building, a strange woman rushed up behind her. “Do you think you are going to bury me?” she shouted, and plunged a stiletto into the young teller’s back.

  The bleeding victim ran screaming toward Ethel Lottman, who had just emerged from her nearby condo, on her way to a doctor’s appointment. “Put the knife away. Don’t be so temperamental,” chided the widow, and stepped to block the pursuing attacker. “You’ll get in trouble if a policeman sees you.”

  The woman with the knife was momentarily distracted and her victim escaped. “I ought to give it to you!” the attacker snarled at Lottman. Stared down, the attacker fled.

  Ethel Lottman, in her red-and-white saddle shoes, limped slowly after the woman, ignoring the painful arthritis in her toe. She “walked slow and laid low,” she told me later, trailing at a distance. The woman she was following was a thirty-nine-year-old mental patient who had won acquittals, by reason of insanity, after five prior knife attacks. When she ducked into a hotel several blocks away, Ethel Lottman stepped into an adjacent hotel. She told the desk clerk about the stabbing and asked him to call police. He refused.

  Lottman’s toe ached. Frustrated and late for her appointment, she went on to the doctor. On the way home she spotted a policeman. He was knocking on doors, seeking information. The stabbing victim was in intensive care.

  “You’re never around when you’re needed,” Lottman complained to the startled officer. She took him to the attacker, psychotic, unpredictable and still lurking in the hotel lobby, knife in hand. The attacker was arrested and locked in an isolation cell until doctors decide once again that she is well enough to unleash on an unsuspecting public.

  The system may not always look out for the other guy, but luckily some people do.

  Like good cops, heroes are somehow at the right place at the right time. Timing is everything.

  When the year’s worst sudden storm slammed into Miami and ruined their fishing trip, all Joyce and Richard Chicvara thought about was towing their boat safely home through hazardous high winds.

  The couple strained to see through the rain that hammered the windshield. A stalled truck and two Florida Highway Patrol cars blocked an expressway exit ramp ahead. A bolt of lightning crashed so close that the two troopers felt the tingle and ran to the nearest patrol car for cover. As Trooper James Benton grasped the metal door handle, a blinding bolt of lightning flashed.

  “I saw the trooper fly through the air, do a back flip, hit the ground and roll down the ramp,” said Chicvara, a fire department paramedic. His wife is a cardiovascular hospital technician. Both scrambled out into the drenching downpour and turned the trooper over. Chicvara began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation as his wife searched for a pulse. When the trooper began to breathe, they rushed him into the other patrolman’s car for the race to a hospital. During the trip, the trooper went into cardiac arrest. Chicvara pounded his chest over and over until the fifth blow restored a heartbeat. He continued mouth-to-mouth breathing.

  The trooper survived because, of all the motorists who could have passed by at that fateful moment, the ones who did were the two best trained to save him.

  Who can explain the forces that place a person in the right place at the right time?

  When Hilde Madorsky moved to Miami, she found that her new apartment was not ready. Exhausted by the long car trip, she had nowhere else to go, so management provided a water-front substitute for the night, high on the twenty-second floor.

  Transplanted from Manhattan, “where nothing ever happened,” she relaxed and stepped out onto the terrace for her first glimpse of Miami’s star-studded skyline. As she drank it all in, she heard the screams.

  Her first thought was of Miami Vice.

  The cries came from out in the water, carried inland and up by a strong easterly wind. “I heard one of them yell, ‘Holy shit, Michael! Hold on! Help! Help!’” She did not waste a heartbeat. She dashed inside, fumbled for the card a security guard had given her and dialed the number. As police were dispatched, at 10:26 P.M., two security men from the apartment complex ran to the marina. Now they too heard the screams and swiftly lowered a twenty-foot open fisherman into the water.

  The tide was sweeping out; waves were rough. With only running lights, they would have to try to follow the sound of the screams. Then they spotted police arriving at the seawall and wheeled to pick them up. It was 10:28 P.M.

  “You could hear people yelling out in the bay, screaming for help,” Officer Steven Sadowski said. Had it not been for the wind blowing out of the east, no one would have heard them. Twenty-two stories up, Madorsky was screaming back at the panicky voices. “Hold on, hold on! Help is coming!”

  “I never yelled so loud in my life,” she said later. “I felt like I could dive off the terrace to help them.”

  Police switched on their high-beam headlights and powerful spotlights. Sadowski and another officer took flashlights and jumped aboard the boat, along with paramedics. In the light from their cruisers, they could now see arms flailing, two hundred yards offshore. When they reached the two boys clinging to their capsized fifteen-foot aluminum canoe, the frightened teenagers’ first words were “Thank God.”

  The boys, ages seventeen and nineteen, had paddled their canoe out a canal and into the bay. When they tried to turn back, rough water capsized the canoe. They had no life jackets. If not for the wind out of the east, Hilde Madorsky never would have heard them.

  “It’s strange,” she told me. “I’ll never know them. They’ll never know who I am.” But, she said, they made her first night in Miami unforgettable.

  Wilfred Yunque was driving to pick up his elderly mother at church. Traveling westbound across the MacArthur Causeway, between Miami and Miami Beach, he stopped at a red light. A young woman’s red Corvair roared past, through the light, at about sixty-five miles an hour. A minute later, as he continued west, he saw the red car again—sinking in Biscayne Bay. Other motorists slowed and stared but did not stop. Yunque pulled his Vega to the roadside, jumped out and dived into the water fully dressed. He never even removed his watch. Water pressure prevented him from opening the red car’s door, but the window was open. He grasped the driver’s shoulder and tried to drag her out but could not. She was limp, unconscious, sl
umped across the seat. He crawled in through the window unable to do more until the car sank, equalizing the pressure inside and out. Crouched on the front seat beside the twenty-three-year-old woman, he waited as water filled the car. When it submerged completely, settling onto the bay bottom, he floated her out the window to the surface, holding his breath and keeping his hand over her nose and mouth.

  Miami and Miami Beach police, coast guard and police boats, a flotilla of pleasure boats, several fire department units and a city commissioner all rushed to the scene, but Yunque, forty-nine, had everything under control.

  I was impressed. How, I asked him, could he do what he had just done?

  “I’m an old sailor,” he said modestly, retired from the Merchant Marine. His seventy-nine-year-old mother was waiting patiently outside her church. He had never been late before.

  “I had to stop and pull a girl from the bay,” he explained.

  “I knew God had a reason,” she said.

  One Father’s Day, Lawrence B. Eaton, fifty-two, was driving to his parttime job as a security guard when he saw a wrecked Pinto in the median strip. The car had knocked down a palm tree. He stopped, turned around, walked toward the smoking car and heard a sound that chilled his heart: a baby’s wail. Dashing into the roadway, he flagged down cars, telling drivers to call the police. “There’s a baby in the car!”

  He ran back to the Pinto and peered inside. The driver was pinned behind the steering wheel, gasping, his neck obviously broken. The baby, an injured toddler, lay pinned to the floor on the passenger’s side, part of the engine on top of him. Crying and covered with blood, he reached out his little arms. Eaton pulled the wreckage off him and tossed it aside. A tree blocked half the window, and he could not quite grasp the baby. Another motorist stopped to help, reached down and held the baby’s feet. Eaton slid his hand under the child’s back. They lifted him from the car, slowly and carefully. It took about five minutes. The wreck was full of food wrappers, beer cans and junk. The windshield was blown out. There was no baby seat.