by Cliff Yates
The little girl must have been standing in the doorway or close by when this happened because later they found she had three pieces of birdshot from the shotgun blast in her leg. After the bodies had been taken away, I was to stay behind and wait for one of our crime scene technicians, which was a full-time deputy wearing two hats. Before everyone else left, Detective York told me to go back upstairs and close a window in the bedroom. When I went upstairs and went into the bedroom, it was an eerie feeling seeing their wedding and family pictures on the dresser. And now two parents were dead, and their three-year-old daughter was left behind.
The dispatcher who was on the night of the call would later purchase this house. I told him that I could not imagine living in that house after seeing such a gruesome scene. He told me years later that the toilet had sprung a leak, and water had leaked into the floor and came out onto the stairway. It was red from the blood that had soaked in years before, the night of the shooting. That's when I named it the bleeding house.
HELLS ANGELS MEETIING
I WAS WORKING the west side, and I got a loud music call deep in the woods of the town of Nunda. At the time, I was talking to a New York State Trooper. I told the trooper I had to go on this noise complaint deep in the woods. He told me they were having a Hells Angels National meeting there, and it probably was not a good idea to go.
Mainly because I'm an idiot, I said, “Fuck that, I'm going.”
The trooper said he knew the head guy and would go with me to make contact. We got to this back road location, and there were probably over two hundred motorcycles and more cars and trucks than that. We had to walk what seemed like a mile into the woods where the trooper and I strolled into a group of over five hundred members of the outlaw motorcycle gang Hells Angels who were gathered around a large bonfire. Thank God the trooper was with me; he knew who to ask for. He told the head guy some local had called in a complaint about the music, so we were obligated to respond.
The head guy said, "Thanks for coming, I'll make sure we keep the noise down," and was kind of smirking.
We said thank you and promptly left—two against these 500 bikers, what the fuck were we going to do. The nearest house was probably two miles away. This was probably the best place for them to have their meeting. As we walked down the dirt road to our police cars, I looked into some of the cars parked along the shoulder. I saw police uniform patches, police batons, and handguns on the seats. We were out of there. I shouldn't even have gone on that call. That's the kind of call you went on by yourself on the back roads of Livingston County.
The kind of town Nunda was, there was a bar called the Hogs’ Trough. Two Hatfield brothers, yes Hatfield like Hatfield and McCoys, were kicked out of the Hogs’ Trough. They went home and returned to the bar with a chainsaw and promptly sawed the bar in half. Those same brothers later tied up a couple in their home and then set it on fire, killing them both. The Hatfields are in Attica State Prison now doing life. That was the mentality in some of those backwoods communities. As a Livingston County Sheriff's Deputy, you would respond to these type of calls yourself with backup about 25 minutes away. We didn't have handheld radios. We had pagers. So if the desk needed help, they could get ahold of us, but we were shit out of luck.
MY ANKLE BROKE
ONE WEEKEND NIGHT I was working radar in the Village of Livonia. I was monitoring traffic traveling east on Route 20A into the 30 mph zone. A red Chevy Nova came into town, and the radar gun flashed 62. As I pulled on to the roadway and put on my overhead lights, the Nova took off, and the chase was on. The Nova fishtailed as it made a right turn onto Commercial Street and then made two more quick right turns on Big Tree Street and then Livonia Station. As the Nova slowed, the driver's door opened, and a mountain of a man jumped out of the car wearing a red and black checkered coat. I forgot to mention it was the middle of winter, and it was a cold night. There were piles of snow everywhere from recent plowing. The side streets were still covered in snow and ice.
I radioed that I was in foot pursuit and jumped out of my police car. I was a good 25 yards behind as we ran across Route 20A and then on to Grove Street. Grove Street immediately sloped steeply down. At the bottom of the slope, my fleeing suspect turned left in an alley. As I slid to a stop in my slick bottomed police shoes, my right ankle caught on some bare road, and I heard the crack of my right ankle. I couldn't walk on it and had to be driven back to my police car by a good Samaritan.
The car was not stolen and was registered to a well-known criminal. I'll call him Sampson. Detectives later told me that Sampson had a lengthy arrest record for resisting arrest and assault on peace officers, and it might have been a good thing I didn't catch him. He had a previous conviction for Driving While Intoxicated and was probably drunk again and didn't want to go down for the Felony. I did identify him from a six-pack, and he was arrested for Obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest. He later pled to a lesser crime and did time in our county jail. My ankle was broken, and it was a long six-week recovery.
STOLEN CAR
NOW IN LIVINGSTON County, the pursuit policy was “they run, we chase.” I don’t think we had a pursuit policy. When I got to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the pursuit policy was pages thick. If you did the right 20 things in the right order at the right time, you might be allowed to continue a pursuit. But in 1979 in Livingston County, it was you run and we chase you until the wheels fall off.
On one of those late nights when another deputy and I were splitting the county, I was driving in the village of Geneseo trying to stay centrally located for calls. It was 3 am, and the dispatcher gave me a call in the village of Nunda of a car squealing tires. A village 30 miles away had someone squealing tires in the center of town, and they dispatched me for that. I was pissed off. When the bars let out, this happened all over the county. I knew by the time I got there 30 minutes later the streets would be bare, except for the rubber on the road from the squealing tires bandit.
I made it down to the village of Nunda, and as I suspected the village was a ghost town. Every bar was closed and not a car to be seen. For five minutes, I drove around town. I didn’t want to leave too quickly and return to the center of the county in case my squealing tires culprit was still in the area.
About five minutes later on a side street, I saw taillights. I quickly got behind the pickup truck and stopped behind it at a stop sign. I turned on my overhead lights, and now I heard squealing tires, and the truck accelerated to over 80 mph on a side street. I broadcasted that I was in pursuit. There wasn’t much purpose in announcing my pursuit because there were no police cars available to back me up within 20 miles. He made several turns on to back dirt roads with no street signs. The dispatcher who lives in the area was telling me where I was. I remember the dispatcher saying things like, “You’re on county road one, and you should see a red barn with two silos on your right.” This was like one of those back road chases you see on tv with dirt kicking up into my windshield as we drove close to 100 mph on this dirt road with deep ruts.
Suddenly he skidded to about 20 mph and turned into the right ditch, coming to a stop. The male driver jumped out of the truck and ran to the middle of a field of deep grass. I radioed I was in foot pursuit and trained my spotlight to where I last saw the suspect running and disappear in the grass. I ran to the middle of the field but didn’t see the suspect. The field was too big and wide open for him to have made it to the woods nearby. I pulled out my gun. Time for my ruse again, yelling, “Stand the fuck up before I start peppering this field with bullets!”
He stood up about twenty feet from me. I was two for two on this one. This young guy had stolen the pickup an hour before I pulled up behind him at the stop sign. He was unarmed when I arrested him, and I found no weapon in the truck or in and around the field where I arrested him. I’m adding the no weapon information because one year later the same guy stole another car in the same area and was chased by a New York State Trooper, and again he ditched the stole
n car and ran into the woods near the field where I had arrested him. This time when the trooper approached him, he raised a handgun pointing at the trooper. The trooper shot and killed him.
CAR DEER ACCIDENTS
DRIVING THE OPEN back roads on the midnight shift, you get used to driving at 100 mph going call to call. A detective used to tell us on the midnight shift, “Familiarity breeds contempt; slow down.” His words would come to me on occasion, and I would slow down. One of the biggest fears we had was hitting a deer at high speed. It was not uncommon for us to respond to fatal car crashes involving car-deer accidents where the deer goes through the front windshield killing the driver. We had fatal accidents with cows and horses. Funny as it may seem, that was a common call on the night shift. Cows out in the road. We had so many smashed up police cars from deer accidents that the Sheriff put on what we called deer chasers on the bumpers of the patrol cars. The wind goes through a hole in them, causing an ultrasonic sound that supposedly the deer hear and stop running before they can leap into the path of the car. The first night Deputy Jim Chiverton drove a car with the deer chasers on, he hit a deer. That was the end of those.
Between October and December when the deer are rutting, and when deer season starts, the deer start moving around like crazy. Starting in late September, the car deer accidents would start. We had deer tags to issue to drivers who wanted to take the deer with them after the accident if they wanted. I hated that time of year because in many cases the deer would still be alive with maybe a couple of broken legs and have to be put down. Deer have a very small brain, so we would have to get real close and put a shot at the center of their heads to make sure they died. It was a sad thing when it was an afternoon and traffic was going by with kids watching this deer with one or two broken legs trying to hobble down an embankment to a field and escape. And we have to get to the deer and kill them before they get into a field out of sight and suffer. I probably put down over 20 deer in the five years I worked for the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department.
There was a time before there were regulations and rules regarding the preparation of food for the jail inmates when you could bring dead deer from the accidents back to the jail. Deputies would bring the deer back to the Sheriff’s Office to be hung in the Sheriff’s garage while inmate trustees gutted them and prepared the venison to be served to the jail inmates. It was quite a sight to drive into the Sheriff’s Office driveway and see deer hanging and trustees skinning them. The jail kitchen was quite a place, and the inmates were very happy to be eating fresh venison.
STORE ROBBERY
ONE OF MY days off in 1981, I drank too much. Oh my, did I drink too much, and I had a dayshift overtime spot to work. My drinking involved a function with numerous department members, and calling in sick would have been a bad move. I dragged myself out of bed with the pounding headache a hangover is happy to provide. I was working the 8 am to 4 pm shift and thinking, If I can just make it through this shift... I stopped at a friend’s house in the east side area I was working midway through my shift and got my second dose of aspirin. I had a couple of report calls, and by 2 pm, I was feeling functional.
It was 2:40 pm when I got the call of an armed robbery in progress at the Millpond grocery in Springwater, one male with a shotgun. I remember saying out loud, “What the fuck.” I have previously described the kind of calls we normally got. Car accidents, suicides, burglaries, high-speed chases, domestic calls. Robberies, not very often. Springwater was at the very south end of the east side. I started hauling ass, partly because it was a robbery in progress, and partly because I got off at 4 pm, and I was half expecting them to cancel the call and say it wasn’t a robbery.
I was just south of Conesus on Route 15 when I saw a motorcycle coming toward me at a high rate of speed. As it passed me, I saw behind the driver the barrel of a shotgun sticking straight up in the air. I turned around, and the chase was on. I saw the shotgun barrel sticking out of one of those square plastic milk crates that was on the back of his motorcycle. I broadcasted my pursuit of the robbery suspect who made a right turn on to railroad avenue in the town of Conesus. This little back road was beginning to narrow, and I knew there was a hairpin turn coming up, and past that he had a good chance of losing me on a small service road. So as we reached the curve, I rammed the back of his motorcycle with my front bumper. This sent him through the curve in the road and into a ditch. He flew off the motorcycle, and I jumped out and was able to arrest him, recover the shotgun and $179 he stole from the small grocery store on Mill Street Extension in the Village of Springwater. Headache was gone.
IT'S SNOWING AND COLD
ONE NIGHT THEY gave me my assigned car. I walked out the back door of the Sheriff’s Office where the patrol cars were parked. My assigned car had not been driven in a while as it had a foot of snow on it. I took a big push-broom and started pushing the snow off the hood. As I drew the broom back across the roof of the car, I pulled a shit load of snow onto and into my shoes. We all had to wear the same brand of shoes. And the brand of shoes we were wearing were open around the ankle, just enough to let snow fill down in around your ankle. They gave me an accident call as I was trying to clear my car off.
As I got in the frozen car, I had to wait for the defroster to create an ever-widening small hole in the ice-packed on my windshield. I was freezing in my patrol car, leaning forward peering out a hole in the ice above my steering wheel about the size of a small dinner plate. I hoped by the time I pulled on to the main roadway that the defroster would be in high gear and hot enough to clear my windshield. I made it to the minor accident alright, I don’t know how. These were the kind of nights that added up to me wanting to go to greener pastures as far as a larger department in a warm climate.
THE CITY IS CALLING
T WAS SNOWING really bad, and I got a stolen car report call. I ended up in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. I finished my report and was walking down the steps toward my patrol car when both feet literally slid forward from underneath me, and I went airborne landing on my back on the snow. The steps had been covered with snow and ice to the extent they were sloping. I laid on my back for what seemed like five minutes looking up at the snowing sky, thinking to myself, I have to get out of this place.
After doing standup comedy for my fellow classmates and then performing with a band after high school graduation, people would tell me you should go to Hollywood. One teacher told me that I should follow my dreams of the entertainment business and go to Hollywood. I was always a fan of the L.A. Lakers since the early 1970’s when Jerry West was playing. I also was a fan of the Oakland Raiders, and for some unknown reason I already had sights on California, even if I wasn’t aware of it.
Like most cops I was inspired by shows like Police Story, Dragnet and Adam 12. I read all the Joseph Wambaugh books. There was a book called Batman and Robin about two wild New York City cops. For some reason, I was infatuated with New York City. I don’t know why, I had never been there. We lived 5 hours from New York. Twenty four years old, and I had never been to New York City.
Although things happened from time to time in Livingston County, it was a very rural small Sheriff’s Department. I had a divorce, and after almost four years of some really lonely nights, I was becoming depressed. One night in the dead of winter I remember being at a U-turn on Route 390 near Dansville during a snowstorm. Two hours went by and I only saw one vehicle, and that was a snowplow. I don’t think that counts. Those freezing winter nights patrolling in the middle of nothing can start to get to you. I started feeding my subconscious mind with a deep desire for going to work at a large metropolitan police agency. I kept that thought constantly on my mind.
The largest Sheriff’s Department in the area where one of my good friends worked was the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department which encompasses the city of Rochester. They have around 200 deputies. I passed the test, but was never called for an interview or to continue with the process. Next, I took the test for the New Yor
k State Troopers. They have about 10 openings for 10,000 applications, and you basically have to score over 95 and they give military credits which can put you over 100. So I knew right away I didn’t score well enough. The City somewhere kept calling me.
I saw an ad in a police magazine for the New York City police exam. I made an application and received my entrance card to take the exam at the Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan. So off to New York by train we went: my mom, aunt Ginny and me. We stayed at the Hotel Lexington. How did we ever not go to New York before this? I fell in love with the city right away. All the sights, sounds and lights. This city is alive with energy, and it was infectious. This was 1982. It would be more than 10 years before Giuliani would become Mayor and clean the city up. Grand Central was not grand when we visited. An amazing building filled with derelicts and homeless. They were laying all over Grand Central Station. There must have been hundreds of the homeless laying around, on benches and on the floor. Times Square was a dangerous place you didn’t want to be around late at night. It was mostly seedy strip clubs and smut shops. On every corner there were aggressive window washers. Angrily turn one away and you might hear the crack of the squeegee across your windshield.