Yeardley:  I’m Yeardley.

Zibby:  And I’m Zibby.

Yeardley:  And these are the minisodes.

Zibby:  They’re bite-sized stories.

Yeardley:  About true crime.

[unison]:  That’s it.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Yeardley:  So, Small Town Fam. Today, we have a little minisode for you we’re calling Drinking From A Firehose, where Detective Dan and Detective Dave both tell us about their first days on the job.

Zibby:  We’re really excited about this minisode because you both had unusually eventful and rather epic first days on the job as officers.

Dave:  That’s very true.

Yeardley:  Dan, since you became a police officer first, why don’t we start with you?

Dan:  Okay. This is back several years ago, fresh out of the academy. The first morning, I didn’t know who my field training officer was going to be. And I showed up early to briefing, raring to go. And I’m sitting in the room by myself because seasoned cops show up two minutes before briefing, not 20. So, I’m sitting there, my field training officer comes in, and he’s a 30-year veteran. I meet him and we sit down to briefing, which lasts a half hour. After briefing, he kind of pulls me aside and gives me his speech that he gives to every new officer, what he expects from me and what this job is really all about.

Yeardley:  What did that sound like?

Dan:  The main lesson that he wanted to impart on me from beginning, going forward, was every decision I need to make is based on time, place, and circumstance. And he drilled that in me, time, place, and circumstance is how you make decisions in this job.

Yeardley:  Meaning what?

Dan:  Everything’s not black and white. We have incredible discretion as police officers, and you need to respect that and keep those things in mind when you’re dealing with a juvenile or a victim or a suspect. How can we make the best impact on a situation? And it’s based on those decisions, time, place, and circumstance. So, he really drilled that into me, and I appreciate that. That’s something that I carried with me throughout my whole career. So, I’m going to say it’s about 11:30 in the morning, we’re on day shift, and a mailman comes to this house to deliver the mail. And inside flags up on the mailbox, saying, “There’s outgoing mail,” and there’s a note inside, and it says, “I’ve killed myself. Call the police. The keys under the mat.”

Yeardley:  Oh.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Dan:  So the mailman calls the police. This is a Code 3 run. This is lights and sirens. So we arrive, two other units arrive, and this is literally the first call that I’m going to ever. And my FTO, Dan, his name is Dan also. My FTO walks up to the front door, looks under the mat and there’s a key there.

Yeardley:  Just like the note says.

Dan:  Just like the note says. So, four of us stack up at the door. We make several announcements before we use the key to open the door. So these guys, they’ve been around the block a time or two. They go in and they clear the house. Well, I’m fresh out of the academy, so I’m following the academy’s way of searching things. And the first door that I come to is the door that you can access the garage from inside the house.

[unison]: Mm-hmm.

Dan:  These other guys went off to other bedrooms and I’m guessing it’s a 1200 square-foot house, it’s not huge. I don’t pass this door. These other guys split up. And all I keep hearing from other parts of the house is, “clear, clear, clear.”

Yeardley:  And you are making sure that nobody else is in the house with any weapons that might bring harm to you or other people.

Dan:  Yes. And maybe we encounter this person who left the note. Any and all options are open. So, we get to the last door and everybody kind of meets back up in the living room, the middle of the house, and they all look at each other. “Well, did you find.” “I didn’t find anything. Did you find anything?” And then they look over at me and I point out the door to the garage and I said, “Well, we haven’t checked this door yet.” And one of the veteran officers comes over to me and gives me the look like, “You’re going to open the door on the count of three and I’m going to slice the pie,” which is what we call basically you’re using the angle of that doorway so you’re not presenting yourself right in the middle of the doorway just in case this guy wants to have a shootout with the police.

Yeardley:  You don’t open the door wide when you first open it?

Dan:  No, I open it all the way, but I’m standing to the side. I’m not presenting myself in the funnel.

Yeardley:  I see.

Zibby:  And that’s called slicing the pie.

Dan:  Slicing the pie. So, as you move around the corner of that doorway, you can begin to see more and more of that room. I’ve got my back to the wall where this garage is, and I’m watching his eyes scan the room and he’s probably slicing the pie for 5 to 10 seconds. And all of a sudden, he looks at me and says, “Take a look.” And I peek around the corner and this gentleman is obviously deceased on the ground. There’s a gun tucked up under his chin, which was odd for me to see. You can tell he’s in rigor because one of his legs is slightly stuck in the air. So, he’s fully on his back. He’s got the gun tucked up under his chin in his hand still, but he’s got a bullet hole on his forehead, and there’s a large pool of blood around him. And this is my introduction to law enforcement.

Yeardley: Jesus.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Dan:  So the next thing to do is, let’s figure out is this foul play or is this indeed a suicide? So, we go back out into the kitchen. We find that he’s got all of his bills in order. He had a big fish tank with several fish in there, so he had care instructions for his fish and he even had all of his medical paperwork. So, he was suffering from some chronic conditions that I think made life really miserable for him.

Zibby:  Like chronic pain?

Dan:  Chronic pain, yeah. And I think he just had enough. He couldn’t deal with it anymore.

Zibby:  Did he have a family?

Dan:  None that I knew of. So, the other thing that he had was he had a check made out for a local funeral home for his cremation even.

Zibby:  Oh, my God.

Dan:  Because he didn’t want to burden anybody else with the expense.

Yeardley:  Do you call the medics even though he’s obviously dead? What happens in that situation?

Dan:  We call the medical examiner. Any suicide or violent death like this, the medical examiner is going to come out for sure. Medical examiner shows up. We do our initial investigation. Medical examiner’s there says, “I believe this is a suicide.” And now it’s time to retrieve the weapon from this dead man’s hand. And my coach looks at me and says, “Hey, do you have a pair of gloves? Latex gloves, right?” I said, “Yeah.” And I reach in my pocket, and I pull him out, and he says, “Good. You should put those on.” I put them on, and he says, “Now go get that gun out of his hand and make sure it doesn’t go off.”

Zibby:  Come on.

Yeardley:  Oh!

Zibby:  it’s not the medical examiner’s job to remove the gun or handle the body.

Dan:  No.

Zibby:  I didn’t know that. Why do you have to do it?

Dan:  Well, they’re responsible for the body, and they will move it around to check for ID in some situations, look for wounds, things like that. But in this case, the gun, that’s a piece of evidence that we’re going to be seizing. And my FTO, my field training officer, also took this as a training opportunity for me to go secure the weapon correctly. And I’m so brand new, I’m terrified. I’m not scared that I’m going to be touching this deceased person, but I’m terrified that I’m going to make a mistake, and I don’t want to make a mistake. So I go down there, he’s in rigor, and I have to break the rigor on his fingers to get the gun out of his hand.

[unison]  Oh.

Zibby:  Was that the first deceased body you had come across?

Dan:  I’d seen them in traffic accidents before as a civilian, but never close enough.

Zibby:  And you certainly hadn’t dealt with a body in rigor until that moment.

Dan:  Correct.

Zibby:  Which I hear is a very specific sensation.

Dan:  Yeah. It’s disgusting.

Yeardley:  You have to break the fingers to get the gun out? Yes.

Dan:  You’re not physically fracturing the fingers, but you’re having to break that tension. It’s called breaking the rigor.

Zibby:  It makes a noise, doesn’t it?

Dan:  It does more of the noise than the sensation while you’re breaking it, you can feel it, it reverberates through your body.

Zibby:  The description of the victim’s position when you found him sounded kind of odd.

Dan:  Yeah. The fact that gun had kind of jammed up under his chin. We were trying to explain that. He was seated, so his leg straight out in front of him. He had shot himself in the forehead, and when he fell back, the gun and his hand kind of bounced against the ground, and the recoil from that caused the gun to kind of rest up under his chin. So, we were able to explain that away.

Zibby:  How old was he, by the way?

Dan:  He was in his 50s. And by all accounts from the neighbors, a very nice old man who was dealing with pain constantly. And it’s really sad that, that’s the only solution he could think of.

Zibby:  Yeah.

Dan:  So after that call, my coach wants to check on me and see if I’m okay.

Zibby:  “Were you?”

Dan:  I was. And he told me, in fact, it’s pretty rare that somebody on their first day, on their first call encounters something like that. I want to make sure that we talk this out. So we went and parked for a good hour, and we talked about it, which I really respect that he did that with me, and I was able to process that.

Yeardley:  That is so much to happen on your first day. But as we understand it, your first week on the job didn’t necessarily get any lighter.

Dan:  Yeah. Fast forward two days, now it’s day three, mid-morning. I’ve been on shift for a few hours, and we’ve handled a few calls, and then the next call we get is infant not breathing, and that is another Code 3, lights and siren call that we go to. And as I arrive, the medics have literally just pulled up and one of them ran inside the house, grabbed the child, came running back outside, and off they go with this child. I was able to see the child from a few feet away, and it was blue. It looked horrible. I won’t ever forget that image, that color.

Zibby:  Oh, dear. What does that mean? What happened to the child?

Dan:  The child died. It was dead at that point. But what the medics were trying to do is, let’s get this child to the hospital, because children are actually pretty resilient when it comes to things like that. And they’ve had success in the past of reviving them, even when they haven’t been breathing for a while. This case, the child did not survive. And Dave and I are pretty outspoken when it comes to co-sleeping. This was one of those cases. It was a co-sleeping case. This child was one day old.

Zibby:  My God.

Dan:  And the parents had slept with the child between them. They had been using meth.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Dan:  And they passed out and they rolled over onto the child and woke up several hours later. And obviously this child doesn’t have the lung capacity and the strength to breathe when someone’s laying on it, so it suffocated. That was a really rude awakening for me, was this is a reality and this is something you’re going to be dealing with from now on. And again, my coach, we go talk and he says, “This isn’t going to be the last time you encounter this. I don’t want you to ever get used to it, but you need to know that this is going to happen again. And this is why I think Drinking From A Firehose is a good analogy to this. It’s just so much you’re trying to absorb, so much that it’s impossible to absorb it all.

Zibby:  Yeah. What a grim way to enter the field, Dan.

Dan:  Yeah. It was eye opening, to say the least.

Zibby:  Did it leave you feeling apprehensive about the career you’d chosen, or did you feel encouraged and emboldened somehow?

Dan:  I felt encouraged because it didn’t break me, and I was really interested in how I can learn from these experiences, also I don’t ever want that to happen again. And I’ve said before on this podcast, I’ve seen so many times where co-sleeping has led to the death of an infant that it’s maddening to me. And every time drugs are involved, it really pisses you off as an officer because you see it so many times.

Yeardley:  And it’s so avoidable.

Dan:  It is. It absolutely is.

Yeardley:  Wow.

Zibby:  Yeah. Thank you for your service, gentlemen.

Yeardley:  Yes, thank you.

[music]

Yeardley:  Small Town Dicks is produced by Zibby Allen and Yeardley Smith for Paperclip Limited.

Zibby:  This minisode was edited by Soren Begin, Logan Heftel, Yeardley Smith, and Zibby Allen.

Yeardley:  Music for the show was composed by John Forrest. Our associate producer is Erin Gaynor, and our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.

Zibby:  If you like what you hear and want to stay up to date with the show, consider visiting us at smalltowndicks.com.

Yeardley:  And feel free to subscribe to us on YouTube to see trailers for past and forthcoming episodes.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]