Read Online Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ralph Sarchie
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his arm. Call it a cop’s instinct, but I knew something was wrong, so I strapped on my gun and went down to investigate. Then the guy started zigzagging down the street, the typical body language for a 10–30, police radio jargon for a robbery. I started running too, sure some poor soul—probably the nice storeowner down the block who’d been a frequent target of bandits—had been relieved of his valuables.
With all the running I did during my baseball playing, I caught the guy pretty quickly. The box tumbled to the ground, and jewelry spilled out. That was enough probable cause for me, so I drew my gun and identified myself as a police officer. The guy seemed meek and was shaking all over, but he suddenly grabbed my gun and got a round off.
Although I took a pretty good hit in the arm, and blood was everywhere, I managed to slam the guy against a chain-link fence and tried to wrestle my gun away from him. I knew if I didn’t, his next shot might be the last sound I ever heard. After a lot of screaming on his part, and bleeding on mine, I got my weapon back, but the guy got away. Somebody called 911, and more cops and an ambulance showed up in no time. I gave the anticrime unit (plainclothes cops) the best description I could of the perp—who was arrested two weeks later, and pled guilty to the attempted murder of a police officer—then let the paramedics put me on a stretcher.
With all that blood on the pavement, you’d think I’d had a major brush with death. Luckily, the wound turned out not to be that serious: The scar is now hidden under a tattoo reproducing a photo of my daughter Daniella’s face, at age three. I also have a portrait of my other daughter, Christina, on the same arm. I love having pictures of my kids there because no matter how old they get, I’ll always remember them as my little girls.
While I was at the hospital, the police chaplain came in case I needed the Last Rites. Talking to that priest made me feel guilty: I’d let my Catholic faith lapse after my days as an altar boy and rarely attended church or received communion anymore. In those days, religion just didn’t seem that important or relevant to me. I was working in a violent, dangerous environment that seemed to have little to do with God. My first assignment, Operation Pressure Point, landed me in Manhattan’s drug-infested Lower East Side to combat street crimes. There I saw “demons” in human flesh, predators who spent their days and nights robbing, raping, and killing their fellow citizens. Of course there were plenty of good people in this inner-city neighborhood too, but I rarely met them unless they’d been the victims of some ghastly crime.
People who are skeptical about religion often ask how I can believe in God at all. They see that the world around them is full of corruption and violence, and say, “What kind of God would allow evil to happen?” Even when my faith was at a low point, I never thought this way. What these people don’t understand is free will. God doesn’t interfere with people’s decisions in life, because He doesn’t want robots: He wants us to choose Him. But there’s a stumbling block along the way—and that’s the Devil. When people deny the existence of God, how can they possibly believe in His most potent adversary? But if anything, all this horror shows just how real the Devil, and the evil he inspires, is. It wears away at even the most devout cop: Alcohol abuse, divorce, and suicide are common among my fellow officers—and on every police force in the world.
Although I felt good about helping get crooks off the streets—first in the Lower East Side, then in the slums of the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn (East New York), and now as a sergeant in the Bronx again, where I work the midnight-to-8:00 A.M . shift in the Forty-sixth Precinct—the savagery never stops. Although the Four-Six—“the Alamo,” as this precinct is known by cops—is only 1.32 square miles
With all the running I did during my baseball playing, I caught the guy pretty quickly. The box tumbled to the ground, and jewelry spilled out. That was enough probable cause for me, so I drew my gun and identified myself as a police officer. The guy seemed meek and was shaking all over, but he suddenly grabbed my gun and got a round off.
Although I took a pretty good hit in the arm, and blood was everywhere, I managed to slam the guy against a chain-link fence and tried to wrestle my gun away from him. I knew if I didn’t, his next shot might be the last sound I ever heard. After a lot of screaming on his part, and bleeding on mine, I got my weapon back, but the guy got away. Somebody called 911, and more cops and an ambulance showed up in no time. I gave the anticrime unit (plainclothes cops) the best description I could of the perp—who was arrested two weeks later, and pled guilty to the attempted murder of a police officer—then let the paramedics put me on a stretcher.
With all that blood on the pavement, you’d think I’d had a major brush with death. Luckily, the wound turned out not to be that serious: The scar is now hidden under a tattoo reproducing a photo of my daughter Daniella’s face, at age three. I also have a portrait of my other daughter, Christina, on the same arm. I love having pictures of my kids there because no matter how old they get, I’ll always remember them as my little girls.
While I was at the hospital, the police chaplain came in case I needed the Last Rites. Talking to that priest made me feel guilty: I’d let my Catholic faith lapse after my days as an altar boy and rarely attended church or received communion anymore. In those days, religion just didn’t seem that important or relevant to me. I was working in a violent, dangerous environment that seemed to have little to do with God. My first assignment, Operation Pressure Point, landed me in Manhattan’s drug-infested Lower East Side to combat street crimes. There I saw “demons” in human flesh, predators who spent their days and nights robbing, raping, and killing their fellow citizens. Of course there were plenty of good people in this inner-city neighborhood too, but I rarely met them unless they’d been the victims of some ghastly crime.
People who are skeptical about religion often ask how I can believe in God at all. They see that the world around them is full of corruption and violence, and say, “What kind of God would allow evil to happen?” Even when my faith was at a low point, I never thought this way. What these people don’t understand is free will. God doesn’t interfere with people’s decisions in life, because He doesn’t want robots: He wants us to choose Him. But there’s a stumbling block along the way—and that’s the Devil. When people deny the existence of God, how can they possibly believe in His most potent adversary? But if anything, all this horror shows just how real the Devil, and the evil he inspires, is. It wears away at even the most devout cop: Alcohol abuse, divorce, and suicide are common among my fellow officers—and on every police force in the world.
Although I felt good about helping get crooks off the streets—first in the Lower East Side, then in the slums of the South Bronx and Brownsville, Brooklyn (East New York), and now as a sergeant in the Bronx again, where I work the midnight-to-8:00 A.M . shift in the Forty-sixth Precinct—the savagery never stops. Although the Four-Six—“the Alamo,” as this precinct is known by cops—is only 1.32 square miles
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