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Killing time in the Batcave the other day I came across some items from my treasury of best-loved crimes of the Twentieth Century, from which I’ve decided to cull the following Wild West episode1 to provide a sample of the kind of thing I used to investigate in my days as a city cop charged with visiting the scenes of “unusual occurrences” and trying to bring order out of chaos by determining what really happened when the guns came out and the shooting started.
For someone brought up on New York newspapers the idea of a gunfight as a major public event like a bullfight in Spain, requiring extensive reporting with no details omitted, was not new. My boyhood was illuminated by the front pages that showed the murder of a cop in midtown Manhattan by the “Mad Dog” (of course) Esposito brothers, the death of Officer Oetheimer in the Astoria subway station at the hands of other killers, and of course the classic siege story of Two-Gun Crowley enacted in Washington Heights. This actually happened in 1930 in my infancy, but it was still being remembered ten years later and what’s more Jimmy Cagney had reenacted it in the movies, thereby engraving it in the memory of every boy in the city.
So I expected this kind of thing and wasn’t surprised whenever I found myself part of the tradition and holding an inquest over yet another shootout of the historic New York kind.
Like the following one which I’ll describe using the report I made at the time.
My first paragraph has an outline of the main facts, as procedure required. They’re on the grim side. A nineteen-year-old boy named Wayne Merkison, from the Astoria Houses on 1st Street (Crowley was nineteen; Oetheimer died in Astoria) was trapped on a rooftop near home holding a Chinese woman hostage with a .25 caliber automatic at her head. She was a waitress in the Chinese restaurant where he’d escaped from a robbery. Now she was his hostage. Two cops were crouched behind a low wall twenty feet away looking for a clear shot that wouldn’t kill the hostage instead of the robber. Other cops were on the stairway behind the closed door to the roof, praying hard that the door was bulletproof, whoever fired on the roof.
The hostage had wriggled free once and one cop fired over her head, but Merkison recovered her and dragged her inside, immediately emerging when he heard the posse below charging up the stairs to reach the roof. Now the roof standoff continued, with the girl continuing to resist, from panic, I suppose, because she couldn’t be sure he wanted a hostage so bad he wouldn’t shoot her.
Maybe he did, because she once more got out of his grip and went to the deck on all fours, leaving Merkison fully exposed to the two cops, who both fired. Though hit, he managed to seize the girl again and even drag her inside the door, where she was taken from him by the cops, who came out on the roof to tell the men there he was being held inside.
The outline of all this was in my first paragraph, which also reported that he had been removed to Elmhurst General Hospital with a gunshot wound in the head from which he “was not expected to recover”.
Presumably he did not recover, but as I’ve said before about these reports, I did not do the follow-up work, so sometimes loose ends accumulated in them. So I never found out what finally happened to some people who had been the main actors in some incident over which I’d labored for hours to produce a coherent report. It didn’t matter: something else was bound to come along to make me forget it..
Merkison’s outcome was an unavoidable loose end which couldn’t be helped. He wouldn’t live or die to satisfy any deadline of mine. At the same time, though, there was no excuse for leaving avoidable loose ends. So we went into the questions we always asked: How’d this all start? Where? Who were the first cops on the scene? What’d they do? Then what? What about witnesses? What about evidence? Recover any? Anyone else involved I don’t know about? Okay, you first, officer. Let’s hear what you’ve got to say.
So the process begins. Gradually the story emerges. Merkison stuck to 30th Ave., ten blocks from his home. He jumped a grocery store at six o’ clock, getting $65 with his automatic. Two hours later he hit another bodega on 30th, getting $140. This time he was spotted, escaping on a bicycle. Wrong move. An off-duty cop saw the pursuit and intercepted him, getting shot in the foot for his pains, but causing Merkison to lose his bike and start running, followed by a volley of shots.
His next stop was the restaurant, where he tried to take a male waiter hostage, but wound up with the woman, whom he dragged up the four stories to the roof and his (probable) demise. At nineteen. For $205. Vouchered under Control No. A491293.
We were into the wee hours of the morning before we got it all laid out in a way to fit the pattern the department expected. We went from the beginning to the middle to the end, concluding that everyone had done his job in the prescribed manner, with no collateral damage to anyone. The scene had been examined and photographed in accord with regulations, the automatic and other evidence had been wrapped, tagged, marked and sealed as required, the chain of command of the Police Dept. had been notified from top to bottom, and so had the office of the Mayor and the District Attorney. There were no signs of community unrest as a result of the unfortunate incident, although a white cop shooting a black teenager has been known to cause this sometimes. A lot of times in fact. But not yet when the teenager is shot in the act of firing a gun himself while holding a hostage by her neck.
Re-reading this after many years, I now notice one omission from an extensive report. There’s no mention of a notification to Merkison’s parents. It must have been made or at least attempted (generating a Missing Persons case), but why’d we leave it out? Incongruity maybe? Now I’ll never know.
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