It was late August 1980, brutally hot, the kind of Los Angeles heat that made the pavement shimmer and turned a wool uniform into a portable furnace.
I was still in the Police Academy, about a month away from graduation, and I was closer to 21 than 22 years old.
That afternoon I was wearing a brand-new LAPD uniform: wool pants, a long-sleeved wool shirt, a tie, polished shoes, and brass that gleamed in the sunlight. Every crease was sharp. Every stitch was exactly where it was supposed to be. Everything met academy standards. I looked like a police officer, but I just wasn't one yet.
This was my first academy ride-along.
I reported to Newton Division for the PM watch. Roll call began at 2:45 p.m. for a watch that officially started at 3:30. During roll call I was assigned to 13A55 with two senior officers. The training officer drove. Another experienced officer rode in the front passenger seat. I occupied the back seat, there to observe and learn what police work was really like.
Newton Station sat on Newton Street directly across from the Coca-Cola plant. The massive building was designed to resemble an ocean liner. Even today, I remember thinking it looked as though somebody had picked up a giant ship and dropped it in the middle of an industrial district filled with warehouses, loading docks, railroad tracks, and endless stretches of concrete.
We had barely cleared the station parking lot when the radio came alive.
"Ambulance shooting, 42nd and Central. Code 3."
I knew what a shooting was, and I knew what an ambulance was, but I didn't yet understand what "ambulance shooting" meant.
The training officer immediately activated the lights and siren.
Our black-and-white was a 1978 Plymouth Fury, one of the muscle cars of the 1960s and 1970s repurposed as a police car. It had white doors, a black body, and "To Protect and To Serve" painted on the side. Mounted on the roof were two light canisters, one over the driver and one over the passenger. Each displayed solid red lights forward and flashing amber lights to the rear. Between them sat the siren. We called the lights mouse ears because they looked like Mickey Mouse ears sitting on top of the car.
The mouse ears came alive, the siren wound up, and we rolled onto Newton Street before turning south onto Central Avenue. From there it was almost a straight shot to 42nd Street, roughly 30 blocks away.
The training officer furiously drove through traffic while the siren echoed off buildings and cars scrambled out of our way. Every lane change threw me across the vinyl rear seat. I bounced from one side to the other, grabbing whatever I could hold onto while trying to look like I belonged there. The ride seemed to take forever and no time at all.
Then we arrived. In my memory, there were thousands of people. Realistically, it was probably hundreds. But to a young academy recruit, closer to 21 than 22, wearing a brand-new uniform and seeing his first shooting victim, it looked like the entire city had gathered at 42nd and Central.
People filled the sidewalks. They spilled into the street. They crowded parking lots and storefronts. The August heat hung over everything, and the air was thick with exhaust, sweat, hot asphalt, and fear.
In the middle of all that was a river of dark red blood. Not a puddle. A river. So much blood that it looked as though there should have been four bodies instead of one. I had never seen anything remotely like it—not in the academy, not in training films, not anywhere.
The victim lay face down in the gutter, unconscious.
The ambulance and fire department arrived almost simultaneously. Paramedics immediately rolled him over and began working on him. CPR started at once. While one paramedic compressed his chest, others worked around him, preparing equipment and getting him onto a gurney.
The crowd pressed closer. The heat was oppressive. The noise was constant. The scene felt completely out of control. Then the training officer grabbed me by the arm and pulled me close and said, "Get in the ambulance. Write down anything he says."
He was sending me to take a dying declaration. If the victim regained consciousness and identified his attacker, his words could become evidence. My job was simple: listen and write. So I climbed into the back of the ambulance.
CPR continued throughout the entire trip to the hospital. The victim never regained consciousness.
I was less than thirty minutes into my first shift ride-along and already on my second ride with lights and siren. Looking back, that was extraordinarily unusual, but then everything about that afternoon was unusual.
One paramedic worked over him continuously while another managed equipment and medications. The ambulance raced through traffic Code 3, rocking violently through intersections and around corners. Equipment rattled. Radios crackled. Orders were shouted over the siren. I sat where I could, trying to stay out of the way while watching everything unfold. Outside was heat, noise, and movement. Inside was urgency. Through it all, the victim never opened his eyes, said a word, or did anything to show he was conscious of his surroundings.
When we reached the hospital, the rear doors flew open. The paramedics jumped out and started rolling the gurney toward the emergency room, and I followed right behind them. The transition was immediate. One moment we were in the suffocating August heat surrounded by an uncontrolled crowd. The next we stepped into the cold, sterile air of the emergency room.
The contrast was startling. Outside, the chaos had been raw and emotional. Inside, the chaos was disciplined. Doctors, nurses, technicians, and paramedics moved rapidly in every direction, but every movement had purpose. Orders were given calmly. Equipment appeared instantly. People flowed around one another with practiced precision.
The victim was rushed into a trauma room. CPR continued. No signs of life. I followed and took a position against the wall with my notebook ready.
The medical team began preparing for an open-heart massage. Instruments were brought in. Staff prepared the victim's chest. Antiseptic solution was applied. Equipment was arranged and checked. Everyone was moving quickly. Then a nurse stepped forward carrying a catheter.
As God is my witness, the moment she began inserting it, the victim suddenly sat bolt upright. His eyes opened wide. He reached out and grabbed the nurse by the wrist. In a perfectly clear voice, he said: "What's your trip, bitch?"
Then he collapsed backward onto the bed. For a fraction of a second, the room seemed to freeze. Then everyone went right back to work. Moments later, the doctors opened his chest with rib spreaders and began performing open-heart massage.
They did everything they could. The victim never regained consciousness. He never spoke another word. And despite every effort in that room, he died. Standing against that wall, I wrote down exactly what he had said.
Those words became the first entry in the first officer's notebook I ever carried.
More than two decades later, on the day I retired, I still had that notebook.
The first thing I had ever written down as a police officer was still there, preserved in fading pencil on aging paper:
"What's your trip, bitch?"
Those were not the most important words I would hear during my career. They were not the saddest. They were not the last.
But they were the first.
And they were my introduction to policing.
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