Good Cop: A True Act of Heroism

We’ve seen a lot of “bad cop” news lately, so seeing something good is refreshing.

It seems like the bad stuff has been pervasive, and if you’re like me, it’s hard to overcome. It weighs on me. Despite the passing of time, I keep picturing the New York police officers choking Eric Garner for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. I picture the video of the South Carolina officer shooting Walter Scott in the back as Scott was running away. I picture the Baltimore police giving Freddie Gray a “rough ride” that appears to have broken his spine and killed him.

When you see these videos, it can be hard to have much faith in police. The warm fuzzies are just not easy to conjure up.  Yet enter a new video that you should see. It features Detective Ken Carter, a 12-year veteran of the Evanston Police Department, acting quickly and saving the life of a 22-year-old man who appeared likely to jump from the top of a parking garage.

Det. Ken Carter speaking to WGN TV

This happened over Memorial Day weekend in Evanston, Illinois where I live. On Sunday May 24 about 5 p.m., Detective Carter was off duty. He was out to dinner at a Chili’s Restaurant with his fiancé. As they left the restaurant at Maple Avenue and Clark Street, his fiancé spotted a man standing on a ledge of a nearby parking structure, some 70 feet above the street. 

Carter called his fellow Evanston Police officers, who arrived quickly. They made a plan in which Carter played a key role and managed to pull the young man to safety.

Several Chicago news outlets carried this story following a press release from the Evanston Police department. When I saw Carter’s picture in the newspaper and on WGN-TV, I realized that I see him often at the gym where I work out. We don’t know each other, but I recognized him. I often see him talking to people, smiling and then getting down to business with his exercise routine.

Carter is clearly a fitness guy – a weight lifter. He’s not one of those stereotypical police officers you might picture in the doughnut shop. As a former journalist covering crime in Chicago for several years, I saw plenty of the big-around-the middle officers who certainly were ill-equipped to give any offender a decent chase around the block.

Detective Carter, on the other hand, is a former Marine and member of the Illinois National Guard. He looks like he could chase a bad guy down, tackle him, handcuff him and read him his rights without breaking much of a sweat.

His fitness certainly paid off as did his quick thinking and action. Once on sixth floor of the parking garage, Detective Carter scurried in a crouched position along the base of a short concrete wall toward where the young man stood on the ledge.  Carter moved swiftly, out of view from the young man, while his uniformed colleagues spoke to the man, trying to get him to step down.

Carter said that the young man had thrown his cell phone and wallet down to the street. It appeared he was ready to jump. Without much time to react or waste, Detective Carter closed in, jumped to grab the man and held on while his fellow officers raced in to help.

Security camera footage of the May 24 rescue

Detective Carter told the Chicago Tribune, "I said a prayer, and once I got close enough, I grabbed him and held him and the assisting officers managed to get him off the ledge." He added, “When I grabbed him he kind of lurched forward. I held on for life. It took the assistance of my co-workers to get him off. It was a struggle. He was very upset. He did not want to come off the ledge.”

You can watch a grainy security camera video of the rescue on YouTube (during the first minute, nothing happens, so jump forward to the 1-minute mark of the 2-minute video).

As you will see, the plan worked.  Not only did he save the young man’s life, but through his action, Carter saved others down on the street who also may have been injured. He saved bystanders coming out of restaurants and stores from seeing the disturbing image of a man jump 70 feet to his death on a crowded street.

What an awful sight that certainly would have been.  I have been to that parking garage on Maple Avenue a thousand times. My wife and I walk with our two daughters past that garage constantly. It’s by the movie theater and several popular restaurants.

Detective Carter acted bravely. To me, what he did was heroic, and it’s something that the Evanston Police Department and the City of Evanston should recognize and thank him for. Would everyone do what Detective Carter did – especially on their day off?

As an Evanston resident, I know I feel proud of him. The next time I see him at the gym, I’ll make sure to tell him in person.

Odd Footnote: At the top of the parking garage on Maple Avenue in Evanston where this distraught young man intended to jump is a massive iron sculpture. The sculpture is long beam that spans across the top of the 6-storey, 600-space parking garage. On each end of the beam is an iron silhouette of a person…balancing sort of like a tight-rope walker.

The sculpture certainly is unique and it draws the attention of onlookers below. As I looked up at it a few days ago, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was it suggestive to the extent that it inspired this troubled young man to step up to the garage’s top floor and nearly jump?

Obviously, I don’t know. People are going to do what they’re doing to do. Maybe it’s an outlandish thing to even consider. But I think it’s worth the City of Evanston, in light of this near tragic event, to ask the question of whether in this case life imitating art might be reason enough to consider a change to the public garage that it owns.  

A Blast from the Past

I am getting dressed in the locker room of the gym after my workout. It’s 6 a.m. I’m leaving and a guy next to me has just arrived and is pulling his workout gear out of his bag. All is quiet and sufficiently mundane. Then, he farts.

It’s not a weak, wispy fart, mind you. This is the real deal – a robust, stereophonic, authoritative, almost bellicose fart. It’s equal parts duck snort, a heavy cotton sheet tearing in two and that moist, chaotic reverberation that the last squeeze on a nearly empty plastic ketchup bottle gives up without fail.

I’m standing, pulling on my pants. He’s sitting down, dressed only in his boxer briefs and white socks, wrestling his microfiber t-shirt overhead when his blast rattles and ricochets off the wooden bench, snapping my otherwise drowsy head into rapt attention.

No one else is around. It’s just us. I look over at him. He does absolutely nothing – just keeps getting dressed, sliding on his shirt, shorts and begins lacing up his Nikes. No acknowledgement of me or of the fart. It’s as if nothing happened at all.

A Two-Part Dilemma

So, as I dress, I now have a dilemma – the first of my young day, which until this point has been decidedly routine. This is not a simple dilemma either. It’s a two-part dilemma.

First – do I call out the elephant in the room – or more accurately the elephant fart in the room? Should I acknowledge this profound act of flatulence, or should I just let it slide – write it off as just something men do occasionally in a locker room without any acknowledgement, let alone discussion?

The second part of my dilemma is trickier. I know this guy – the farter. Yet by his passive disregard of me, it appears he’s entirely forgotten who I am. We’ve met before – in fact, multiple times. Let me explain.

His name is Larry. We went to the same high school together – a Jesuit, all-boys school. He was 3 years older than me and served as one of two student aides in my freshman theology class. Mr. Joyce was our teacher, a man of slight stature and a  calming yoga-instructor voice who had impeccably combed wavy brown hair and an impressive array of brightly colored sweaters that he wore regardless of the temperature or season.

I was impressionable then, I guess. Prior to the locker room blast, Larry burned a spot in my cerebral cortex that stores my long-term memory. I, on the other hand, apparently did no such thing to him. I know this because a few years earlier I saw him standing by the coffee lady at the commuter rail station. I shook his hand, introduced myself and reminded him of high school, Mr. Joyce and our mutual theology class. His response was a foggy, polite and a quite perfunctory, “Oh, right…” as he weakly shook my outstretched hand.

While I was nonplussed, I figured, “Well, whatever.” It was 30 years ago. He’s a lawyer now, I learned, during our short chat. I cut him some slack. He’s been busy, plus lawyers need to remember a lot of stuff. We parted ways at the train station that day, yet here we were again, both half-naked in a locker room at 6 a.m. and seated a mere four feet away from me, he unleashes the mother of all farts, then proceeds to pretend it didn’t happen, leaving me with the dilemma I’ve just described.

"Did You Say Something?"

Seconds after Larry’s fart, I felt compelled to speak. Somehow the first response that came into my head was Shrek’s simple but profound, “Better out than in, I always say.”  But I kept quiet.

Then I thought of saying, “Sorry….did you say something?” I held off, though.

I then considered saying, “That’s my point exactly!” but I backed off because it seemed out of place and somehow rude.

Larry was a slow dresser. This afforded me some time to think things over, actually. He was in no hurry. Fortunately for both of us, this atomic gastrointestinal event was curiously odorless. Had it not been, I suspect it would have hastened both of our departures.

As the awkward silence continued, I came to realize quickly that Larry could care less – not just about the fart, but about me. There was no, “Excuse me,” or “Sorry, those Brussels sprouts get me every time” He didn’t come out with even a slightly boastful claim of, “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”  Nothing.

Any of these phrases would have been fine, but he was like a Trappist monk seemingly reflecting in his own mini mental monastery, focusing exclusively now on making the most perfect knot possible in his white shoelace.

My desire to interject faded. I realized that if I were I to speak, I’d need to remind him of our common past. I’d have to mention high school and then the train station. It seemed like a long, burdensome conversation, one entirely not worth having. So, I left.

It’s just as well. I’d heard enough. I needed to start my day. I had no desire to dredge up the past – at least with an unrepentant, flatulent attorney with an aloof demeanor and a sketchy memory to boot.