After Herman was locked in the drunk tank Tracy and Mark headed off to the hospital to get their injuries attended to, Tracy for her bitten finger (and a tetanus shot) Mark for a numbness in his face where he had been hit by Herman. Wayne and I sat down and started work on the small mountain of paperwork that the morning had generated (I often lusted after police in the movies and on TV whose paper work seemed to consisted of a half dozen lines on one sheet of paper if there was anything at all. I also thought that real police work would have been more exciting with a soundtrack but that’s another thing). By this time, Mel arrived for dayshift and we brought him up to speed with what happened.
A few minutes after settling down at the desk, the guard phoned me up and told me that our prisoner had just finished breaking the set of handcuffs joining his handcuffs and shackles and was working on the second pair. Mark was called back from the hospital (Tracy was already being seen) and we all went down to the cells.
I will never forget the look on Herman’s face when I looked in through the window of the drunk tank. He was sitting in the middle of the floor by the drain, a broken set of handcuffs beside him. When I looked in he looked up at me and smiled with a look that was pure, okay I want to say evil because that is what it looked like, but I know it had nothing to do with evil. This was a drunk out of control not some John Wayne Gacy. But it was a look that turned me cold.
We quickly formulated a plan, one of us would grab his hands the other would grab his feet, I’d kneel on his body to pin him to the floor and the last would work on undoing the cuffs and refastening them properly around the shackles. We opened the door and before he could do anything we were on him. My knee was firmly in his back and he was stretched out.
I’m uncomfortable with describing this next part, as what happened might have been an excessive amount of force on our part, had the blow actually struck. The member that was left to do the re-positioning of the handcuffs brought a defensive baton into the cell with him, (by way of an explanation he had been stabbed at a break and enter a couple of years earlier and tended to strike first rather than let something like that happen again). Herman struggled with us as he was stretched out, this member swung the baton at his side, there was no reaction from the hit, and you could see the quizzical look in his face as he swung a second time. This time he got a reaction but not the one he expected. When I put my knee on Herman’s back it stuck over his side by an inch or so, the other member’s blow struck me square on my knee but not wanting to let Herman up I grimaced and took the pain. I didn’t on the second blow.
As I fell off Herman grabbing my knee, the member with the baton dropped into my place. I composed myself and re-positioned the handcuffs. This time he was unable to maneuver them in front of him and eventually he fell asleep, the incident finally over.
Mark went back to the hospital and I followed soon after, when I had done up the charges and remand warrant as my lungs were aching from the after effects of the fire extinguisher. I was fine, but was monitored for chemical pneumonia for a couple of days.
Herman appeared in court late that afternoon, and quickly pled out to the charges, and was sentenced to a total of six months (three months concurrent for the assaults on Mark and Tracy and six months concurrent for assaulting me, because I’m special, or rather because he assaulted me with a weapon). Within days of being released he committed a serious sexual assault in his home town. When I asked him later what he on, he claimed he had only been drinking alcohol, although it was unlike any drunk I’d ever seen before.
Oh, and he asked for some aspirin as he was sore.
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Seems to me you came out of it worse than Herman did, Clare.