By Joseph Galbo
SPC Alumnus, ‘08
That’s what Unit-11 said to me as he was leaving Central. I had only met him two minutes ago.
Unit-8 laughed, “That’s the best advice you can give our new guy?”
“Yeah,” said Unit-11, “Seriously.”
I had only been on the job for 3 days and already I could tell my time on the Harlem Co-Op’s security force was not going to be just some other lazy night job.  When the type of advice your co-workers toss around is, “Crack some n*gga’s skulls.” you know immediately that you are in some serious stuff.
Unit-11 had done some skull cracking himself. Some time ago two armed robbers had ran through the MHHC grounds. Unit-11 had caught the fatter one in the Lasalle St. parking lot. The guy was clearly out of breath and, wanting to save himself from a more serious charge, tossed his gun away when he saw Unit-11 approach. Unit-11 tossed the guy against a car and held him until NYPD arrived. He got a medal for his trouble.
I thought to myself how not ready I was to be cracking anyone’s skull. How just a few weeks ago I was unhappily mopping floors and pulling dirty diapers out of trash compactors. Then, it seemed like my life was at a dead end but, at least I knew I was going home everyday. This job already had an interesting start.
It was my first day. I had been in uniform for only three hours. S-1, my sergeant, had assigned me to Post 3, the busiest post during the night. I am sure he did not want to but, I had not learned anything about working at Central. With only 3 people on staff, including himself, he was seriously short handed. As I would learn, this is the normal amount of people for a Sunday night into Monday morning shift. Permanently short handed, that is how this place rolls.
I had just finished unlocking the Metfood gate on the corner of Amsterdam and Lasalle. The sanitation workers were picking up the cardboard like they always did. Everything was “96,” status normal.
The sergeant came down to talk to me about making sure the gate was relocked once they were finished. He turned, and then paused.
“Come with me.” He said.
And so I did. Happily.
‚ÄúWe got a call from one of the apartments. Man says he needs to go to the hospital. I don‚Äôt know why he called us instead of 911, but…‚Äù
I thought the same thing. 911 is so much easier to dial than a 10 digit security office number, but I was glad to have the opportunity to go meet some people. So far every resident I’d met was really nice.
“I’m bringing you along because it’s always good to have a witness with you. I could be doing this by myself, but you never know what’s going to happen.”
The logic worked for me. Normal cops have partners. I would never want to check out an apartment by myself to begin with.
We took the elevator up to the resident’s floor. Their apartment sat at the end of the shorter side of the hallway. Each hallway on every floor looks exactly the same. Beige walls, black tile floors and red doors. The fluorescent lights give everything a weird sort of glow. It is hot in the hallways, the ventilation fans are still the originals from the 1950’s when the place was built. On some floors, if there was an exceptionally large number of old people, you could smell it. It’s never cool in the hallways. During the summer mopping was horrendous even when the uniform was just a t-shirt. Now, just walking to the door, wearing long johns, uniform pants, turtle neck, dress shirt, bullet proof vest and my winter jacket
I felt like a moving pile of slush.
It’s a short walk from the elevator and we get to the resident’s door. On it, is a blue Amnesty International sticker, as well as some kid’s drawing of a house with a list of names next to it. Probably the resident’s grand kids. The name on the door read, *.****. A pretty epic name I thought. S-1 knocked.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
No response.
Again… Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Silence.
I was surprised with how suddenly my body told me that something was not right. My back got stiff, and I felt my muscles tense. I became alert, aware, like I had just caught myself nodding off behind the wheel. Some one from this apartment had called asking for help. Now, they were not answering.
“S-1 to Central.” The sergeant calmly said into the radio.
“Central proceed.”
“**.**** is not answering, call EMS.”
“10 Р4.”
The sergeant pulled out his key ring and began trying keys on the door. I had seen this before, well, sort of, it’s a little different when you’re working maintenance at a small New Jersey college, bringing the exterminator around. It took him a little while, but eventually.
*Click*. The door slowly opened.
S-1 went in first and looked around. I followed immediately behind.
The apartment was a sh*t hole, for lack of a better expression. Papers, boxes, clothes, food, things… things strewn everywhere. Bugs crawling on the counter tops. Lights left on. The hallway and floors clogged with so much stuff it was almost impossible to walk without stepping on something.
I heard S-1 kick a box and checked to see if he was OK. Looking down to see what he had tripped on, I noticed that he had something red stuck to his shoe. I could not quite tell what it was, but my imagination was already filling in the pieces for me. I got that same tensed up feeling again. The one I had just had standing outside the silent door. He turned the corner and…
“Oh sh*t.”
I followed, reluctantly, in his footsteps. Looking down to make sure I did not step on any of the other blood soaked napkins that were strewn on the ground. The floor itself turned from black to red. Foot prints, smears…
“Dry,” I kept saying to myself, “it’s all dry.”
A light was on in the bathroom, I was watching where I stepped. I prepared myself to see a body, I prepared myself to see something dismembered. I felt my stomach turn and got ready to throw up. I feel faint, the floor got redder… I looked up…
I thought of Willem Dafoe…
“It was a f*cking slaughter.”
And it was. It was a f*cking slaughter.
It was tragic. It was dynamic. It was the sight of the century. It was my own little 9/11 in a room the size of your average closet. Murder. Murder is what it looked like. Someone had been murdered here in this bathroom. I was speechless, just starring at it, just starring at the floor.
I’d never seen this much blood before, anywhere.
There were finger marks where someone’s hands had smeared the wall. Red lines ran down the bowl of the toilet. The sink looked like blood had somehow overflowed down the wash basin. The whole scene, reminded me of some sort of hellish operating room. It was covered, covered in blood. The initial shock leapt out of my body with two words, “Holy shit.” I looked at S-1 whose stoicism gave me some courage. My stomach turned again and calibrated itself. There would be no vomit today.
S-1 radioed to Central.
“Central, call NYPD.”
“10-4.”
He turned and walked past me.
“Oh boy Galbo! Your first day!”
I laughed. He was right. What a way to begin. I turned from the bathroom and followed him back into the hall.
“You got a flashlight? Sarge asked.
“Yes, sir.”
He took my light and started searching the dark parts of the apartment…
“This guy is in here somewhere.”
We looked, he was not. Whoever had called Central saying they needed an ambulance was gone. The Sarge handed me back my light.
“Sergeant!” I barked out a lot louder than I should have, “I have a camera if you want me to take some pictures.”
“Yeah, do that.” He said, “The pictures will be good.”
I snapped some shots of the bedroom. There was a faint trail of blood leading from there, to the hall, into the bathroom. But, those pictures were nothing. The bathroom was the apartment’s Grand Canyon. The floor, the walls, the sink, everything. It was a photo junkie’s dream. Only few types of people had seen sights like this. EMT’s, cops, photographers who work with cops, and those people crazy enough to travel to war zones in search of sh*t like this. It was something I had never expected to see.
I finished up and we waited in the apartment for the police to arrive. The phone rang once, but it was just the EMS calling to say that they were on their way. There were no signs of a struggle. No bloody knife lying around. No blood leading up to the apartment and no blood on the doorknob.
I thought to myself, ‚ÄúSuicide, for sure.‚Äù But there was no body. After about 10 minutes NYPD arrived and Sarge went downstairs to let the cops in. He told me to stand guard outside of the apartment. Immediately I thought that whoever had killed **.**** was going to come back for me and I would be forced to defend myself with the only weapons I had… my Maglight flashlight and also, my Zebra pens.
Not two minutes went by and I heard Sarge over the radio.
“Central, I’m downstairs with NYPD and **.**** they’re going to take him to the hospital.”
If I’d ever had a “What the f*ck?” moment in my life, this was it.
“S-1 to Unit 12 (my call sign assigned to me when I was hired).”
“Unit 12, go ahead S-1.”
“We have **.**** downstairs in the lobby, secure the apartment and return to Post 3.”
Securing the apartment consisted of locking the door and shutting it behind me. It was easy enough for me to do, but I was not done with that apartment just yet.
Acting on what I could only guess to be impulse, I went back in. I went back in to get some video of the hallway, floor and bathroom. I did not really have any good reason too, except that I knew that digital video cameras perform better in low light situations. It seemed like a good idea at the time, it really did. But, I had not closed the door behind me for more than 2 seconds when I was overcome with the worst fear I had felt since this ordeal began. I was totally alone, in a creepy, dirty apartment, with a room that looked like someone had died in it. It took more concentration than I expected to get myself focused again. Getting the right shots and making sure I did not disturb anything.
I followed the blood from the bedroom to the bathroom and then, once there, found every last streak of red I could. I don’t know if it makes me messed up or not. I do not know what my motivation was for going back to get better footage. I am pretty sure most of it was me just wanting to do a good job, but I still question myself about it pretty much everyday.
When I was looking at the pictures of the bathroom floor the next day, I could not help but find myself being reminded of clouds. If you looked close into that dried bloody floor, you could definitely see patterns, images, kind of like staring at clouds in the summer. There is really nothing to them except moisture and air. But, in them, you will see people, you will see animals, you will see ships and castles and other things.
Blood, this dried up, smelly blood, was almost the same. There was really nothing there. Just dead cells and shades of red. But, in it, I saw fear, I saw naivety, I saw discomfort and anxiety. The things within myself that I had only seen in the most vulnerable moments of my life. Here they were on a tile floor, revealing themselves to me in the most twisted and unexpected of ways.
Fortunately or unfortunately (depending on whether or not you are my mother) the truth behind this story is much less exciting than the find. **.**** had been urinating blood, they claim, for most of the day. The amount of blood and its dryness beg to differ, but I have yet to hear anything to the contrary. I’m not a detective so I have not tried to follow up on the ordeal. All I know is, when my parents are old, I will do a much better job of caring for them. This resident clearly had no one.
I filled out my paper work, wrote my first incident report and spent the rest of the night thinking about everything that had happened. S-1 was right. It was one hell of a first day.
Day 3 and I am watching Unit-11 go to his post. “Crack some n*gga’s skulls.” That was what he said. If this job is nothing else, besides a steady pay check, it is an introduction into a world that I’ve only ever seen in movies and on television. It has given me a tiny taste of what it is like to be faced with real horror. To be witness to real tragedy. To maybe have to toss someone into a car or a wall and hold them until the cavalry arrives. To stand alone staring at a blood covered room, in a dark apartment.
I am sure there are some who are reading this who are probably surprised, maybe even slightly disgusted. I am also sure there are some who have seen things like this so much that it does not bother them anymore.
I am torn. I do not know who has it better. And worse, by the time I am done with this job and moved into some sort of media work, I do not even know which one I will be.