Blue & Grey City

By C.L. Douglas

"Look over your shoulder; Justice is coming...Hell has victories. I am at peace."

These were the chilling final words of a white supremacist cop killer just

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imzadi Publishing, LLC
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9781944653316

Book preview

Chapter 1

BEGINNINGS

Life is the soul’s nursery – its training place for the destinies of eternity.

-William Makepeace Thackeray

June 21, 1991

Lieutenant Gerald Power stood stone-faced on the blue carpet in front of the full-length mirror in his office to double check the gig line of his grey uniform shirt and navy blue trousers one last time before walking into the classroom containing 41 police recruits about to graduate. Since the start of his career in 1968, Power had attended the funerals of seven Oklahoma City Police officers who had given their lives in the service to their community, the most recent of those just a few months prior. The sound of a lonely bugler playing taps in the background and the sight of a grief ridden father struggling to breathe while clutching his uniformed son’s casket still echoed in Power’s memory.

Police funerals sickened him and made him angry. The world contained both givers and takers, and he hated the takers who took the givers. He loved his officers and the older he grew the more determined he became to make officer safety the priority for every young officer he had a chance to influence. If that meant some intimidation during their training so that they would pay attention to detail and listen the first time, so be it. His goal was to never attend a funeral for one of the cops he trained. As the Director of Training for the Oklahoma City Police Department he worked hard to ensure that they were not only in the best shape they could achieve physically, but that they understood the importance of esprit de corps and solidarity as brothers and sisters in uniform.

At 6’6 and 280 pounds, Power was an imposing figure and the recruits had quickly adapted a conditioned fear at the sound of the rhythmic clicking of his Bates patent leather size 14 shoes approaching on the 20-year-old marble tile hallway floor. Reinforcing their fear was Power’s deep booming voice, which was as large as his stature. For years he had walked with a limp, a remnant of a shattered left leg he suffered in a crash during a pursuit with a bank robbery suspect some 15 years prior. The limp gave the alarm of his imminent presence an ominous and eerie cadence, like an executioner coming calling for the condemned.

Power looked mean. He had been trained by a generation of police officers long since passed who believed rookie cops had not proven themselves until they had gone into at least one of the toughest dives in the city and picked a fight with the biggest, meanest drunk in the place. Because of his size, he had plenty of opportunities to be tested in battle. Back in the seventies, the miscreant lowlifes in the city’s downtown slums often had dim-witted and ill-advised urges to go up against a big cop like him. Whether they were testing him or themselves no one could say for sure, but he never lost a street fight.

He was clean-shaven, even on his days off, and wore his thick brown hair in a closely cropped crew cut. Only in the last couple of years had the first traces of grey begun to appear at his temples, but he did not care. He was not vain about his looks and believed a man’s appearance should reflect a life of discipline. His nose had been broken and moved to the side of his face in a bar fight his rookie year. Two months later, it was broken again by a thrown lamp during a domestic brawl between a man and his two live-in girlfriends, who all united against Power when he arrived at their studio apartment in response to a domestic disturbance called in by neighbors. This served to give his pockmarked expression a permanent scowl which, along with his intimidating figure and booming voice, created an indelible impression on the uneasy 20-something year old civilians who dared to think they had what it took to join him as fellow police men and women.

Power was in his 24th year as an Oklahoma City Police officer. He was an Oklahoma City native, having grown up in an aging neighborhood in the city’s northeast side. The neighborhood had been replaced by a park in the name of urban renewal in 1975. Having graduated from Central High School in downtown Oklahoma City in May of 1966, power immediately enlisted in the United States Army. He was proud of the fact that he had been among the earliest American combat troops deployed to Vietnam with the 173rd Airborne Brigade as a combat engineer. While in Vietnam, he had taken part in the only major airborne deployment of the war and received a Purple Heart medal for wounds received in battle near the battle of Prek Klok in the province of Tay Ninh in South Vietnam on March 10, 1967, ten months to the day from having graduated high school.

After three surgeries and a lengthy recovery in Germany he was honorably discharged. He returned to Oklahoma and enrolled in classes at El Reno Junior College west of Oklahoma City. He had seen more than his share of bloodshed, death, and violence during his time overseas and fought to suppress the demons that followed him home from the war. Twenty-five years later, he would become a strong and vocal advocate of treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for police officers.

In Junior College, Power attempted to return to the carefree life of a student just as his peers enjoyed, but he sensed that for him, that ship had sailed and would not return. His innocence and naiveté had been long lost. The warrior mentality he had developed as an all-state linebacker for the Central High School Cardinals had been honed in training at Fort Benning, Georgia and in the jungles of Southeast Asia. His hometown sensibilities and understanding of right and wrong never allowed him the privilege of ambivalence when he felt that something was unjust, and seeing the antiwar rallies and the growing civil unrest of his peers stirred in him strong and unfamiliar emotions.

Gerald Power was a patriot, and he loved his country. He felt that his service overseas in the cause of freedom in Vietnam was an honorable thing and it surprised him that so many others met his experience with derision and scorn. Most of his classmates at junior college were his age and he had even graduated high school with two of them, but even they treated him like an outsider. Labels like warmonger and baby killer got back around to him and he sensed a growing divide between himself and the world he’d left behind when he shipped off to Vietnam. He grew to accept that he would always be different from the world back home, but he felt that as a protector he still had much to offer to society, even if they didn’t appreciate it. As soon as he turned twenty and a half years old, the required minimum age, he applied, and was hired by the Oklahoma City Police Department.

Power saw himself as something akin to a bridge between two disparate generations. When he first started his career, police officers made just enough money to be ineligible for food stamps, but not enough to live comfortably. They worked 12-hour shifts with rotating days off and often hot-seated 200,000 mile plus patrol cars, literally changing shifts between calls never turning off the engine. The bullet resistant Kevlar vests, now issued to all police recruits, were an out of reach luxury for the vast majority who could not afford to purchase one on their own. In spite of the fact that semi-automatic handguns and high powered rifles were often used by criminal offenders, the men and women of the Oklahoma City Police Department were mandated to carry six-shot, .357 magnum revolvers and often found themselves outgunned and outmanned by a criminal element, not bound to the restraints of a city budget.

Back in those days, a cop was a cop because he wanted to be one. For the most part, the media and society in general supported and trusted its law enforcement. Police officers were more apt to improvise and do whatever it took to get the job done, as long as that meant that the right bad guy went to jail, or justice was served. People called police officers sir and expected to get smacked if they were rude or disrespectful. That generation of officers watched one another’s backs and was willing to give their lives up for those they considered their brothers and expected the same from other officers.

Much had changed since then. Much needed to. New officers were now given the best training available in a 20-week academy before being put out on the street. They were not only issued protective vests, but also brand new 9mm semi-automatic handguns, and an officer no longer had to start a street fight to earn the trust of veterans. Those were good changes, but Power lamented some of the loss of unity and camaraderie purchased by hardship that once distinguished his beloved department. He saw it as his duty to preserve the good and instill it in the graduating police recruits.

The main lecture lab of the Oklahoma City Police Academy was a theater style room with curved rows of swivel style seats braced to a solid table running the length of each row. Each of the eight rows of seats sat approximately eight inches higher than the row in front so that regardless of where one sat, he or she had an unobstructed view of the presenter at the lectern on the lowest level of the room directly in front of the first row of chairs.

That Friday, Recruit Reed Dixon was sitting in his assigned seat at the far left of the back row nearest the door as Lieutenant Power approached the classroom. Each week a different recruit was picked to be the class commander for the next week in order to share the leadership development and peer related administrative duties of the cadre of recruits. Class 0291 had started nearly five months earlier in February 1991 and Dixon was the current class commander. Every Friday afternoon the name of the next week’s class commander was posted on the bulletin board on the wall near the lectern at the front of the classroom. The recruits had the responsibility of knowing the content of the bulletin board and they crowded around it after class was dismissed late that afternoon. The only deviation to the alphabetical order in which the recruits had sat in the last 19 weeks was the prominent placement of the class commander in the upper left corner of the room. Dixon chuckled out loud when he saw the name of the class commander for the final week of the academy.

What’s so funny? asked one of his fellow recruits as he strained over Dixon’s shoulder to see a test score.

That, right there, he said with a noticeable Arkansas drawl. You see who the class commander is next week?

Oh, man, the recruit snickered. That’s going to be awesome. He’s gonna crap when he sees this. Does he know yet?

I don’t think so. I haven’t heard anyone throwing up, he replied before calling over his shoulder, Hey, Fitzgerald, come over here a minute.

Dixon had called out to Andy Fitzgerald, a 24-year-old former security guard who had dubiously made a name for himself on the first day of the academy. He had shown up in his 1983 Chevy Malibu and casually parked in a staff parking space next to the main building as opposed to the fenced in recruit parking lot further away. His car easily stood out, complete with red flashers in the grill, a blue Kojak light on the dash, post mounted spotlight on the driver side, and an expired license plate in the back. Most police officers do not like security guards anyway because of their tendency to act like cops and speak only in ten-codes. Lieutenant Power was incensed at Fitzgerald’s brazenness, showing up like Jack Webb from Dragnet and strolling in like one of the fellas.

The training staff usually did not have to look very hard to find a way to make a statement about how life was about to change for the group of anxious civilians and, in this case, Fitzgerald helped make the point quite easily. They were absolutely, positively not police officers yet and some, they were often reminded, would never be. Three of the sergeants from the training staff paced back and forth on that first day, arms folded across their chests, amidst the recruits as they stood at attention while Lieutenant Power loudly ensured that they knew their places in the pecking order. Then, inside of the first ten minutes of his new career as an Oklahoma City Police Officer, Mr. Andrew Ronald Fitzgerald, white male, 5’10, 155 lbs, of 12225 Camden Park Drive, was summoned to the front of the class and seated at a table directly across from Lieutenant Gerald Power of the Oklahoma City Police Department and issued an $85 citation for driving with an expired tag.

Since that day, Fitzgerald had been petrified of Power who seemed to have it in for him. He had heard the legend of Power’s military and police service and thought he was probably the guy who pushed scared soldiers out of airplanes during airborne training and liked it. He was convinced that the Lieutenant was looking for a way to not only drum him out of the police academy, but also personally arrest him and drive him to jail. Power knew that he had gotten into Fitzgerald’s head and did not let up on him.

Power knew Fitzgerald was weak and, for his own sake, he needed to overcome his fear of those who could easily intimidate. The young recruit still needed to respect Power and the officers appointed over them, but he had to find a way to do it without becoming debilitated. Among his peers he was nerdy and a bit of an outcast, but he was still able to function reasonably well as long as Lieutenant Power was nowhere near. He could even control himself when the other training staff and sergeants were present, but there was something about Power’s voice that caused Fitzgerald to stumble and stutter with the subtlety and grace of a rotary telephone thrown into a running clothes dryer.

Fitzgerald’s fellow recruits were no help either. They too sensed the fear and weakness and found amusing ways to release some of the tension and pressure of the police academy at Fitzgerald’s expense when he presented the opportunity. One of those times came during their two weeks of firearms training.

The Oklahoma City Police firearms range was an outdoor facility. Behind the building containing the offices and classrooms were several ranges of various depths built to accommodate pistol, shotgun, and long-range rifle shooting. The main pistol range was 50 lanes wide, built to accommodate 50 shooters at a time. It had concrete runners to mark shooting distances from three to fifty yards away from the rotating targets. The targets themselves were life-size paper silhouettes clipped onto a metal frame which at the appropriate time would turn toward the recruits, then turn away from them again to allow for timed shooting.

The targets would be scored by a range instructor who, after all weapons were unloaded and made safe, would walk inside a hip deep concrete ditch which shielded the target turning mechanism. The instructors would set their clipboards on the concrete ledge of the ditch facing the line of recruits standing at the position of parade rest to score individual targets, and move down the line until all targets had been scored and instructors moved safely back behind the line of shooters. The range would then become hot again as the recruits were given instructions on the next shooting phase.

It was at this point and near the end of the two weeks of Class 0291’s firearms range training that Lieutenant Power left his coffee cup on the concrete ledge near the targets and in the line of fire after inspecting the results of a round of shooting. More like a Bavarian beer stein than an average coffee cup, it held approximately three cups of coffee and was made of thick porcelain. The cup was wide at the bottom, tapered near the top, and was the best coffee cup Power had ever owned since it kept his coffee hotter on cool mornings like this one at the gun range.

The mug itself was almost a work of art. The beautiful high gloss baked-on finish was a gleaming red, white, and blue and featured a soaring bald eagle and an American flag waving behind a panorama of snowcapped mountains. Near the bottom of the 3-D cup was a leather clad motorcycle rider winding his way through a narrow mountain pass surrounded by majestic pines and bottomless cliffs. The rider on the cup wore a black leather jacket and mirrored sunglasses. A tongue wagging golden retriever rode in a sidecar as a traveling companion. It even had such detail that an orange HD was visible on the shoulder of the rider’s leather. Power would often hold his cup up as if on display and with a grin pronounce to any who would listen, This, is a picture of the perfect retirement.

The cup was a gift from the shift he commanded at the time of his 20-year anniversary for service within the department. Each officer on the shift had signed his name on the cup in thick black permanent marker with the intention of Power putting it on display on his desk or at home. Instead, only some of the writing was still visible and the pure white of the cup’s glossy virgin interior had a permanent stain of light chocolate tan from daily fillings of Power’s strong, black coffee. The prized gift was his constant companion, as if keeping the cup close was a visual reminder of the good life to come, a life of retirement someday.

Apparently, no one noticed the coffee mug sitting on the ledge among the targets as the recruits lined up along the twenty-five-yard line to receive their instructions. Their weapons would be loaded and holstered and at the sound of the buzzer they would have twenty seconds to draw, shoot five rounds, unload, switch shooting hands, reload, then shoot five more rounds before the target turned at the sound of the cease-fire buzzer. Lieutenant Power’s coffee cup sat almost directly in front of the target on lane sixteen.

Andy Fitzgerald was shooting on lane sixteen.

As the range master recited the final instructions to the recruits, Andy Fitzgerald looked up and noticed Power’s cup in front of his target. A wave of panic shot through his entire body. Fitzgerald suddenly felt light headed and his throat became tight. He could not feel his fingertips or the bottom of his feet and wondered if he would pass out. Just the day before, Power had chewed him out in the classroom in front of everyone for getting into his seat late after a break and then again the first thing this morning for scoring low on the first phase of shooting. The reason Power’s cup was sitting in front of Fitzgerald’s target in the first place was that the Lieutenant had stopped to individually scrutinize Fitzgerald’s shooting after the last round. Fitzgerald felt that he could do nothing right for Lieutenant Power and the last thing, the very last thing he wanted in the entire world was to attract Power’s attention on this lovely spring morning.

Okay, calm down. If you’re on target, you’re good, he told himself. But dear God in heaven please don’t let me shoot low.

He could no longer hear the range master give the instructions to load and holster weapons. All he heard was the pounding of his pulse in his temples as he subconsciously repeated, please, please, please, please… Only at the last possible moment before drawing attention to himself did he notice the movement of the shooters on either side of him and quickly mimicked them by loading and holstering his pistol.

Oh dear God, please, please, please…

In the myopia of the moment, what Andy Fitzgerald did not know was that two lanes over, at lane eighteen, his classmate, Walt Jameson, had also seen the Lieutenant’s prized coffee cup. At thirty-eight years old, Jameson was the old man of the class. The elder recruit had just retired from the Army after twenty years of service and his last assignment was that of a range master at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He had spent the final nine months of his military career teaching marksmanship to basic training recruits and utilized much of his off hours in the Army refining his already excellent shooting skills.

For Jameson, the time at the police pistol range was like a vacation. He was almost bored. Timed shooting and stress inducing situations were his specialties and he was a superb pistol shot. He was so good that after only about five rounds of shooting, his paper target was impossible to score because all of his rounds went through the same quarter-sized hole his first few shots created. Part of Jameson’s success was due simply to his years of practice. Shooting is a refinable skill.

Another major contributor to Jameson’s success at the range, and everywhere else in the academy, was that he simply did not stress over what was happening to them. He knew the game and had come expecting the shouting from the instructors and the military style atmosphere. The discipline was necessary for the younger recruits, most of whom could confine their total life experience to a college dorm room.

Jameson was a no-nonsense man and though he was a fellow recruit, carried himself with the professionalism and dignity of a retired First Sergeant and future police officer. He was married with two teenagers at home and kept mostly to himself, regularly declining offers by the younger recruits to join them on weekends for drinks and a few inane laughs and typically spoke only when spoken to.

However, in the seconds before the sound of the buzzer indicating the commencement of this particular round of shooting, Walt Jameson had a decision to make. A decision in the negative was the right thing to do.

You ought to just do your job and mind your own business, he thought. Just do your thing and let the others do their thing.

The temptation to make an affirmative decision, however, was almost too much to bear. I like to have fun as much as the next guy and I may never get an opportunity like this one again.

Besides, he’s weak. This is no place for the weak.

Poor Mister Fitzgerald.

At that moment the buzzer sounded and the targets turned. The sound of more than forty 9mm pistols erupted, the first shot was nearly synchronized, but after the second and third shots, the skill of the individual shooter disrupted the steady staccato pace and for a few seconds a hail of sustained gunfire poured downrange. Then, nearly as coordinated as the first shot, the range fell silent as the recruits, within seconds of each other, dropped an empty magazine, switched shooting hands, reloaded with a fresh magazine and commenced firing.

As he shot, Andy Fitzgerald wondered if he was hitting the target at all. The way his hands were shaking, he doubted it. Though he was shooting, he was conscious of the rising nausea in his belly and wanted more than anything else in the world for this round of shooting to be over. With every trigger pull he was intensely aware of the precarious placement of the nearly half-foot tall coffee cup and was hoping desperately to keep his shots well above it. He was probably shooting so high that if he was hitting the target at all, they were all headshots.

Power is going to think I’m horsing around, he thought. There is no way I get out of this. I’m screwed either way this goes.

Andy Fitzgerald fired the fifth shot in his magazine and the slide on his Glock-17 pistol locked back indicating an empty weapon. He pressed the magazine release with his right thumb and simultaneously reached for a fresh magazine from his belt with his left hand. His hands were shaking so badly though that he nearly dropped the magazine twice trying to slide it up into the grip of the pistol. Switching the pistol from his right to his left hand seemed to take an eternity, but he really was not thinking about the dwindling time clock as much as he was concentrating on not dropping a loaded pistol onto the concrete during the exchange. The recruits on either side of him had already begun shooting their second five rounds before Andy had his pistol raised and ready to shoot.

Now shooting with his off-hand, he was even more nervous and his hands were shaking more than ever. He knew that once the buzzer sounded and the target turned away from him all shooting had to cease immediately. He also knew that if time ran out and he had rounds left in his magazine he would have to raise his hand signaling an unsafe situation and bring the wrath of Lieutenant Power down upon himself again for the second time this morning. Fitzgerald squeezed the pistol so hard his knuckles turned white and wished he could telepathically will his remaining four shots to simply find the target somewhere – preferably high.

Two lanes over was a relaxed and confident Walt Jameson. He had developed a clock in his head from his years of range shooting and knew within a second how to pace his shots. As the end of the twenty seconds drew near, Jameson slowed his pace to save one shot. He could see that all of his rounds had found their mark in the jagged hole through the X-ring center of his target and that counting individual bullet holes would be impossible for the range staff. In the last two seconds of the exercise, the frenzied recruits rushed to get their final shots off before the buzzer sounded and the targets turned to make the range safe for scoring.

At the very moment that the buzzer sounded to signal a cease fire and the targets began to turn, time became distorted and slowed to a crawl for Andy Fitzgerald. The recruit held his empty pistol in his left hand, slide locked back and still pointed downrange while everything else became a warped and disfigured blur. The entirety of his conscious world existed in the small space he occupied on the concrete runner and the twenty-five yards of real estate between himself and the paper target he despised so much.

In that instant, he did not notice the final, single pop of a 9mm pistol shot. However, as if in slow motion, a fraction of a second later he watched in horror as Lieutenant Gerald Power’s cherished red, white, and blue coffee mug with mountains, trees, a soaring eagle, and a dog in a side car exploded into shards and splinters and half a quart of hot, black coffee jumped three feet into the air and landed steaming onto the concrete and cool morning grass.

Cease Fire! Damnit cease fire!

Power’s voice boomed from behind the line and drowned out the voice of the range master over the loudspeaker mounted to the range house just behind the recruits who was giving the command to make safe and holster an empty weapon. Power must have been standing just behind lane sixteen. Fitzgerald felt his face go clammy. His ears were ringing and he somehow was able to swallow the pre-vomit that had rushed to his throat. At that moment, Recruit Fitzgerald encountered a phenomenon known as sensory overload.

This occurs when the body’s senses experience overstimulation from one’s environment. The mind locks up as a result of the onrush of stimuli approaching too quickly to effectively mentally process. As the brain ceases normal operations, the body stiffens and freezes in place, and that was exactly what Andy Fitzgerald was experiencing. But he didn’t know it. His brain was no longer processing new information.

He was still holding his empty pistol in his left hand as range personnel surrounded him from all sides. He did not hear the murmuring whispers of his fellow recruits, Good Lord what was that all about?

Oh brother, he’s toast!

Dude, that was freaking awesome. Did you see that?

Only his subconscious registered the presence of Lieutenant Power and the training staff encircling him. In his brain, the crash of their shouting was muffled and unintelligible, like he was under water. His face bore an empty stare as Power unloaded a thunderous tirade on the dangers of horseplay and nonsense on the gun range, and that was even before he realized that it was his own cup laying in shattered pieces amidst the steaming grass and concrete. When he did realize that his cup was the victim of Fitzgerald’s apparently foul shot, his eyes widened and he took a long deep inhale through his nose. Without breaking his murderous glare off Andy Fitzgerald, he called the name of one of the sergeants responsible for the recruit class and with slow, deliberately measured syllables, commanded, Get - these people - in formation.

Nearly an hour later the recruits had run approximately two and a half miles, done roughly one hundred fifty pushups, and repeated death crawls through a 2,500 square foot sand pit. They were dripping with sweat, covered in dirt and grass and had sand in every imaginable pore and crevice on their bodies. Three of them had thrown up and it was barely 11:00 a.m. One of the training sergeants blew two short bursts on a whistle, signaling the command for the class to fall into formation. The beleaguered recruits scurried to comply. The oldest among them, retired Army First Sergeant Walt Jameson, was probably in the best physical shape too. As he jogged toward the formation, he brushed as much sand off himself as possible. He did not speak a word as he took his place in the formation and quietly resumed keeping to himself. The only person in the world who really knew for sure if Fitzgerald shot Lieutenant Power’s cup wondered what was for lunch.

Once the recruits returned to the classroom the next week, Fitzgerald was able to blend in a little more successfully. This was a good thing since the next major stressor in the recruit’s lives would be in Defensive Tactics and Custody and Control and Fitzgerald needed the two week classroom period to decompress from the gun range and relax a bit before starting that intensely strenuous portion of his training. Now, on the final Friday of the police academy, Andy Fitzgerald had to face the fact that he would be responsible as the class commander and report directly to the man he’d avoided, like Willy Nelson avoided the IRS, for the last 19 weeks.

At least this is almost over, he thought.

He knew that he had pretty much made it. Unless he bombed the final comprehensive written and PT tests he would graduate with the rest of his class next Friday. He just had to make it until then.

Thank God it’s Friday he thought.

After being shown his name in the Class Commander slot on the bulletin board he started up the tiered steps at the side of the lecture lab to head toward the back door. As he was leaving, he stopped to view the room from the class commander’s seat. Dixon’s books were still at his place and Andy realized that he needed to get the navy-blue Class Commander shoulder epaulets, identifying the recruit filling that position from Reed so that when he arrived on Monday morning he would be properly attired.

Hey, Reed, toss me those epaulettes.

Oh, yeah, Dixon replied, still standing near the front of the classroom. I almost forgot. Good luck huh.

Yeah right, Fitzgerald answered with a nervous chuckle.

Reed Dixon unbuttoned the epaulette strap of his uniform shirt near the collar and reached up to slide the cloth insignia signifying the recruit leader of the group of students off his shirt. He flipped the epaulette toward Fitzgerald who had to lunge six feet to his left to catch it as the lightweight fabric sliced through the air.

Dixon was looking over toward his other shoulder repeating the process of removing the epaulette as a smiling and almost relaxed Fitzgerald regained his footing near the top of the lecture lab. The other recruits were packing up their gear to go home for the weekend. Simultaneously, as Dixon flipped the second epaulette to Fitzgerald, the door to the lecture lab opened and Lieutenant Power entered the room behind and just to Andy Fitzgerald’s right.

The epaulette sliced again, this time the other way and hit Power right across the bridge of the nose as he stepped into the room. Fitzgerald spun around to try to make the catch and found himself eye to eye with the stunned Lieutenant as the epaulette fell to the ground.

Reed Dixon darted into a group of six recruits gathered at the front of the lecture lab and pretended to be a part of the conversation while Fitzgerald somehow had the presence of mind to shove the other epaulette he was holding into his hip pocket.

Power stared Fitzgerald down for a moment. He was not quite sure what had just happened, and he was not going to ask. He simply said, You had better get your act together Fitzgerald. You’re not through here yet, he walked toward the lectern to retrieve a notebook he had left at the end of class as the remaining recruits scurried out of the room.

As Reed Dixon made his way to the parking lot, he too was glad this was almost over, although he had not struggled like many of the other recruits. Just days away from realizing his dream of becoming a police officer, he was not where he thought he would otherwise be in this stage of his life. He was a veteran of the Marine Corps so subsequently the stress of the academy never really got to him. Like Walt Jameson, he had come expecting it. He was just eager to move on and actually make a new start. He had subconsciously set out on a course to reinvent himself as soon as he graduated high school and joined the Marines. His successful graduation of the police academy would be the culmination of that process and he was eager to leave the past behind.

Dixon looked and acted confident. He carried himself tall and straight as though he were seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds, but at five foot nine and 175 pounds, he was about average size for his fellow recruits. He had the same 32-inch waistline he’d had since his junior year of high school, but he was broad shouldered and well built. He had put on nearly 40 pounds of muscle since high school and looked good in uniform. His light blond hair and ocean-blue eyes gave him a youthful appearance that could have easily had him pass for a high school student. Someone had actually suggested to him that he might be a good fit for a potential new undercover drug program in the Oklahoma City School system.

As he opened the door of his blue and silver 1982 Chevrolet Silverado pickup and tossed his oversized briefcase stuffed with books and study material into the front seat, he smiled with subdued amusement at the fact that he’d gotten this far.

Who’d have thought it? he mused that morning, before the other recruits had taken their places in the classroom, Dixon had passed the final spelling test of the academy and was one more milestone closer to feeling normal, like he wasn’t running to play catch up with those who were where they were supposed to be in life. Because of his poor reading and spelling skills, he had been required to take a spelling test every Friday morning since the second week of the academy. Prior to the police academy, he had hidden his academic deficiencies fairly well and had learned to fake his way through nearly any situation, even much of the application process to join the police department. A close examination of his high school transcripts, however, prompted a conversation with him by the recruiting and training staff whereupon he agreed that his entrance into the academy was subject to his submission to a weekly spelling test.

In spite of the confidence he exuded, his background was such that he was destined to become a statistic. Born to an unwed teenager and abandoned overnight with reluctant distant relatives, Reed Dixon had grown up searching for a sense of identity in life which thus far had escaped him. He was a functional illiterate when he slipped through the cracks and graduated high school at seventeen and left home three days later for Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego California.

Dixon got his first taste of real success in life in the Marine Corps and took his duties seriously. He would study late into the evenings, and on weekends, to not only learn the art of soldiering, but to acquire the reading and writing skills which remained miraculously absent during his school years, but which he knew would be necessary if he was to make anything of himself in life.

Now as he drove out of the parking lot of the police and fire training center and turned left onto North Portland Boulevard it occurred to him that this time next week, he would be a full-fledged Oklahoma City Police officer.

He thought, Look at how far you’ve come. Just don’t screw it up.

Now he was just days away from realizing a dream and embarking on his career. A real career, he thought.

Who would have imagined it, me, a cop.

The wonder of his situation stemmed from the fact that for as long as he could remember, Reed Dixon felt that he had been born under a bad sign, coming into the world in what many described as the worst year in U.S. history, 1968. He always felt that his own life personified the malaise and disorder of that year. The late 1960s had marked sweeping change across the nation. The hippie movement was challenging long held social conventions. The consumption of hallucinogenic drugs and the defiant burning of draft cards in the name of peace and love occupied the media while the bloody Tet Offensive marked the beginning of a painful and drawn out end to the divisive American military action in Vietnam. In the year that Reed Dixon was born, two leading icons of the changing times, Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated and the poor race relationship between black and white America was displayed before a watching world as two American medalists raised their fists in a black power salute during the Star Spangled Banner at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City.

In the previous year, 1967, Suzanna Rene Moon was in her junior year at Baker High School in Columbus Georgia. She was a member of the recently formed National Honor Society and a star player on the girl’s softball team. She was the youngest daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hank Moon, a basic training infantry unit commander at nearby Fort Benning and a strict disciplinarian. Colonel Moon had spent thirteen months in Vietnam as a company commander during his youngest daughter’s transition from a relatively small middle school to the largely populated Baker High School and he barely recognized his mini skirt clad teenager upon his return. She had found company with a group of girls and had begun listening to some of the psychedelic music that was growing increasingly popular among high school students, Iron Butterfly, Jefferson Airplane, and The Doors were among her favorites.

He struggled to maintain control of his blossoming daughter, but the more he fought the changing tide of teenage culture, the further behind he felt he got. Suzanna had started packing her tie-dyed shirts and headbands into her gym bag, and changing after school to go hang out with friends until it was time to come home for dinner. She was dating the captain of the boy’s basketball team, a tall blond athletic boy who was a native of Muscogee County, Georgia. She had managed to keep their relationship a secret from her father because she knew he would not approve of him. The boy wore his hair just long enough to remain within the school’s code of appearance, but not short enough to avoid the disapproving looks from the teachers and coaches. He had just recently managed to grow out what appeared to be sideburns if one stood close enough to notice. The anti-war views he was picking up from his older brother were causing Suzanna to question, for the first time in her life, the character of the man she had admired so much, but from whom was growing more distant. She had even joined her boyfriend for a few of the student led peace protests during the school lunch hour. Suzanna had told her older sister, then in college at Auburn, about her boyfriend and she agreed that their father would forbid the relationship if he knew. She thought it best to keep quiet about it.

All of that was about to change though as the winds of transformation blew in with 1968. Scared and shaken she had convinced her sister to skip classes and stay over on Sunday night after coming home for the weekend, to take her to the doctor’s office the first thing Monday morning. There at the office of their long time family physician, blood was drawn by a phlebotomist overseen by an overweight middle-aged nurse with a spotless white cap sitting atop her grayish brown hair pulled back so tightly that it raised her eyebrows. Not long afterwards, the same burly nurse sneered over the top of her horn rimmed glasses and told Suzanna artlessly and with no emotion that she was pregnant.

The drive back home that mid-morning was excruciating. As she tried to wrap her mind around her dilemma, her thoughts barely reached beyond the new found fact that life had now changed forever. The strict Nazarene upbringing insisted upon by her mother dissuaded her from considering an abortion. At least that was off the table. She knew that she could not undo her condition without the taking of an innocent human life and she knew enough to respect that. Still, the fear and shame of going home and facing her parents was almost more than she could bear. As she talked about her predicament with her sister, they both cried and brainstormed for solutions; then her sister thought of a possibility. Their Uncle Bill was living in Arkansas. He was the most gentle and loving person they knew.

Maybe you can go stay with him, her sister said, No one knows you there. You can have the baby and give it up for adoption then come back home.

That evening, Suzanna and her sister sat down with their parents and broke the news that she was pregnant. She intentionally steered around the use of the word grandparent, rightly assuming that they were not ready for that transition in their lives. She offered the solution of moving to Arkansas with her aunt and uncle during her pregnancy so that she could finish out her eleventh grade year without the shame and embarrassment that would inevitably come to her and her family.

After several lengthy and emotional discussions over the next few days, the decision was made. Suzanna would finish her junior year right there in Columbus and face her consequences. Being pregnant, she would not be able to physically attend classes at Baker High so she would enroll in a Homebound Program for students unable to be on campus.

You can explain to all your friends and family what you’ve done, said her father. You’ve made your mess, and you’re going to have to live up to it. You’re not going to run off and hide as if nothing happened. You will face your…your problem.

Even though he put on a tough face, she knew that she had hurt and embarrassed him. Things were going to be different now between them forever and she cried herself to sleep many nights wishing that all of this were just a bad dream. The next several months were difficult and strained as she battled the physical symptoms of pregnancy and the depression over what her unsure future would bring.

During this time, her family was in regular communication with Suzanna’s aunt and uncle in Arkansas working out the details of a summer visit just so they could all have a break from the tension. Just after she finished her finals in May, her uncle agreed to meet Suzanna’s mom at a halfway point to take Suzanna to their home near Fort Smith, Arkansas for a few weeks.

Her uncle Bill was a deacon at his church and he and his wife Marcy faithfully attended services Sunday mornings and evenings, and a midweek Bible study on Wednesday. Suzanna of course went along since that was what was expected of her, but was surprised when, in spite of the growing lump in her teenaged belly, her aunt and uncle seemed genuinely proud to introduce her to friends and members of the congregation.

Suzanna still did not know what she was going to do with the baby, but one of the members of the church who worked for an adoption agency in Fort Smith spent some time with her, explained the process, and encouraged Suzanna to consider adoption. Letting her baby go was something she just couldn’t foresee, but she also knew that life for an unwed teenage mother back in Georgia would be difficult at best. She pondered her options during her visit with her aunt and uncle and even more so after she arrived back home in Georgia as the days drew near for her to give birth.

Mid-august of 1968 came and the graduating class of 1969 started classes at Baker High School back home in Columbus, but without Suzanna Moon. She was missing everything: privileged senior status, prom, sports, and even dates. Her now ex-boyfriend and baby’s father had flatly denied paternity and threatened to ruin Suzanna’s life if she pressed the issue. His family was well established in the community and she had a sense that he had the ability to carry out at least some of what he threatened. He was on a college deferment from the draft and was attending the University of Georgia on a partial basketball scholarship. She knew that he had a lot to lose if he admitted his role in their relationship, and that she could not prove with absolute certainty that he was indeed the father. She was stuck.

The closer the time came for the birth of the baby, the more emotional and volatile home life became. Suzanna decided that she could take no more and called her uncle pleading to come get her and take her back to