Irony....

My supervisor is retiring this year. I can't imagine anyone in the department replacing him. In the several years I've been here, and going through three shifts, he's been my immediate supervisor practically the whole time. I am always fascinated by his stories from policing in rural Texas. To me, the man is a mentor. I hate to see him upset. He came into the office and told me someone close to him is dying. I new the name from his previous stories. He is only person I've ever seen who can hold a conversation and shed tears simultaneously without breaking down. It takes a lot of steel nerves to do that. When he leaves, doesn't matter who they promote in his place, our shift will never be the same without him.

I did get a bit of good news. A few months ago an officer drove up on a burglary in progress. The crook fled through the back yard, leaving his car there. The homeowners were out of town on vacation. So we worked it. We tossed the car and found some paperwork with a name on it. I ran the name and found he had a criminal record. I also found out that someone had broken into his house. How ironic, first time I've known of a burglar to also be a "victim of a burglary." I find a telephone number for his mother and call her. I don't tell her the whole story at first (because I felt she would lie to cover for her son and I was right). I then told her that her son's car was left at a burglary. She exploded. She accused me of "scaring" her and she didn't know who I was even though I told her from the beginning who I was. Anyway, later on in the day the son (aka suspected burglar) shows up at a substation wanting to report that he was carjacked several hours earlier. The officer who took that report calls me. According to suspected burglar, he was car jacked by a fat, white male at a particular intersection in a bad part of town about 6 hours previously. He said he had to walk from that intersection to his house (roughly 10 miles) before he could report (trying to account for the time lapse in reporting). I point out two obvious flaws in his story. First, at that particular intersection, no white person would be there car jacking people. That's like going to a redneck bar and claiming you drank wine and ate cheese with a transvestite philosophy major at Rice University. Second, you get carjacked, and cannot find a phone in the 10 miles you claimed to walk? Anyhow, I find out that the detectives did a great job, busted through his story and filed on him for burglary. I was relieved.