Death On The Beat

By Steve Lopez/Phoenix

His shift about to begin, Phoenix police officer Marc Atkinson asks his wife if she knows something he doesn't, the way she keeps telling him to be careful. Yes, maybe she does. Maybe they both know something, but it has no shape. It is the same thing officer Scott Masino's wife feels when she tells him at about the same time that she doesn't want him to go to work. Something unknowable haunts the day.

It is March 26, 1999, the day Atkinson's seven-month-old son Jeremy will learn to drink from a cup, and Marc's wife Karen will page him with the news. It is the day Atkinson, 28, will call old friends out of the blue, uncharacteristically skip lunch and return a long-ago borrowed book to a Maryvale Precinct squad mate--a book on street survival, with a section on ambushes. And then he will ask his sergeant if he can be freed from radio calls to keep an eye on a west Phoenix dive that is a magnet for drug dealers.

At about 5 p.m., Atkinson pulls into the parking lot of the bar along with two other squad cars, and three young men run from the vicinity of a white 1988 Lincoln Town Car. The cops tail them into the bar and ask questions, but the answers lead nowhere. The other two officers peel off, and Atkinson waits, alone, watching the dive from a distance, in a neighborhood gone to hell. This is exactly where he wanted to be.

Atkinson is a former marine, and the well-groomed north side of Phoenix was too quiet for him. Three years ago, he asked for a transfer to Maryvale, where the action is. No white-haired Sansabelts in golf carts here. Drugs rule; gang bangers shoot each other out of boredom; and third-generation Mexican Americans join Anglos in grumbling about the illegals who pour across the border four hours to the south and come here to live, 10 and 20 to a house.

Atkinson, widely regarded as the best cop in his squad, believes he is needed in this precinct. He hands out police-badge stickers to children and tells Karen chilling stories abut the conditions he finds them living in. His sense of frustration grows with each shift, but he is still young enough to think he can make a difference for thousands of residents who sweat the mortgage payments and fear for their kids' safety.

Now he runs the license plate on the Lincoln, and it comes up suspended, and when three young men, possibly the same three from earlier, emerge from the bar and drive away, he follows. He radios in that he is heading east on Thomas Road, planning to pull the car over. The Lincoln speeds up, and Atkinson goes to his lights and siren. His next radio transmission is one word--bailout; it quickens the pulse of every cop who hears it. Across the west side, squad cars bearing the raised-wing symbol of the mythic Phoenix change direction like birds in flight.

At 30th and Catalina, a colorless flatland marked by the concrete cake boxes of light industry, the driver of the Lincoln has jammed on the brakes and is bolting on foot as Atkinson turns the corner in pursuit. The backseat passenger hotfoots it in the other direction, and the front passenger slides cleanly across the seat, perhaps unseen by Atkinson. That passenger stands at the door, levels a .357 magnum at the squad car and fires several rounds. He is wearing a SAY NO TO DRUGS SHIRT. There is $7,000 worth of cocaine in the glove box and a shotgun in the backseat.

A security guard driving to work comes upon the scene and opens fire on the shooter as Atkinson's car rolls ahead aimlessly and plows into a utility pole. The guard, a red-haired, 300-lb. Irishman named Rory Vertigan, wings the shooter, who drops the Lincoln into reverse, slams into Vertigan's car and comes out flashing metal. Vertigan, his gun empty, rushes the driver, rips his gun away, throws him to the pavement and hands the weapon to another civilian just on the scene, ordering him to stand watch while Vertigan rushes to Atkinson and sees he has been shot.

The first officer on the scene is Masino, whose wife had not wanted him on the street today. He kicks a hole in the passenger window, unlocks the door and tries to revive Atkinson with help from another officer. She is Patricia Johnson, Atkinson's best friend on the force--the one who had lent him the book on street survival. Atkinson has taken two bullets in the right side of his head. Says Masino, 28: "It's almost like Marc's spirit was standing there next to him."

With the help of civilians, including two Hispanics who followed one of the fleeing suspects and used cell phones to report his location to police, all three suspects are in custody within minutes. All three are illegal aliens.

And now the commander of the Maryvale Precinct, a man who was born in Mexico and became a naturalized citizen at 24, is on his way to the murder scene. Manny Davila lives in two worlds, one the color of his uniform and the other the color of his skin, and he knows those worlds have collided on this horrible day. A day in which a brilliant, falling sun glints across the sprawling desert city, catching the top of the utility pole that Atkinson plowed into and casting the shadow of a perfect cross onto the side of a building across the street.

Police brutality in New York City. Racial profiling in New Jersey. Quick trigger fingers in Chicago, where two unarmed black motorists were killed by police in separate incidents on a single day earlier this month. Judging by the national headlines, it is a season of cops gone mad. The story in Phoenix is different, but it is part of the same drama--the constantly stressed marriage between mostly white police forces and the minorities they work with, who are at once disproportionately the victims of crime and its perpetrators. The great majority of hardworking, law-abiding minority residents need the police for protection, just as the police need their help to catch the bad guys. But it is a relationship that can easily spiral into mutual recrimination, triggered by a cop killing or by police brutality.

Phoenix has had its share of both. Last year the city paid $5.3 million to the family of a black 25-year-old who died as the result of a neck hold during a 1994 altercation with police; he was a double amputee whose prosthetic legs came off during the struggle. And a civil trial awaits in the 1996 police killing of a 16-year-old Hispanic, shot 25 times while armed with a butcher knife.

Arizona state representative John Loredo, 29, a Mexican American, says that since 1990, he has been pulled over by police "six or seven times for no reason other than racial profiling." Once, while pulling up to his grandmother's house on Christmas Eve, his car lit up. Five police cruisers were behind him, a helicopter overhead. He was ordered onto his knees and handcuffed. "They said there'd been a drive-by shooting," Loredo says, and he presumably matched a suspect description. "Situations like that happen all the time," Loredo claims, judging by calls he receives from constituents and by the way that police have come at him with sass and swagger until they find out he is a public official.

Loredo says most of his west-side neighbors want the police responding quickly to their calls, locking up gangsters and shutting down drug dens. But they don't want their kids harassed--good kids who go to school and to work--as part of the deal. "That type of aggression has an extremely negative impact on people."

Davila, who works the very neighborhood where Loredo lives, answers, "We've got nearly 3,000 officers in this city. Do we have some bad apples? Yes. But we're trying, and this is a department I'm proud of."

Davila got laughed out of elementary school when his family moved 40 years ago from Mexico to Douglas, Ariz. He couldn't speak English, and kids made fun of him, so he ran home, only to have his mother drag him back. One day the teacher had the class write a letter. Put the principal's name at the top, she said, followed by a comma. Davila dutifully wrote down the principal's name and then drew a picture of a bed. The Spanish word for bed is cama. The teacher slapped him, the class roared, and his mother told him to find a way to endure. Without an education, he would have no chance in America.

Davila is now 49, and on July 20 he'll complete the course work for a master's degree from Northern Arizona University. His grade-point average is 4.0, and his wife Sue hangs his report cards on the refrigerator along with their son's and daughter's, both community-college students. And still he must endure. He is called "coconut"--brown on the outside, white on the inside--by some Mexican Americans. And when he made sergeant in 1982, he overheard a white colleague say, "We got another spic promoted. Let's see how long this beaner lasts." Yet Davila believes as passionately in the goodness of his officers as he does in the goodness of struggling immigrants.

As he retraces Atkinson's route, wheeling through the last moments of his life, Davila comes upon the shrine where the officer died. Davila had tried, in his quiet way, to live beyond the stereotypes that divide police and community, white and Hispanic. And now there were people out there stirring it up, the vultures and hacks, politicizing Atkinson's death before he was in the ground. At the spot where the afternoon sun still draws a cross on the wall, Davila's spirit breaks again. "You had people calling the radio talk shows to take their shots. It started with illegal aliens, and then it was, 'Let's send all the Mexicans back.'" Some of his officers were jumpy too--ready to crack down on immigrants. "I told people that it's not whites or Hispanics who killed Marc," Davila says. "It's drug-dealing cop killers. The issue isn't ethnicity--it's crime and drugs." Losing Atkinson was bad enough. Davila was determined to lose nothing more.

Tom Martinez, 59, has been on block watch for 18 years in the neighborhood where Atkinson worked and died. "You see this older woman out front? She's undercover. Reports everything to us." Martinez works for the recreation department. The friends who ride civilian posse with him work construction jobs and return to their well-kept homes each day with aching backs and cracked hands, and then they take turns pulling night duty, trying to pass pride of ownership and safe streets on to the grandchildren. "We've been burglarized 10 times, and nobody ever sees a vehicle or a person," says Tom Sapien, 51, who peers into the twilight from Martinez's backseat and misses nothing. "People are afraid to get involved."

Phoenix businessman Alfredo Gutierrez, a former state senator, makes poetry of the west side's Los Angelized sprawl. "It's a place with no edges. It bleeds in and out of industrial and residential developments, and there's a creeping invisibility--an anonymity." The weak sense of community makes the area all the harder to police. And there is ethnic fragmentation as long-established Hispanics see new Mexican immigrants moving in next door, calling south of the border for the relatives and parking the truck on the sidewalk.

Davila knew he had a cultural clash on his hands when he took a call from a resident complaining that the next-door neighbor was growing corn in the front yard. New immigrants, Davila says, are "suspicious of cops. In Mexico most of a policeman's salary is from bribes. They think we're going to beat them up or take their money." It doesn't help that while Hispanics make up more than 28% of the 1.2 million residents of Phoenix, they account for only 12% of the city's police.

To all of this, add the drug problem. On May 5, police stumbled onto the biggest drug bust in city history--a ton of cocaine valued at half a billion dollars--and arrested two Mexican nationals. A federal drug official told the Arizona Republic, "Phoenix has arrived...as a drug transshipment point."

And then there's the gang problem. An estimated 300 gangs and 7,000 gang members work the streets of Phoenix, selling drugs, stealing cars and occasionally aerating one another. One day officer Robert Vasquez brings an East Side gang member into the station for a chat--a kid he is trying to rescue after meeting him at an alternative school. The 17-year-old has a tattoo of an X under his right eye and an 8 under his left. It's his gang ID. He runs with Wetback Power's 18th Street crew. "It's crazy out there now," he says. "You could be walking down the street, and some little 12-year-old will shoot you." Last year he was shot in both legs by a member of the Mafia Crip Gangsters, and he pulls up one pant leg to show through-and-through wounds where a bullet skewered his leg.

You begin to understand the frustration police feel when the gang member says that shooting a cop wins you honor these days; that all his contemporaries do is fight and shoot and get high and steal; that he will never identify the kid who shot him because ratting is the lowest; that he burns names under an R.I.P. tattoo on his left arm when close friends die; that he doesn't expect to live to 25; that sometimes he dreams about going legit and getting a really good job. Like what? "I don't know," he says. "Like maybe a telemarketer."

The last line of defense against the barbarians is filing into the briefing room at the Maryvale Precinct, home to 229 sworn officers. Marc Atkinson's old squad is just beginning its 3:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. shift. Sergeant Pete Fenton tells them about a fresh homicide and about a tree that will be planted in Marc's honor out front. A chalkboard advisory warns against dining at a certain fast-food joint because a cook with a grudge, just out of jail, is bound to add special ingredients to any cop's dinner.

Several weeks have passed since Atkinson's murder, but you wouldn't know it to look around the room. Officers wear stickers on their belts or radios: IN MEMORY OF 5930. Atkinson's badge number. And now it hits you that these are kids. The age range is 24 to 34. At 28, Atkinson was the senior officer among 10. The one they looked up to. The one who couldn't die. When he did, they began wondering how they could be crazy enough to do this job. And then three weeks later, officer James Snedigar was shot dead as his SWAT team moved on an apartment in the nearby town of Chandler. Two of his three assailants, one of whom was killed, were identified as members of the New Mexican Mafia.

Out on patrol, Masino sees a car inching along suspiciously, and then suddenly the car speeds up and darts out of sight into a parking lot. Masino finds it, approaches cautiously and sees the driver and a passenger drinking beer. Neither speaks English, and Masino knows only a little Spanish. With TIME translating, we find out the driver has no license, no registration and no keys. He started the car with a screwdriver. When he finds out he's under arrest, he makes a brief move on Masino, then thinks better of it. The passenger's hands, meanwhile, drop down under the seat in the car, maybe to hide something, maybe to get something, and in that moment everything is crystal clear: the potential for the cop to shoot. The potential for the suspect to shoot. The potential for either to die, and for the press, the public and the lawyers to wrestle over the facts for months and never approach the truth.

As this one turns out, there was no weapon or drug stash under the seat. Masino releases the passenger, telling him to stay home next time he wants to drink. The kid makes a rude gesture. "Nice doing business with you," Masino says.

Detective: "So, then you were the one that killed the officer, kid?"

Suspect: "Well, yeah, there's no other. How can I tell you?"

Detective: "Are you afraid?"

Suspect: "Well, yes ... I didn't want to do that. I didn't even think that he had died, but I know that I deserve my punishment."

The interview with Felipe Petrona-Cabanas, 17, took place the night of Atkinson's murder. On April 5, a Maricopa County grand jury indictment charged Petrona-Cabanas, his 18-year-old cousin and a third man, age 21, with first-degree murder. The 17-year-old will be tried as an adult in what will be a potential death-penalty case for all three. They have pleaded not guilty.

The first week was hard on little Jeremy Atkinson, and he cried a lot. Whenever the garage door opened, he got excited, thinking it was his father. Now nine months old, Jeremy has just awakened from a nap, and Karen Atkinson, who has only recently returned to her job as a nurse, goes and gets him in their two-story house north of Phoenix. Marc's squad was right. Jeremy looks just like him. Sky-blue eyes, hair the color of straw.

When Marc talked about his work, it was mostly about the kids he would see. "He'd go into a house to arrest the parents for drugs, and he'd see a two-year-old, naked, needing a diaper, and the kid reaches up: 'Please hold me.'" At home, Atkinson was on a mission to have Jeremy's first word be Dah-dah. He'd hold him close, look into his eyes and repeat it over and over. But Jeremy never responded. And then shortly after Marc's death, Karen was awakened one night by Jeremy's voice on the intercom: "Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah..."

Take all the problems of the day--drugs, gangs, the politics of immigration--and Manny Davila has an answer for them. Not a police roundup or a new law. A trip to a school. Here is Davila eating a cafeteria burger with the boy he has visited once a week for the past year in the Pathfinder program he volunteered for. He chose Andoni, 11, because he sees some of himself in the boy. Andoni was born in Mexico too. After lunch, in 98-degree heat, Davila organizes a basketball game on the playground. "He works with the whole class," says Nicole Liggett, Andoni's fifth-grade teacher. "He reads to the class with me; he plays with the kids at recess; he brings stickers, candy, ice cream."

In his three years as commander of the Maryvale Precinct, Davila and his officers have given up nights and weekends to help people paint, mend fences, organize anti-crime marches. On the streets of Maryvale, residents frequently refer to "my police officer," and the officer refers to "one of my people" getting robbed.

At the Woodmar apartment complex, Masino is seen as some kind of alien force by a woman whose name is being withheld to protect her from gangs. "I thought he was crazy, the way he just walked through here by himself at night," says the grandmother, whose phone lines were cut when she began snitching on dealers who had turned the complex into a drug emporium and shooting gallery.

In February work by Masino and other officers resulted in 18 arrests. To keep the gangsters from returning, Masino and officer Brian Kornegay opened a substation in one of the units. They gave a cell phone to the woman whose phone lines had been cut. When Masino pulls up now in his patrol car, that woman's seven grandchildren, no longer confined to the house, climb into his car to play with the lights and loudspeaker.

This kind of work provides a vital, unseen ballast as Phoenix is rocked by Atkinson's murder and by the ugly reaction from some quarters that there should be a crackdown on "the Mexicans" who should be sent packing. What could be a breakdown in race relations is defused by a quiet, powerful counter-demonstration--a defining moment in city history.

In response to the racist outbursts on talk radio, Hispanic leaders called for a peace march and a prayer vigil for Tuesday evening, four days after Atkinson's murder, with such short notice that no one knew how many people might show up. At 6 p.m., they started to gather in a field not far from the bar where Atkinson's chase had begun: adults and children, first in a trickle and then in a swelling stream. Michael Hernandez Nowakowski, a radio-station general manager, had bought hundreds of candles, and people began lighting them.

By 7 p.m., 800 people had gathered, and now police officers were joining in, clearing a path for a twilight procession along the course of Atkinson's pursuit. Children carried photographs of Atkinson. A mariachi band played De Colores, a song about the rainbow after the storm.

As the marchers approached the site where Atkinson died, some left flowers or novena candles; others left poems or notes of thanks, many in Spanish. And then Davila spoke, in Spanish, then in English, thanking the throng for turning the place of Atkinson's death into sacred ground. State senator Joe Eddie Lopez followed him, asking Davila to tell his officers "that we love the work that you do, that we are slow to express it as much as we should, but that the safety of our children and our families rests in your hands."

After the vigil broke up, about 100 people stayed behind and said a rosary. Karen Atkinson was there, along with Marc's mother, brother and sister, and strangers went up to them to say--some in Spanish, some in English--that they were sorry. It would be the first night since her husband's death that Karen Atkinson slept.