“It seems strange that she should be offended”

I had on “Black Boys on Mopeds” the other night driving home after elections were done, playing on an old tape, and marveled at Sinead O’Connor’s third line below:

“It seems strange that she should be offended.”

Decided to retype the first bits to get a better feel for Sinead’s sparse, evocative writing. And to figure out how to work “should” into my own stuff the way she does.

It’s a grammatical “should,” very correct, that totally negates the justification for the offense. Smacks Margaret Thatcher down with a single conditional “should”.

Margaret Thatcher on TV
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders were given by her

I’ve said this before now
You said I was childish and you’ll say it now
Remember what I told you:
If they hated me they will hate you

England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that’s why I’m leaving
I don’t want him to be aware that there’s
Any such thing as grieving

“Daddy’s heart procedure went fine”

The sweetest heart I know got a shock today when they stuck some tools under my father’s skin and inside his chest paused his pulse a second and turned up the power to reset his heart.

My father is a steady man. He poured the concrete first thing before heading mid-morning to the hospital. He smooths and calms, and calls you on your birthday. He laughs when others might scream and yell. He orders the same Chinese food, the same gin martini.

So how could his heart blip anything but regular?

It wasn’t a big deal, the procedure on my heart, the general anesthesia. I couldn’t even feel it, he said tonight during a call he’d snuck before my mother got home. He dialed my number out to reassure me.

He wanted to know about me.

I’m fine.

I didn’t hear an ugly string of words trapped in a single sentence: “daddy” and “heart” and “hospital”. I didn’t spend the afternoon ignoring my parents’ mortality. I didn’t envy doctors today in Philadelphia, who got to touch the sweetest heart in the city.

Probably they didn’t even feel it.

’911 decoy fails, cops say’

The night was late and the lads had been out, logging some hours at the Zante’s in Orland Hills.

So when Orland Park police stopped their car about 3 a.m. Sunday morning, the backseat passenger wanted them to know why they were going home.

Stephen Fratto called 911 to report people with guns outside the bar.

But to Orland Park police it looked like something else: Distract the officer, dodge a potential DUI.

The dispatcher could hear the officer conducting a traffic stop, according to prosecutors, and thought something was up.

When more police arrived at the scene at 16100 S. 88th Avenue, they arrested Fratto, accusing him of making a fake call.

Fratto, 24, of 8829 Juniper Court in Tinley Park, is charged with false reporting of an offense, a Class 4 felony, according to Andy Conklin, a spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Cook County Judge Noreen Daly set his bail Monday morning at $10,000 and ordered him back on April 26.

By Monday afternoon, after Fratto posted $1,000 for his release, he told the SouthtownStar it was bad timing.

His call to police was to report a gang of guys harassing his buddy’s girlfriend outside the bar, he said from his Tinley Park home.

“The part they’re leaving out is I called too late,” he said. “We saw guys, we didn’t know what they had in their hands. It’s 3 in the morning. They were flashing their hands around on the car like gang members.

“We hightailed it out of there,” he said. “I was pretty drunk.”

Fratto’s friend, and the driver, Brian Elitzer, was cited with driving under the influence. Elitzer had “a couple beers,” but said he was not drunk.

As they were leaving, a man in a car next to them hung out the window and began shouting, said Elitzer, 25, of Tinley Park.

There was more. The guy may have been flashing gang signs. And, he had something in his hands and was going to throw it at them, Elitzer said. When the light turned green, his girlfriend, seated in the passenger seat, shouted, “Go, go, go.”

And he did. “My first instinct was to get away,” Elitzer said.

Less than a minute later, Elitzer said, police stopped him for failing to use a turn signal.

The officer didn’t appear interested in what had happened just moments before in the parking lot. “He just told me to step out of the vehicle. I don’t think he believed me,” Elitzer said.

The officer wanted Elitzer to take a field sobriety test. Elitzer said he passed the first one but refused a second at another officer’s request.

Inside the car, 14 minutes after they were stopped, Fratto called 911, Cmdr. John Keating said.

Fratto told the dispatcher two men in a silver car had just flashed guns, Keating said. Police from Orland Hills and Orland Park sped out to find them but couldn’t. The dispatcher called back and this time Fratto gave a different location, Keating says.

“He was trying to draw attention away from the officers at the stop,” he said.

Elitzer wasn’t in the car but hopes that’s not the case.

“Maybe he was trying to get them to catch the other car to prove we weren’t lying,” Elitzer said. “I hope he wouldn’t.”

As published in the SouthtownStar April 5, 2010.

I do enjoy a verb

Yup, Scott Blanchard.

Give me verbs, give me picky, specific, evocative verbs. I love them. I lean on them heavily when writing. Don’t know when or how that started.

So after I read your post about shoving good verbs into narrative writing, I found myself looking for fun ones a minute today.

Like on this list here. Look at the top two from each column. So punchy, so active.

abandon
abduct
collapse
collar
dramatize
drape
fix
flag
hover
hug
lurch
maim

‘Heroic efforts not enough’

Ah, she died.

Phoenix police Sgt. Ricardo Frausto happened to be kicking around at the station when the call came in: Car accident, 153rd Street and Ninth Avenue.

He’d been to the chief’s monthly breakfast meeting, and though he wasn’t on duty Friday, he was still at the police department about 1:30 p.m.

Then the passer-by calling 911 said the words that set him off: The car is underwater.

The 33-year-old ran to his own car and tore over to the corner where the Rupari Food Services plant sits, he told reporters late Friday afternoon, shivering in a light jacket, his left hand clinging to his bandaged right one.

At the grassy corner, the chain-link fence had been smashed, its poles crumpled and lying flat. And in the retention pond, a deep murky pool, he saw a gray car submerged.

Frausto ignored the chilly drizzle. He shucked his coat and his shoes. He stripped off his clothes and threw away his gun. Frausto grabbed a baton, and in briefs and an undershirt, he dove into the water.

The Navy had taught Frausto how to swim, how to hold his breath, how to manage under the water.

So he broke the car’s back window and tried to get at the lady in the driver’s seat. A few minutes later, someone else jumped in, too. They felt the lady’s hand but couldn’t get her free. Then the divers came in their ice water suits to protect them from the 40-degree water.

“You’ve done enough,” the divers told him.

It was South Holland firefighters who ultimately pulled Helen Wallace, 87, out of the retention pond after breaking the front window of her silver Buick and cutting her seat belt, South Holland Fire Chief Don Bettenhausen said.

A Phoenix resident known to be religious, she was driving near her home in the 600 block of 153rd Street, not far from the mayor’s house, when something happened near the Phoenix-South Holland border.

Maybe her car’s hood popped up, Phoenix Police Chief Mel Davis said at the scene. Maybe something happened with her health, he guessed. No skid marks showed on the asphalt so it’s likely she didn’t hit the brakes before crashing through the fence, up the embankment and into the scummy water.

She wasn’t breathing when she was pulled out, officials said. She didn’t have a pulse. She had spent multiple minutes in the pond.

Responders performed CPR on the scene and were able to get her heart beating again.

Then they rushed her to Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey. She died Saturday afternoon at the hospital in Harvey, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Some ladies from the Daniel Chapel AME Zion Church rushed to the pond Friday and were stunned to recognize their friend’s car. They had just seen her at Wednesday morning Bible study.

They heard that a lady had been fished out and resuscitated.

“I pray it’s not her,” Dorothy Allen said.

They left before finding out for sure.

Officer Gerald Shives said he was the second officer on the scene but did not dive in.

“I could hear the lady screaming, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying,” Shives said. “I was trying to tell her to get into the back seat.’’

Frausto will be nominated for a life-saving award, Davis said.

But Frausto, still shivering, still clutching his cut-up hand, was intent on finding the name of the firefighter who jumped in right after him, and happily, finally did: Charles Smith.

By the end of the day, some 75 firefighters, divers, police and other emergency rescue workers had congregated at the rescue scene, from Hazel Crest and Oak Forest and as far away as Frankfort and Lynwood. Davis was grateful for the help, which just showed up in his town of about 2,000.

As neighbors chatted and snapped photos, officials dragged the car out of the pond, its hood popped up and its windows broken.

And they used sonar and more divers to scan the pond. Initial reports said two people had been in the car. They wanted to make sure the water at the Rupari Food Services plant, 15600 Wentworth Ave., South Holland, was clear.

Frausto spoke with Wallace’s family at the hospital but never got to meet the woman he pulled from the water. On Saturday, he still was recovering from the cuts he suffered in the water and grateful to all the authorities who came to help.

“It does feel pretty bad,” Frausto said. “It’s part of the job sometimes. I wish it had turned out better, but it didn’t.”

Contributing: Sun-Times Media, Victoria Johnson, Joe Biesk

As published in the SouthtownStar, April 3, 2011, final edition.

‘Car plunges into pond’

Story felt bigger than the news. And once he told me he jumped into the cold water in briefs and an undershirt, I decided to try the narrative. Though I need to stop relying on The Call at the start of these stories.

Phoenix police Sgt. Ricardo Frausto happened to be kicking around at the station when the call came in: Car accident, 153rd Street and Ninth Avenue.

He’d been to the chief’s monthly breakfast meeting, and though he wasn’t on duty Friday, he was still at the police department about 1:30 p.m.

Then the passer-by calling 911 said the words that set him off: The car is underwater.

The 33-year-old ran to his own car and tore over to the corner where the Rupari Food Services plant sits, he told reporters late Friday afternoon, shivering in a light jacket, his left hand clinging to his bandaged right one.

At the grassy corner, the chain-link fence had been smashed, its poles crumpled and lying flat. And in the retention pond, a deep murky pool, he saw a gray car submerged.

Frausto ignored the chilly drizzle. He shucked his coat and his shoes. He stripped off his clothes and threw away his gun. Frausto grabbed a baton, and in briefs and an undershirt, he dove into the water.

The Navy had taught Frausto how to swim, how to hold his breath, how to manage under the water.

So he broke the car’s back window and tried to get at the lady in the driver’s seat. A few minutes later, someone else jumped in, too. They felt the lady’s hand but couldn’t get her free. Then the divers came in their ice water suits to protect them from the 40-degree water.

“You’ve done enough,” the divers told him.

It was South Holland firefighters who ultimately pulled Helen Wallace, 87, out of the retention pond after breaking the front window of her silver Buick and cutting her seat belt, South Holland Fire Chief Don Bettenhausen said.

A Phoenix resident known to be religious, she was driving near her home in the 600 block of 153rd Street, not far from the mayor’s house, when something happened near the Phoenix-South Holland border.

Maybe her car’s hood popped up, Phoenix Police Chief Mel Davis said at the scene. Maybe something happened with her health, he guessed. No skid marks showed on the asphalt so it’s likely she didn’t hit the brakes before crashing through the fence, up the embankment and into the scummy water.

She wasn’t breathing when she was pulled out, officials said. She didn’t have a pulse. She had spent multiple minutes in the pond.

Responders performed CPR on the scene and were able to get her heart beating again.

Then they rushed her to Ingalls Memorial Hospital in Harvey. She died Saturday afternoon at the hospital in Harvey, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Some ladies from the Daniel Chapel AME Zion Church rushed to the pond Friday and were stunned to recognize their friend’s car. They had just seen her at Wednesday morning Bible study.

They heard that a lady had been fished out and resuscitated.

“I pray it’s not her,” Dorothy Allen said.

They left before finding out for sure.

Officer Gerald Shives said he was the second officer on the scene but did not dive in.

“I could hear the lady screaming, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying,” Shives said. “I was trying to tell her to get into the back seat.’’

Frausto will be nominated for a life-saving award, Davis said.

But Frausto, still shivering, still clutching his cut-up hand, was intent on finding the name of the firefighter who jumped in right after him, and happily, finally did: Charles Smith.

By the end of the day, some 75 firefighters, divers, police and other emergency rescue workers had congregated at the rescue scene, from Hazel Crest and Oak Forest and as far away as Frankfort and Lynwood. Davis was grateful for the help, which just showed up in his town of about 2,000.

As neighbors chatted and snapped photos, officials dragged the car out of the pond, its hood popped up and its windows broken.

And they used sonar and more divers to scan the pond. Initial reports said two people had been in the car. They wanted to make sure the water at the Rupari Food Services plant, 15600 Wentworth Ave., South Holland, was clear.

Frausto spoke with Wallace’s family at the hospital but never got to meet the woman he pulled from the water. On Saturday, he still was recovering from the cuts he suffered in the water and grateful to all the authorities who came to help.

“It does feel pretty bad,” Frausto said. “It’s part of the job sometimes. I wish it had turned out better, but it didn’t.”

Contributing: Sun-Times Media, Victoria Johnson, Joe Biesk

As published in the SouthtownStar, April 3, 2011, early edition.

‘Cops have long wait at courthouse’

JOLIET — All morning, a buzz fills the hallway outside the six courtrooms on the Will County Courthouse’s felony floor.

Police officers gossip, defendants consult with attorneys, mothers hurry children to restrooms. Bodies keep the fourth floor’s slatted, blond-wood benches occupied.

During an ongoing fatal DUI trial against Cecil Conner Jr., two well-dressed witnesses have been near-constant fixtures in one set of seats. As other witnesses march in and out, Sgt. Gerald Ruff and Det. Peter Fajman have spent 13 — or maybe 14 or 15 — weekdays waiting. They sit in seats in the hall since witnesses can’t listen to testimony in the courtroom.

And the two Steger officers constitute a good part of the state’s case against the accused drunken driver, Cecil Conner Jr.

The pair also were needed as witnesses during the defense’s pre-trial motions, delayed first by new evidence, then for other witnesses, then snow. They were retained for the defense and then for the state’s rebuttal, all of which ended Friday afternoon. Closing arguments are scheduled for today.

They had been sitting out in the hall hoping every day was their last there.

On Friday, finally it was.

Ruff, a DARE officer by day, relied on his phone to keep him occupied. It’s hard to do so much nothing, he said.

Fajman made slow slaloms down the hall and back.

Ruff and Fajman were dressed and ready to dance. But with few exceptions during the weeklong trial, the two were more like wallflowers.

Their boredom filled the space in an otherwise empty hallway.

Ruff testified Feb. 14. He was the first responder when the Chevrolet Cavalier skidded almost sideways across a lawn along Steger Road and a tree impacting right where little Michael Langford Jr. was strapped into a booster seat.

Fajman took over the case’s investigation as a Steger detective and did the interview that led to Conner’s arrest. But as a part-time Steger Estates firefighter and EMT, he first helped a wobbly Conner into the ambulance. His main testimony came Tuesday.

By Thursday afternoon, some Steger 911 dispatchers had left the courthouse, released from their own subpoenas so they could return to work.

With them went the new blood to talk to.

The judge got back on the bench after a break and everyone scrambled to get back in where the action was — everyone but the two officers.

On his way in Thursday, the lead defense attorney hollered out the courtroom door, “I’ll call you when I need you.”

Then an hour later, he reappeared to say, “Hang in there, guys.”

No room for this dialogue

Ack, ran out of space in this story. No, it just didn’t fit, good as the dialogue is, much as it set off my radar when I heard it.

Witness Jennifer Tartt, friend of Cecil Conner, took a phone call from him shortly after his designated driver was pulled over and arrested. He ended up driving the car, which had his girlfriend Kathie LaFond’s little son sleeping in the back. He called back to the party where he’d been drinking.

Tartt only could testify about her part of the conversation, which, in my mind, was even more effective than if she’d been allowed to do her part and his part both.

Her phone rings and she picks up, she tells the jury. Cecil spoke first. Then she responded:

“Who arrested Kathie?”

Then Cecil. Then her again:

“Do they know you’re drunk?”

Cecil again, then she responds:

“Pull off to the side of the road and me and my fiancee will bring the baby back.”

Cecil tells her something else. She explains her next part of the conversation:

“I told him he was slurring his words, he was extremely drunk.”

And Cecil’s demeanor? the defense attorney asked her.

“Very upset, panicky, drunk up, choked up.”

“I’m sorry,” Tartt said and she dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “I had told him to look for stop signs to let us know where he was so we could go find him.”

And then?

“The phone cut off.”

And then?

“I tried to call him back numerous times.”

And why?

“Because I knew he was driving with a 5-year-old in the car. I was worried. I was also worried because we didn’t know where he was with the baby and we didn’t know he was.”

Michael Langford Jr., 5, died that night after Conner crashed the car into a tree.

Feb. 5, 1984

You were born on a Sunday, early in the morning. Your name was going to be Seamus or Shannon, our mother decided. We lived on Ripka Street, went to Holy Family. And on the Friday before your birth, our grossly pregnant mother sent me to school as usual. I was in the second grade. 

We were bundled off to church after school that day to have our throats blessed. And when I finally got home an hour or so late — I walked then with other kids from school — our mother was frantic.

— Where were you?
— They took us to church to bless our throats. It’s the feast of St. Blaise. What are you talking about?

That was Friday afternoon. You were born on a Sunday early in the morning. The name stuck in our mother’s mind and she gave it to you.

And on that morning, I was seven, and my bedroom had moved to the third floor to make space for you.  Our father had collapsed into bed after a long night of labor and I woke up to see what was up.

I peeked into his room at the bottom of my stairs.

— So?
— It’s a boy, he said, and rolled back over. He went to sleep again.

I burst into tears, I know, because I feared another brother like the instigator I already had, who wrecked my toys and my play and my life. I cried because I didn’t know a little brother could be anything else.

Later in the day, when I stopped crying and he was himself again, he’d tell me you couldn’t breathe at your birth. The doctor gave you a slap and you didn’t cry, as babies did, to take a breath. And he and our mother were so scared, and the hospital put you on a machine for a minute and then you were ok.

But he and our mother were so scared you couldn’t breathe. And you came home and that was it. We were going to be friends, because you weren’t the sort of little brother who wrecked things and I found your name for you.

I like you immensely now, more, sometimes than I love you. And I wish you a very happy birthday today.

‘Christ Hospital employees won’t stop helping’

Even in a major blizzard, life inside a trauma center goes on according to plan.

As the storm descended Tuesday evening on the Southland, doctors and nurses at Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn implemented the plan: Code White.

Some slept at the hotel next door Tuesday night to keep up staffing levels. Some worked on the fly, filling in where they could. Plows stepped it up around the hospital, keeping roads clear for emergency vehicles.

But life went on in a deadly storm. And nine lives came to be.

Nine blizzard babies were born, a hospital spokesman said, between 3 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

‘I guess I can make it’

In the frigid dark at 6 a.m. Wednesday, a flock of nurses set out from the Hilton Oak Lawn for their 7 a.m. shifts at Christ Medical Center. The shuttle couldn’t get into the hotel driveway, so three of the nurses walked to Cicero Avenue and down to 95th Street, four blocks to the hospital.

“I guess I can make it,” thought Elsie Ervin. No matter her 70 years nor her replaced hip. No matter the arthritis in her knees. Her line dancing keeps her agile enough, she figured.

“Of course, that’s like walking 10 miles in the snow,” she reflected later.

Ervin signed up for her shift, knowing that younger colleagues had children at home who needed them. She planned to sleep at the Hilton Tuesday night with other staffers, knowing she wouldn’t be able to drive to and from her Calumet City home.

Besides, no one needed her at home. At the hospital, her female patients were counting on her.

But as she walked to the hospital, she faltered. The snow was very deep. The other nurses had just met Ervin minutes before, but they came to her aid. Bernadette Scott stayed with her. Another, Joyce Emerson, went ahead a little, flagged down a police vehicle, begged a ride for Ervin.

“She didn’t have any gloves and we gave her some gloves, and she had all her bags and everything and she started walking,” Scott said.

Oak Lawn police officer Benjamin Hahn agreed to give them a ride, Ervin said, “because of my being an old lady.” There was room for all in his yellow Hummer.

“Elsie could hardly get up into this Hummer. We shoved her up in there, and we got to the hospital,” Scott said.

The nurses made it to Christ half an hour early — Ervin to her floor, the other two to the special surgical-neurosurgical intensive care unit.

“It was like a blessing for the three of us to have made it,” Ervin said.

“That was more than a blessing,” Scott told her. “That was a gift.”

Talk about dedication

The call came to Shelly Churchill about 6 a.m. Wednesday. Other nurses had called in to her cardiac procedure recovery unit at Christ Medical Center, unable to get in for work, a supervisor said. Could she try, please, and fast?

Churchill, 52, took one look at the garage at her home in Chicago’s Beverly community and knew she wasn’t driving anywhere. She grabbed her husband, Tony, to accompany her on the four-mile trek to the hospital.

The couple headed straight down 91st Street on a dark and silent morning. They stuck to the street, taking the brunt of the wind on their side. Western Avenue was deserted, ghostly.

By Evergreen Park, they migrated over to 93rd Street. Debated 95th Street but feared the traffic. Then they headed south on Kostner Avenue.

“We walked in the street the whole time,” Churchill said. “Thank God, there were not a whole lot of drivers.”

She was warm enough, in proper Chicago winter gear. She does the trip often, though typically on her bicycle. She’s active, works out a ton.

And the cardiac unit needed her skills in this kind of weather. Shoveling such deep snow can be heart-attack work. And she was there for them.