Karmatic Justice

True story ( as best as I can recall ): Back in the early 90s, while working midnights at MPD, there was a mope in the north end of the city who was pretty much  the crack cocaine kingpin; this was before or early on in the time period where the Detroit and Chicago factions were starting to move in on local dealers. The drug task force had been chewing on this guy and his crew, as were the patrol officers, and had made significant strides in crippling his trade. We’ll call this scumbag ‘Doc’.

It was summer time, a warm night….a Sunday/Monday; there was nothing moving outside. We’d received a stolen car complaint a few hours earlier and, as luck would have it, the car was found…sitting in the middle of Bowman Street at Buckingham St, crossways and engine spewing steam. Somebody had run the crap out of it and left it abandoned. This was at about 0300 hours. Gary Foster, who is like a brother to me, was the officer assigned to the call; he was fairly new, maybe a couple years on the job. I was a Field Training Officer at the time, and had Joann Krausmann on board…she was driving this night. Gary was standing in the street waiting on a tow truck to arrive as we cruised up, and we stopped and chatted for a few moments, making a joke or insulting one another…typical cop stuff. I’d told Gary, “If you need anything, we’ll be in the area”, and he responded that he’d be OK as soon as the tow showed up.

As we pulled away, Joann turned east on Buckingham…and then BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!! , sounding like the gunshots were right outside our cruiser. Simultaneously, Gary starts screaming on the radio “ SHOTS FIRED SHOTS FIRED! 300, I’M BEING FIRED ON !! “. Joann whipped the cruiser around and we screeched to a halt beside the abandoned stolen car, which Gary was crouched behind, weapon drawn. Sirens seemed to be coming from every direction, and shortly there were about ten other police officers on scene….our guys, the sheriff’s department and the state patrol. Gary was OK…they’d missed him…but a little shook up; who wouldn’t be? Cruisers streamed through the neighborhood, searching for the suspect(s) who’d shot at Gary from the north, around the Bowman/Harker intersection. After 20-25 minutes or so, the search was called off…no sign of them anywhere.

As you’d expect, the incident initiated an intensive investigation and round of new policies; the detective bureau utilized their street contacts, searching for any information on whoever had shot at Gary. Patrol guys chatted up neighborhoods in the area, trying to get that one shred of intel to work with. Nothing.

Finally, somebody got something; METRICH had an informant ( they’re called ‘cooperating individuals’ now; ‘informant’ has a negative connotation ) who’d been told that the shooter was ‘Malcolm’ a young guy I’d had contact with a few times who was on the wrong side of the law. Malcolm had been instructed to shoot a policeman by Doc, in retaliation for all the heat that had been brought down on his little operation. I’m sure thousands of man-hours were expended by the Special investigative Bureau, METRICH and the Detective Bureau in order to expand on this information, but nothing concrete enough to take to the prosecutor’s office came out of it. Malcolm, budding drug trafficker that he was, would remain free.

Fast-forward a year, almost to the day Ptl. Gary Foster was shot at several times; afternoon shift receives a call of a shooting with a ‘man down’…somebody had been shot on Vale Avenue, which is the next intersection south on Bowman from the location of the night shift shooting. Officers arrived to discover a body laying in the yard of a home, the body having been shot multiple times. It was Malcolm. Investigation showed that two underage thuglets had tried to rob Malcolm of his dope, cash and jewelry, and had been shot in the process. Malcolm had tried to flee, staggered from the street and collapsed in the front yard of the house on Vale, succumbing to his wounds.

The address of the house whose yard Malcolm had collapsed in was 173.

Gary Foster’s badge number?

173.

You can’t make this stuff up.