Remembering A 'First'

Anyone who has ever served the public behind a badge can tell you about their ‘firsts’… first homicide scene, first bar fight, first fatal accident… and remember it with clarity. One of my ‘firsts’ is The Hanging Man.

It was turning into a beautiful spring Sunday morning in 1982; I’d worked the overnight shift at OPD and the eastern sky was turning that deep purplish-blue that precedes the rising of the sun. It was always about that time of the morning when I’d take my meal break at Denny’s, because they were the only all-night joint open in the village back then.

I’d been inside for a bit, long enough to have my scrambled-eggs-and-hashed-brown-potatoes set in front of me by the waitress when I got the call.

“112, we have a suspicious circumstances complaint…” and the dispatcher went on to give me the location. Then, at the end, she added “…possible suicide.”

Possible suicide.

I threw a couple of bucks on the table, having had one bite of my meal before jumping up and heading out the door. As I recall, the other guy I was working with on that night had arrested a driver for DWI earlier in the shift and was at the station working on his report. We’d usually wait till the latter part of our shift to start working on paperwork, as the hours between 0500 and the end of the shift at 0800 were the slowest.

The place I was sent to was in a semi-rural area; it was a farm with acreage, but the area had been somewhat built up around it. Access to the farm was back a long, dusty lane which ran between a construction company and radio station.

I approached the house, which sat to the left of the drive with a barn further down on the right, and pulled into the gravel drive leading to the home’s garage. The overhead door was up and I was met by a woman who was probably 70 years old or better, wearing a house coat over her night clothes. The look on her face was one of concern…and pain.

After getting pertinent information from her, she explained that her husband had gotten up sometime around 0430 that morning and had gone to the barn to feed their livestock, which was his usual routine. Then he would come back to the house, where she would have his breakfast waiting for him.

On this morning, however, he hadn’t come back. The woman feared something had happened to him but she was too afraid to go look. “He’s always back around five-thirty to eat his breakfast”, she’d said, “and I’m afraid he’s done something terrible.”

It seemed the woman’s husband, who’d always been a fit and healthy man, had recently developed some problems; problems deep enough that he’d made an appointment to see a doctor which, she’d said, he would never have done unless it was something serious. He was due to see his physician the next day.

Tears welled in the woman’s eyes. “He’s afraid he has cancer.”

The woman pointed out the barn, which sat probably seventy-five yards from the house, indicating that was where he’d gone. I backed my cruiser into the gravel lane, traveled the short distance and then parked in the grass in front of the two-story red barn, entering through the open man-door on the lower level. I called out a few times, not wanting to startle the man, and was met with only the sounds of chickens and cattle.

I made my way to the back of the barn where two large doors stood open, facing the east…and the rising of the sun, which was just peeking over the horizon.

I found the man in that place. He had hung himself, his lifeless form hanging by a rope from a cross-beam, facing that rising, burning orb, a step-ladder laying on its side beneath him.

It is one of the indelibly-etched scenes in my mind, one which would be joined by countless others in the coming decades.

This man, who had worked hard all his life to provide for his family, had chosen to end his life because he thought he had cancer.