I’ve always wondered if some alert reporter would pick up on my track record with law enforcement before I went to work for Blue Lives Matter in 2017. It happened. But the pictures they used for the story are just godawful and were clearly pilfered from old social media posts of mine that I should never have posted in the first place. FB teaching me another life lesson, right?
If you’d like to check it out, the story is in Law Enforcement Today and they’ve written about me in the “Great American Warrior” column (pretty sure I don’t deserve that). Check it out here!
But seriously, it’s an interesting article (part one of two, apparently) about how I got involved in the law enforcement community through my husband and how I’ve made the most of it since we’ve been together. There are two kinds of cop wives – those who are involved and those who are kept in the dark. I was the involved kind. But that was mostly due to the fact that my husband was the highest-ranking official in his department who actually lived in DC. That meant he did a lot of things that the officials who lived out in the suburbs didn’t do, and it was easy for me to participate in things at the substation.
I was in my 20s and so were my girlfriends, so it was fun to say “hey, wanna help me take Krispy Kremes to roll call?” We’d pick up 10 dozen hot donuts – sometimes more – and get a Krispy Kreme balloon. We’d feed the cops and put a balloon on the railing of the substation to let all the nearby cops (there are 37 different departments in DC) know we had hot donuts on hand. Lots of officers would stop in. We’d also have the grills ready when the cops got off duty at 3 am on the 4th of July. I’m sure the neighbors at the old substation do not miss our illegal fireworks displays in the parking lot. The new district has cameras outside and that’s no fun at all.
And there were so many cookies… I delivered thousands of cookies to the old District 2 back in the day. We learned early on that if you wanted the sergeants to deliver the cookies to guys who weren’t at roll call, you had to give the sergeants an extra bag of cookies as a delivery fee. Otherwise, they’d take their fee out of the officers’ cookies bags. Utterly unfair. We also tried to keep fresh cookies on hand for anybody who stopped by our house on duty. It made us a popular spot.
The night in 2003 when drug dealers opened fire on our new home on the edge of the Brookland neighborhood in Northeast DC was one of the scariest experiences I’ve ever had. We’d only lived in our house for a few months, but my husband, Bill, had already bumped heads with some local drug boys around the corner (they lived with their grandmother who used to be the neighborhood loan shark – go figure) who weren’t happy about his take-home police car being parked on their corner. Apparently, we were hurting their business. Boohoo.
Anyway, some idiot named Dominick Flowers (19 at the time) decided it would be a good idea to try to scare us away by shooting at our cars and house. To be far, they actually only shot the crap out of Bill’s Chevy Blazer. They left my Jeep Cherokee alone. But some of the bullets they dug out of our house and the neighbor’s air conditioner were a match for 13 murders in the city.
You wouldn’t believe the police response when a captain goes on the air and tells everybody that somebody is shooting at his home and his wife is there alone. Holy moly! I was still on hold with 911 when my husband’s department – Metro Transit Police – responded in full force. I can honestly say that hearing those sirens in the distance as I hid in our stairwell (the only place without windows) was one of the best sounds ever. I will never complain about being woken up by sirens during the night.
At first, police officials didn’t want to talk about what had happened. DC Police sent over the “intelligence unit” to do a security assessment and they blamed us for being an obviously Blue family in the city. And that was before George Floyd but only two years after 9/11, so people still generally liked police officers when we moved into what was clearly a gentrifying neighborhood.
Fortunately, a good citizen who saw the shooting gave a description of the vehicle to the cop stationed on our corner to protect us and a super-smart detective tracked down the gunmen. They weren’t real smart. They shot at us from a red convertible Miata with body damage.
A huge investigation ensued – turned out several cop families had been shot at in our police district that year – and when it was all over with, police and federal authorities had arrested more than 80 members of a gang called the Taft Terrace Crew in connection with the murders they matched to the bullets from our house. We testified at their sentencings – they pleaded guilty to life without parole to avoid the death penalty – the day before we moved to Puerto Rico, one week after my husband retired. We didn’t plan it that way. Karma just did us a fabulous favor.
My husband always says that cops only catch the dumb ones because the rest go on to be members of Congress or Enron executives. The guys who shot at us were really dumb. But I can say that because all we had was destruction of property – all of the other victims we saw at the sentencing had lost somebody they loved.
I didn’t intentionally turn my first book series into a police romance. I just wrote what I know and that’s what I know the most about. I have lived through a lot as a cop wife – my husband responded in the DC area on 9/11 and we lived in the neighborhood of the Anthrax post office. They irradiated our mail for a year and it all crumbled when we opened it. And then, of course, there was the DC Sniper. But Bill was never shot or seriously injured in the line of duty, and he never had to shoot anybody, in 30 years on his department. For that, we are seriously blessed.
We know what it’s like to bury a friend killed in the line of duty and I know what it’s like to be afraid to open the front door. Fortunately, I had a husband who took me to the police range and taught me how to shoot every kind of gun we might ever have in our house so if the bad guys came back, I was prepared. But let’s be honest. That’s not the most enticing way to learn shooting as a hobby. But I survived and hopefully thrived through it. And now we’re on the other side and enjoying his safe retirement.
After we moved to Puerto Rico and opened the wedding planning business, we got involved with the police family on tiny Vieques Island. We helped launch a police charity that helped pay for new windshields, pepper spray, and other resources that stateside cops get without even thinking. On Vieques, it could take two months to get a car repaired. And they didn’t have that many police cars that worked in the first place. I served on a bunch of committees for the Police de Puerto Rico, but that’s a story for another day.
But I can brag that I have the Puerto Rican police commissioner’s cell phone number because back when I was there, he was Commander Lopez and I was the portavoz (spokeswoman) for his region on the Department of Justice’s committee to reform their police department. He’s my buddy. Our group sponsored the first-ever celebration of Police Week on May 15, 2012, on Vieques Island and it was attended by officials from all over Puerto Rico. We did a radio roll call of the fallen officers – something they’d never seen done there before. It was pretty amazing.
On a happier note, we also figured out how to get hundreds of Krispy Kreme donuts from across the big island to Vieques… but that’s another story for another day.
My books are about a wedding planner starting over. But it’s also about learning to date and love a law enforcement officer and all the perks and trials and tribulations that come with it. If you’re reading the books and love them, please take a minute to leave me a 5-star review on Amazon or Goodreads. Also, if you’re in FB groups where the members would be interested, I’d love it if you’d promote my news book series. I’m happy to do a giveaway or something fun for your friends.
Until next time, happy reading!
Sandy