One Remaining Gram

332.

Over time one's empathy can become wrapped in a protective layer of calloused skin. I have been doing this long enough to know that it is a blessing and a curse. We have to ask the tough questions of those choking in the grip of grief. Fortunately Mustang's employment history, most notably as a post-traumatic neurologist, has provided her with a few the necessary prerequisites, but not all. It remains one of the toughest parts of the job comparable to the nightmare of first responders assigned to doing just that. Carnage is carnage whether it's physical or emotional. Blood unleashes a autoimmune response in any sentient human being.

Our task is not in solving the crime, but in understanding it. The local Police have the lead in making arrests and gathering evidence for subsequent court proceedings should the perpetrator be captured and not killed. Our job is to determine if the gunman was acting alone or as part of a larger web of dissidents, that being a kinder, softer, word for domestic terrorists. We start with the family.

No matter the fealty, standing, history or criminal record of the person of interest, emotions quickly rise to the surface. Good times and bad, highlights and low, smiles and tears are all waiting just below the surface for the opportunity to escape, to be released into the custody of sympathetic ears. I try my best to establish a bond of trust, one that will allow the sharing of facts that sometimes have been suppressed for decades, secrets that were locked away for protection, but now need the light of day - if there is going to be a useful and/or cathartic exchange. The skill of the police interview is something that must be learned by experience, not merely understood from a classroom lecture or film study. Every situation is unique as is every individual put in the unenviable position of answering difficult questions. The final challenge is often in determining an acceptable degree of confidence in cross-cultural examinations, and in this case we are dealing with a young Syrian born Islamist, a circumstance some social umpires call two strikes.

Do not rush to judgement. Let the story be told. Establish as solid a relationship as possible in the first ten minutes based on trust. And most importantly, ask the right questions and then shut up and listen. The protocol we have established calls for me to interview and Mustang to  transcribe as much of the exchange as possible in shorthand, even though every second is being recorded to audio tape. Our field experience has shown on countless occasions that environmental interference such as wind, rain, traffic noise, birds and even a child asking for something to eat can render key passages not only inaudible but inadmissible. There is also the undeniable fact that body language, slang, dialects and other communications can only be felt, and then noted, undetectable by even the highest quality recording devices. So I talk and she writes.

After several hours with an entire household of relatives and a small community of well-intentioned, mixed-race neighbors, we have enough to formulate a fairly accurate profile of person one: A young, troubled and angry, American born local High School athlete with a short fuse, paranoid and borderline psychotic, anti-social, isolated, and perhaps, PERHAPS capable of extreme violence as a form of response for the perceived hardships inflicted upon him by a society that discriminates and agitates people of color. He has a minor rap sheet, most notably violent social interactions, is an average student, and prefers video games to dating, and rap music to reading. There is no obvious link suggesting he might be a part of a gang, organized radical group or other street club. Records now indicate that he purchased the weapon, the go-to AR-15, just six days prior to the mass shooting, the only form of ID required a valid Colorado drivers license and the payment of eight-hundred dollars in cash.

We call the information in to and ask Julie and ask for background checks on the family, suggesting also that it appears at this point to be an isolated case of a kid with limited coping skills no longer able to dismiss the pressures of a modern oppressive society and eventually choosing death by cop in a desperate cry for help.

That he took ten innocent others as proof of intention and was subsequently taken alive, creates a much larger and more complex riddle for our fractured judicial system to unravel.

We decide to stay another day and look around. After a relaxing meal we arrive, exhausted, to a hotel near the college campus. Before retiring to our rooms we divvy up the homework and I offer an outline for the effort: "Don't spend time on detail, just get the facts lined up chronologically, we'll review once more, reading between the lines, on the second pass, tomorrow."

She seems troubled, so I ask, "You OK?"

"Yeah, just emotionally fatigued," she says.

"I hear ya. Not my favorite part."

"Tough times to be a cop."

With the one remaining gram of empathy I have left to give, I offer her a "Welcome to DT."