Ding Dong

I answered the front door of our home at 4 o’clock in the morning. I turned on the porch light to reveal 6 police officers positioned in various locations on the lawn with their guns drawn and aimed at ME. Two of the police officers had shot guns.

According to my mother, this is what happened on that night . . .

She was fighting with my father. She was standing at the top of the stairway, my father was at the bottom of the stairway standing on the floor. My father was drunk and angry, waving his gun around. He then pointed his gun up the stairs directly at my mother and barked, “I’m going to blow you away, bitch!” My mother jumped down the full flight of stairs – landing on top of my father. The two of them crumbling to the floor. My mother was hysterical, screaming for her life. She began screaming for all of us kids to “Run, get out of the house!” “Go! Get out! Get in the car! Your father is crazy!” She fled the house with my siblings.

My mother saved not only her own life on this night, but the lives of her children. She saved us from my father, the drunk animal. She was a true life hero. A bonafide Momma bear risking it all for her cubs.

We were reminded about this heroic act for decades. She retold it many times over the years at family gatherings to anybody who would listen. It was David defeating Goliath.

After all these decades of telling this story, my mother had forgotten one important detail: I was there. I witnessed the entire event. I wasn’t more than 8 feet away. I saw everything.

Let me tell you what I saw …

My father was a New York City detective assigned to the Midtown North Investigation Unit. He’d been on the NYPD about 15 years at this point, about half of those years as a detective. He was exactly where he’d always wanted to be in his law enforcement career.

It was the middle of the night and the family was asleep when I heard the back door unlock and my father stepping into the kitchen. My father was home from an evening shift. He went to the living room where he fell asleep on the couch.

I heard my mother’s feet hit the floor across the hall in the master bedroom. She was getting out of bed to confront my father. Heading for the stairs she tells my younger sister to go sit with my younger brother in his room.

I didn’t stay in my room. I wanted to see this. It was show time.

She stomped down the stairs like she had baseball bats for legs. She went into the darkened living room and began hitting my father and screaming at him.

My father awoke to my mother screaming and hitting him. He got off the couch and exited the living room. She followed. They wind up at the bottom of the stairs screaming at each other. My father is on the foyer floor facing my mother who is now on the first step, eye-to-eye with him. She is still screaming and dropping hammer fists in any opening she could find in his defenses. When she couldn’t hit she scratched. My father was trying to grab her hands and wrists to restrain her. He is in pure defense mode. Now she’s screaming across the house that my father is hitting her. “Oh my god, what are you doing? Let go of me! Stop! Stop! Help!”

Believe me when I say, my mother can scream the dead back to life.

She grabbed my father’s throat with both hands and began squeezing. He was now trying to back away. My mother used both her thumb nails and began digging them deep into both sides of his neck. My mother had long nails and they were sunk deep.

My father was backing up while she had her claws in him and the two of them wound up falling against the wall, creating a large hole in the sheet rock. They crumpled to the ground where she lost her grip.

She jumped up and began screaming across the house for us kids to run for our lives! She gathered up my younger brother and sister and left the house.

I refused to go anywhere. I stayed with my father.

Dad and I are now alone. The chaos was gone. He went back to the couch to try and sleep, I went back upstairs to my room and tried to sleep.

About 4 o’clock in the morning I heard a knock on the front door. I figured it had to be my mother returning for round 2. My father yelled up from the living room asking me to get the door. He wanted no part of her.

As I open the door I turn the porch light on and there stood 6 police officers spread around our front lawn, guns drawn and leveled at me. There was a cop on each side of the front door standing against the exterior wall of the house. Those were the two cops with the shot guns.

One wrong move and I would have had my face shot off.

When my mother fled the house she went to a relative’s house where she not only recounted her twisted version of events to extended family but she also called the Suffolk County Police Department and told them her 6’4”, 240lb cop husband was drunk, out of control, waving his gun around, threatening to “blow her away” and he was very violent!

A cop grabbed me forcefully and pulled me away from the front door like he was rescuing a hostage. I was taken around to the side of the house. The cops began asking me what happened. I told them what happened.

“What about the gun?,” they asked.

“What gun?,” I asked back, “There wasn’t any gun.”

This was the first time I was hearing about a gun and the first time they were hearing there wasn’t a gun.

The cops pointed towards the other side of the house where I can see my father standing in the driveway. He was handcuffed in his underwear. Apparently the cops thought I was too afraid of him to tell them what really happened so they wanted to show me King Kong was shackled and I was now safe to tell them the truth.

“Okay, tell us what happened,” the cops started again. I told them, again, what happened. No gun, he was defending himself. She tried to pierce his neck with her thumb nails. She was playing offense, he was playing defense. That’s it.

My mother attacked my father.

I look over to the driveway again. I see cops with flashlights looking under my father’s chin, at his neck area. They had him looking up and turning his head side-to-side. They were looking at the scratches and the two gouges on his neck. One was bleeding. The gouges were located exactly where I said they would be. They looked far worse now than they did immediately after they were inflicted. They had become these dark purple bruises, like he’d been shot on each side of his neck with a paint ball gun.

What the cops didn’t find was, evidence of intoxication. My mother lied.

The cuffs came off, Dad and I went back inside. It was just the two of us in the house. It was peaceful. Finally, the chaos was over.

The next day, my mother called my father’s boss and repeated her lies. She demanded he be fired.

But a much bigger storm was on the horizon …