It’s 1:00am and I’m lying in bed thinking about a recent morbid day at the office that I assumed I was done thinking about.
The thing that throws me off about this particular incident is that I’ve seen much worse over the past several years. I’ve pulled dead bodies from cars, seen a lifeless baby, witnessed child abuse, investigated a legit rape or two, discovered incestual sexual assault involving a kid I thought I knew and his younger brother, failed to resuscitate dying people with CPR, and blocked off dismembered bodies with crime scene tape. There’s no shortage of doom and gloom in this job.
As cops, we develop that infamous gallows humor to deal with the grime and the filth. I’m not proud, nor am I ashamed to admit that I’ve joked at length about some of the more heinous things I’ve come across. With that said, I don’t know why I’m losing sleep thinking about one man’s suicide that I came upon a few months back—and I’m actually kind of pissed at the guy for it.
It was about 10:00am on a Sunday morning when dispatch sent me one of those calls where the information coming in doesn’t really make any sense because the caller is so worked up, but I was right down the street from her apartment complex, so I got there pretty quick. When I arrived, I climbed the stairs to a second-floor apartment and the caller was waiting for me outside her door.
There stood a twenty-something female sweating profusely and gasping for air as she struggled to tell me that her friend was inside the apartment. “He might have killed himself,” she said meekly. I asked if there were any weapons inside, and she shook her head to signal that there were not. I drew my gun anyway and entered the apartment as she said something about a note left on the floor.
There’s something about the air in a room with a dead body.
A small-breed dog began to bark from behind a pet barrier in the kitchenette to my left, and I can remember smelling the piss that soaked the “wee-wee pads” left on the kitchen floor by the little dog’s owner. Next, I made my way into the bedroom and the pomeranian or whatever the hell it was went quiet. As I looked to my right, I could see an unmade bed, some clutter, and a book with Joel Osteen’s shit-eating grin plastering its cover on a shelf in the corner—nothing out of the ordinary. The left side of the bedroom fed into an adjacent bathroom with a closed closet door across from the sink. There on a section of carpet in between the bathroom sink and closet door was a notepad placed on top of a loose sheet of paper as if it was there to keep it from blowing away in the wind. The note read:
“I’ve committed suicide. Don’t come in. Please have someone else come in.”
Just then, I heard my backup’s footsteps behind me, and I thought about making a Joel Osteen joke, but I didn’t. Instead, I pointed to the note and read it aloud as I looked over my left shoulder at J-Mac and said something I can’t quite remember.
Knowing there was only one thing left to do, I opened the closet door with my gun at low-ready, that week’s “suicide by cop” down the road at Georgia Tech still floating around in my mind. In this case, it wasn’t a live man with a knife on the other side of that door, though. It was a shirtless male hanging lifeless by his neck facing the wall. His body was in a kneeling position and it kind of reminded me of the scene in the movie I Am Legend where Will Smith goes into that zombie den looking for his dog only to find a pack of those creatures hunched over facing the corner in the darkness, completely still. I took a step back immediately, saying something along the lines of, “Ah, what the f-ck?.” I stepped back in to have a better look, but I didn’t need to check for a pulse. His feet were dark blue and his lower back was on its way there. Lividity had set in. He’d been dead for hours.
There’s something about the air in a room with a dead body. Even when the decomposition process hasn’t yet begun, the air feels heavier than usual. It’s almost as if the life has been sucked out of the room. Maybe there’s more than one reason they call them “stiffs.”
There were a couple of weird things I noticed before I got to reading the suicide note on the floor next to his left knee. For one, there was a tattoo that said “LUCKY” on his left shoulder, alluding to the better days of his past. Then there was the heavy duty strap he used to tie around his neck. It was bright green in color, and I could imagine it being used to tie a kayak to the roof-rack of an Xterra, but not for this. Finally, there was the closet rod he hung by. Buddy weighed at least 180. Before this moment, no closet rod I’d ever seen was capable of surviving the wrath of my wife’s wardrobe.
The note was par for the course for suicide notes—not a feel-good read made for a Hallmark greeting card. It bugged me a little when he wrote to his four kids that they were his fondest memories, as I just can’t imagine selfishly leaving behind my own no matter how horrific life could ever get. In contrast, he gave a big screw you to his parents and fair-weather friends who “never understood” him or at some point told others not to give him money—that he “did it to himself” in becoming a drug addict.
What else was there? His note suggested the song Trapeze Swinger by Iron and Wine to help comfort whoever it was in his life that he still cared about—probably his fatherless children. That song bugged me too, though. I listened to it once to honor a dead man’s wishes, as I wasn’t sure if the note would ever come across the eyeballs of its intended audience, and it stuck in my head for almost two weeks—resurfacing at the forefront of my mind at the oddest times with mental pictures of the guy strung up in the closet with it.
The note also suggested people “listen to as many Alan Watts lectures as they possibly can.” I’d been a casual fan of the British philosopher prior to this, and it kind of sucks that I’ll probably always attach his brilliance to this dude from now on. Nonetheless, I’m sure my “so-and-so brought me here” comment on one of Watts’ YouTube videos will stir up a pretty interesting conversation for years to come. The suicide note closed with this:
“Time to find out what it’s like to go to sleep and never wake up. Gotta go.”
It turned out that the caller had only known him from meeting on a few occasions thanks to a dating website, but she hadn’t heard from him in months. She knew he was an addict and told him that he could call her for help if he was ever about to relapse. On the night prior to me standing in her apartment, she received a call from him, which led to her driving an hour north to find him running down the side of the road high off snorting Adderrall.
The poor girl talked with him, told him he could sleep in her bed while she took the couch, and woke up to a corpse. He could have killed himself a million and one other ways, but he chose to victimize someone who was trying to help by hanging himself in her bedroom closet. If you ask me, that’s pretty low. My partner J Mac says it’s a sign of just how selfish people in society are becoming. The true victim here has since quit her job and moved back to Florida with the scars of the deceased transferred to the innocent. Call me crazy, it just doesn’t seem fair.
Joking about how I’d off myself too if I had to wake up to Joel Osteen staring at me, pointing out the ironic humor in the “lucky” tattoo, and whatever else was said to make light of the situation afterwards was probably in poor taste by most peoples’ standards—but that’s never done to disrespect anyone. It’s just a feeble attempt to lighten up the darkness, and there’s plenty of darkness in this world.
