Police Officers see horrible things on a daily basis. Death and violence is part of their jobs. Sometimes though, there are calls that are so horrific and brutal that even they can't forget them. In the following stories, police officers share the worst calls they've been on that they can never forget.
(Content has been edited for clarity.)
No One Ever Learns
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“I used to be a beat cop a long time ago. I’d get called out on domestic disputes all the time. Hundreds, probably, over the years. However, there was this one guy – this one disgusting, alt right human being – that I will never forget. Gordy. He looked like Bo Svenson. You remember him? Walking Tall? You don’t remember? No. Anyway. Big boy, 280 pounds. His wife, or whatever she was, was small. Like a bird. Wrists were like branches. Anyway, my partner and I got called out there every weekend, and one of us would pull her aside and say, ‘Come on, tonight’s the night we press charges.’ This wasn’t one of those deep-down he-loves-me set-ups – we get a lot of those – but not this. This girl was a victim, but she was scared. She wasn’t going to cross him – no way, no how. Nothing we could do but pass her off to the EMTs, put him in a car, drive him downtown, and throw him in the tank. He sleeps it off, next morning out he goes. Back home.
One night, my partner is out sick, and it is just me. The call comes in, and it’s the usual stuff – broke her nose in the shower kind of thing. So I cuff him, put him in the car and away we go. Only that night, we’re driving into town, and this guy is in my back seat humming ‘Danny Boy.’ It just rubbed me wrong. So instead of left, I go right, out into nowhere. I kneel him down, and I put my weapon in his mouth, and I tell him, ‘This is it. This is how it ends. I’m going to shoot’ He’s crying, pure look of terror on his face, going to the bathroom all over himself, swearing to God he’s going to leave her alone. Screaming (as much as you can with a weapon in your mouth). I tell him to be quiet. I need to think about what I was going to do here and, of course, he gets quiet. He goes still and quiet. Like a dog waiting for dinner scraps. We just stand there for a while, me acting like I’m thinking things over and Prince Charming kneeling in the dirt with a mess in his pants.
After a few minutes, I take the weapon out of his mouth, and I say, ‘So help me if you touch her again…’
Two weeks later he murdered her. He caved her head in with the base of a Waring blender. We got there, and you could taste blood in the air.
The moral of the story is, I chose a half measure when I should have gone all the way. I’ll never make that mistake again.”
Just When You Think It Can’t Get Any Worse
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“I was dispatched to a shooting. The 65-year-old mother reported her son had just shot himself. She was refusing to provide CPR or see if he was okay. I was only a couple blocks away. My best friend and I arrived simultaneously and contacted the complainant at the back door. She was in a thin nightgown and calm. She said, ‘He’s down there,’ pointing downstairs.
As we made our way down, I noticed a haze in the air, thick enough that it was forming waves in the air. I didn’t take immediate conscious notice of it, but both my partner and I commented on a strong smell in the air. Although I knew what it was, I immediately commented that it must be powder from the weapon, somehow making the connection with the call description of a shot.
As we got to the bottom of the stairs, I stopped at the sound of horrible moaning coming from a back bedroom. I made eye contact with Adam. ‘You ready?’ He nodded, and we moved in slowly.
The bedroom was tucked off a small hallway which intersected with the main downstairs hallway. I saw the blood before entering. Three walls of the room were covered in goo. I still couldn’t see the victim, but I could hear him. I saw a weapon laying on the bed, laying in a literal puddle of blood. I forced myself to take a few more steps through the door. Training takes over, and for some reason, I remembered the adage, ‘Don’t stop in the fatal funnel.’
As I came through the door, I saw him to my left. He was down on all fours, rocking back and forth. The first detail I noticed was his red shirt. My mind thought it was weird he was wearing such a red shirt. I noticed the bottom hem of the shirt was white; it was just a normal white t-shirt.
‘Buddy, we’ve got help coming, just stay there.’ I’m not sure what you’re supposed to say. He raised his face to me. It was cut in half; the skin flaps waving back and forth. He had tried to commit suicide. He had stuck a weapon under his chin, and when he stretched to reach the trigger, his head tipped back. The bullet entered the soft jaw, crossing the hard palate, and left right at the top of his nose. There was nothing left but cheeks.
I’ll never forget the moaning. I knew it was not funny, but my mind triggered by some zombie and predator fanfic. On all fours he kept rocking back and forth, shaking his head back and forth, just moaning. The sound is still with me. As he shook his head, the two flaps of cheek kept swinging back and forth, opening and closing, just like Predator.
The first few medics arrived. They had been told by dispatch that the subject was ‘echo’ (obviously deceased), and hesitated until I pointed out that they needed to get on this one and get on it now. They started to cut off his red shirt. I told dispatch to get the bird going now. She said, ‘You want them on standby?’ She was trying to help me, as only medics are supposed to tell the air medics to fly.
‘No, tell them to fly now, this one’s going,’ I said.
My sergeant was the third to arrive. When he got downstairs, he yelled at me, ‘What’s that smell?’
‘Powder, sarge.’
‘Nah, that’s not it.’ He breathed a few deep nasal breaths. ‘That’s… like propane or something.’
The medics stopped and inhaled. We all go silent for the first time, and we all hear at the same time what had been covered up by horrible moaning. In the wall, behind where the man shot himself, there was a bullet hole. Out of the hole was coming a hissing sound. The bullet had cut through the natural gas main that fed the house from the outside meter.
For the first time in my career, I saw firefighters panic. ‘Get out, get out, get out!’ Three of them yelled at the same time.
I got on the radio and called, ‘No flames,’ and told everyone to clear. I saw for the first time what the ‘waves of haze’ I had noticed earlier were. It was the natural gas which had filled up the bottom floor of the house, filled it up so much that the ‘top’ of the gas lake was over my eyes, at about six feet deep.
The medics grabbed the guy and ran upstairs. I quickly cleared the downstairs, thinking the guy might have small kids in the rooms or something. They were clear. I came upstairs and found Adam sitting calmly in the sitting room with the victim’s mother. I stopped, unable to understand what he was doing still in the house.
‘Adam, get them out of here!’ I wasn’t yelling yet, but it made me mad. I had stayed behind for two minutes in a situation that was probably going to kill me, and he had stayed in the house talking with mom?
He looked at me, confused. ‘Adam, get them out of this house.’ I was yelling now. The mother stood up, saying she needed shoes. I grabbed her, probably too hard on the arm, she was old. I pushed her through the door. ‘Get out and do it now.’ I could feel myself losing a bit of control. I’ve never, never lost control.
Adam didn’t understand. He had turned his radio down so he could sit with the mom and not have her hear the terrible details that would likely be on the radio. He didn’t hear me give out the evacuate order. He still didn’t understand, but he trusted me implicitly. He stepped between me and the mom, who was still trying to get inside. He did what had to be done, but he did it gently at least. I couldn’t manage that.
I went back in with some haz-mat guys ten minutes later. The horror of the room was more noticeable this time. I saw that little bone and teeth chips were stuck in the soles of my boot. I saw that enormous glops of human goo were dripping down the walls. I got to the clean wall, the only surface without goo all over it. It was the wall he had faced when he pulled the trigger. I looked down and saw his chin, laying on the carpet at my feet.
‘Dispatch, check with the hospital, see if they want this tissue.’ I couldn’t believe I was even asking. The dude was going to die, I knew it, everyone knew it, right?
‘That’s affirmed, they want it delivered.’
‘Copy,’ I said. How am I even going to do this? My sergeant, one of my best friends, offered to do it. ‘Nah sarg, I’ll get it.’ I knew I was already gonna feel this one, no need for anyone else to have this memory. I grabbed a bio sack from one of the firefighters and went upstairs to the freezer. I put a layer of ice inside and went back to the chin.
I gave the bad to a firefighter to run it to the hospital. It didn’t matter; I knew he was dead. Or going to be soon enough.
I learned later that he was 45 years old. At age 35 he was diagnosed a degenerative brain disease, Huntington’s or something. It took him pretty quick, leaving him with the reasoning skills of an 8-year-old. His mother begged us on the front grass, after I probably bruised her arm, just to let him die. Where’s the DNR? I asked. There wasn’t one.
He died two hours after shooting himself. They pumped blood bag after blood bag into him, but it all just came out his massive facial wounds. The medical examiner called me, asked, ‘So, that was a weird one huh?’
‘What do you need, man?’ I asked him.
‘You notice anything strange in there?’ he asked.
‘Nope. Just another suicide.’
‘Yeah, figured. Alright, see you on the next one,’ he said.
‘Yup,’ I said.”
The Incident On The Way To The Incident
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“I’m a special constable with the UK police (I volunteer but have all the same powers and responsibilities). I started out in a small rural town which is extremely stereotypical of a middle English community. This was one of my first major incidents. I usually do my shift on Friday nights after work, as statistically, it is the busiest time for us.
It was some time in early March 2009, and I was paired with a regular officer, and we were out in the response car driving around for the first few hours of the evening until we were scheduled to go to operation later. Around 11 p.m., a burglary in progress report came over the radio, and we said we’d take it, as it was only a few miles from us. Blue lights and siren, on we sped to the incident as fast as we could. It was dark, and the visibility was pretty bad, but we could still see enough to be driving safely.
We decided to use a well-known shortcut to get to the other side of a village, avoiding a very annoying bridge/bollard combo that would save a few minutes of our time. The road was next to a farm and was not very well maintained. At the best of times, you could only really do 20mph down it without causing significant damage to your wheels and underside of your car, but it would still be quicker than the normal road. As we carried on down the track, it quickly became apparent that something wasn’t right. There were fresh muddy tire tracks all over the road, and long scrapes in the tarmac, as if something metal was being pulled along the floor.
At the time I didn’t know why, but it soon became clear when we rounded the corner and saw what looked like the mangled remains of some biomechanical cyborg. Blood, guts, glass, hair, metal. It was all over the road, in the hedges, in the trees. It was horrific. I had never seen death before in such a grotesque form.
My partner slammed the brakes on, and we spent a few seconds just absorbing what in the world we were looking at, before switching to rescue mode. We raced out of the car, leaving the headlights on to illuminate the scene. Steam was rising from the wreckage, a mixture of radiator coolant and body heat. There was so much blood; it was unreal. Too unreal. Our first priority was to look for survivors. The driver and passenger were obviously dead; I couldn’t see into the back of the car as it was just a complete mess. Over the sound of our engine running, I could hear what sounded like a baby making a hushed moaning sound.
Because our main source of light was from our car headlights, we couldn’t see the front of the wreck very well at all. After hearing the noise, I ran back to get the Maglite from the boot of the car, so we could search the area. Some crash victims have been ejected up to 200 feet from the car. As we came around the front of the car, we realized with horror what had happened, why there was so much blood and where the ‘baby’ was. There was a cow, wedged between the car and the ground, completely disemboweled, intestines all over the grass, head snapped backward, milk was flowing out, feces all over the place. And in the middle of its mothers mangled corpse was a calf, almost ready to be born. It was trapped inside still, and it was very severely injured, but it was alive and mooing at us.
Backup arrived not long after but there was not much that could be done. SOCO turned up to cordon the road off and find out exactly what happened. We carried on our shift after that.”
Something From A Horror Film
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“A local police officer in my town was called to a house where a woman had been babysitting while the parents were out to dinner. I’m not sure who made the call, but I’m pretty sure it was the babysitter. Anyways, when they showed up the babysitter was on the front lawn completely covered in blood and hysterical but not upset hysterical, just nuts. The officer and her partner got out and tried to talk to her and she wasn’t making any sense just saying, ‘No, she’ll be fine, they can just sew it back on.’ That was a little more unnerving by the fact that she had bloody scissors in her gown (they didn’t know this until later).
The officer’s partner stayed with the hysterical woman and tried to get her to make sense while the officer who now does public speaking went in to check out the house. She found the daughter who was being babysat completely decapitated by a pair of scissors.
She went out to get her partner and say what she found and when the woman who did it realized what was probably going to happen she freaked out and pulled the scissors on the officer that found the daughter. She ended up stabbing her in hand, not as bad as it could have been, right? It turns out the lady with the scissors had HIV, and the blood was both her own and the daughters.
The officer had to go on HIV medication to prevent infection and ended up becoming VERY sick for about a year. Afterwards, she was in the clear from infection and returned to work.”
We Always Blame Ourselves
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“I’ve seen a lot of horrible stuff in my time, and I’ve only been a cop for a year. The worst was someone who was suicidal and standing on the outside of a fence on the balcony with one foot on the ground. I stood there in the doorway with a negotiator for ten minutes talking about the girl’s life, her family, dreams, favorite movies, and shows, trying to get her to calm down. Then out of nowhere in the middle of her sentence, she just jumped. All I think of now is how I could’ve grabbed her; I could’ve just saved her if I was a little faster. It was my fault that the mother had to deal with the loss of her only child.”
You See It All In The Big City
Bartek Zyczynski / Shutterstock
“As a cop, we tend to see the worst in people. As a cop in a large metropolitan area (Los Angeles) we tend to see more than the average officer. I’ll share some of the stories that haunt us and I share my own as well as fellow officers in an attempt to maintain my anonymity.
One time we got this call, ‘Unit to handle, meet the fire department at [address] for an attempted suicide. The subject is a female. FD is waiting for PD to respond. Code 2. Unit to respond identify.’
We get there and ensure the location is safe for FD to enter and give them the green light to help the female out. The attempt wasn’t the gruesome part – not even close to some of the worse scenes I’ve seen. IT was her story. We asked why she did it and the look on her face when she was revealing her nightmare is an event I don’t care to think about or dwell on.
As a teenager growing up, she had an older brother who decided the gang life was for him. No matter what he did, their parents always had his back. Aside from the violence and the terrorizing of the community he decided one day he wanted his sister. Her attempts to stop him were futile, and in a state of shock, she told her mother what had happened. As if that wasn’t bad enough her mother told her to shut up and not say anything and told her she must be making stuff up. This wasn’t enough for her to ponder suicide. Instead, she went to the police.
Her mother disowned her and kicked her out for sending her brother to prison. This wasn’t enough for her to ponder suicide.
Years later she has managed to make something of herself and somehow get over the horror show that had been her life so far. She meets an incredible young man who thinks the world of her and she sees the light at the end of this dark tunnel; that is until they find out he has terminal cancer. At this point, she wonders what she’s done to anger God so much that she is punished this bad and she says she gives up.
I don’t have anything on my belt that will make a difference. Handle the call, log it, and clear for the next call. The night’s not over.
The next time we didn’t get a call, but what we like to call, ‘An Obs.’ Obs short for observation meaning instead of a radio call generated by someone calling 911 this is an activity generated by the officer’s observations. Driving around looking for work and I’m running plates on random cars when one of them returns with a hit. Stolen vehicle. Boom baby!
I call in, and we start following the suspect. The adrenaline kicks into high gear, and we wonder if he’ll keep driving normal until backup arrives or if he’ll spook and turn this into a pursuit. Then he blows through a red light. Pursuit! We throw the lights and sirens on then we are off. Back up catches up to us and we’re following this guy all over the place when it happens. He blows through an intersection and hits a car, and there is debris everywhere. A bunch of units go straight to the suspect’s vehicle, and as I was about to head over, I see the other car. There’s a family inside and a hole through the passenger side of the front windshield. I start heading towards the front of the car, and I see it. I see her.
She’s been launched several car lengths away, and she’s against the curb. As I am running to her, I see she’s in bad shape. As I kneel down next to her, I look down and hear her gasp. That’s it. She takes her last breath. Suddenly the excitement of the chase isn’t exciting.
Usually unknown troubles can quickly turn into nightmares. Another time someone had called 911, but they weren’t able to tell the dispatcher enough information or the call was interrupted and the line went dead. So we were going in blind not knowing what had happened or who was involved. We get there, and it’s a rather large house. Simultaneously we see the fire department pulling up as well. I yell over to them, ‘You guys got a call here too huh? You guys got any info? We don’t have anything.’ Fire tells us all they were told was a medical or panic alarm was activated.
As we go up the driveway a lady comes out of a door and runs to us in tears, and as she’s pointing frantically behind her she gasps, ‘Back there! He’s back there!’ I try to ask her what’s going on and who is back in her house, but she’s hysterical and runs past us.
We start jogging to the back of the residence with our weapons drawn expecting… I don’t know. Fire is right behind us, and as we get to the back we, see there is a pool, and we’re looking around, and then we see him. He’s in the pool. Fire takes a look, and I ask, ‘You guys going to get him?’
They respond, ‘Screw that… he’s a goner. He’s dead.’ Taking a look at him, he looks like he’s been in there awhile and taking him out wouldn’t change anything. Not to mention he tied himself to weights.
It turns out it’s a suicide, and he’d left a note. We take a look, and after reading the note and talking to the man’s wife, we learn why he’d killed himself. The man was a successful professional and had been doing very well for himself and his family. He took great pride in what he did, and he relied on his sharp intellect to be successful. Unfortunately, a clot formed in his brain and after going to the hospital to be treated, he was never the same.
Tasks took longer, and everything became more difficult. He stopped working and stayed home, but having been so independent before it was killing him to have people helping him so he decided he’d help his wife out one last time. On her birthday he freed her from having to take care of him. In his mind, it was a gift he was giving her. She cried, and I told her it wasn’t her fault. She told me he’d woken her that morning and told her happy birthday. But she was so tired she told him, ‘Just a few minutes. I’m just so tired.’ He told her not to worry and to go to bed. That was the last they talked.”
The Heartbreaking Consequences
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“The worst call for me was an attempted suicide. Not because of the ‘victim,’ who had very superficial cuts to her wrist. She was found naked and extraordinarily inebriated.
Her 9-year-old daughter, though, was hurt. She was sitting in her nightgown, huddled on the floor of the bathroom, her mom’s blood all over the floor and her nightgown. The only thing she said was, ‘She made me watch. She said it was my fault. Will she be okay?’
That one still hurts.”
Having To Live A Nightmare Over And Over
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“On Christmas Eve we respond with fire and EMS to a full arrest. It was called in as a ‘Witnessed Collapse.’ She was in her 50s. We work on her for 15-20 minutes and rush her to the ER. We later find out she had been dead for hours. Her father had been the one to call. He had Alzheimer’s and had seen her fall then forgot about it for a few hours. So not only did this man’s daughter and caregiver die on Christmas Eve, but he had witnessed the whole thing.”
A Lesson In Regret
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“We responded to a traffic crash in which four people were in a sedan. All were inebriated. The vehicle swerved off the road hitting a culvert and left the occupants injured to the point that they could not exit the vehicle. The driver exited and walked to the roadway to get help. The car caught fire and the passengers still inside were too inebriated to know what was happening to get out in time. By the time we arrived on scene no one was able to get within about 40 yards of the car because of the heat. We were unable to get to the car, despite trying several times.
I have seen fatalities before, and they are sad. But you learn to deal with it and move along. These people, however, were screaming for help, and no one could get even close to the car. By the time the fire department showed up, the coroner was pulling up also. It is the worst feeling to see someone go like that, and not even be able to try to help.
Another time, we responded to a traffic crash with a pedestrian on the highway. When we arrived, it was clear that this woman had committed suicide, by kneeling down on the road and taking the full brunt of the next car that came down the road. Her husband arrived on scene a few moments after we did. He explained that she had been drinking and they got into a fight. She left the hotel room they were staying in and walked to the highway a couple of hundred yards from the hotel. I don’t know what his last words to her were, but they were not nice. I will never leave a dispute unresolved with my significant other now, and I always make sure I leave her with kind words.”
Nothing Is Simple
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“The worst call I’ve ever been to was a 9-year-old having an asthma attack. I was right on top of the area when the call came out because I had responded as backup on a previous waste of time call. So, I took the call because it would be easy and I didn’t have any calls holding in my beat. All I would have to do is show up and wait for the fire department and the ambulance and let them do their medical thing while I got basic info from the caretaker. I got the call, and it was in Section 8 housing, I am unfamiliar with the area because it was nowhere near my beat. The mother and aunt were screaming, I ran upstairs alone and saw this 9-year-old seizing. I didn’t know what to do other than try to hold him securely, so he didn’t get hurt. The seizure lasted a minute at most, and it was over, but he wasn’t breathing. I start CPR for about two minutes when backup arrived and the fire department because I’m screaming on the radio to step it up. This particular Section 8 housing, I later learned, was a high violent crime area. When I backed out and let the firefighters take over, there were about 70 people gathered outside this apartment; we had no crowd control and for whatever reason people were starting fights. I did my best to manage emotions because no one likes it when a child is involved.
I followed the child to the hospital, but just as I made contact with the fire department, the ambulance driver let me know the child was gone. Our city does not pronounce children dead at the scene; we take them to the hospital working the entire time no matter what. But now I realize it was my call, and I had to inform the family once we get to the hospital. The family consisted of an entourage of 20 people some of which were causing the fights. I am an emotional guy, so I was already crying in my patrol car like a little girl just at the thought of how am I going to tell them and the fact this child just died, and I couldn’t save him. They were all following the ambulance thinking the medical team was going to save him but didn’t realize he was already gone. We got to the hospital, I composed myself, and the doctor came out and informed me, so I needed to get the mother. I tried to get her alone but it’s a no-go, the entire family insisted on being there. I was struggling to find the words start to get a little teary-eyed and the mother read my face and just collapsed. I still had to contact homicide and informed them of the situation due to the circumstances. The family started fighting with each other over who was at fault. Luckily the hospital police were there to diffuse the situation.
I’ve never heard of a person dying from asthma if they had a breathing treatment, which was the case here. The family did everything right, but he still passed. It has stuck with me, and this is the first time I’ve told the full story on this. I was trying to be helpful to the zone I was in because they were slammed with calls. I figured I would knock this call out so they could handle the more serious calls. I wish I had never taken this call.”
Situations You Can’t Shake Off
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“My dad has two defining moments in his 30-year-career. One involved a woman who took her last breath in his arms after a car accident. Her boyfriend was driving inebriated. He was hysterical, and my dad had to lie to him and tell him everything was okay even though her head was completely mangled.
Another time, a father accidentally shot his 15-year-old son in the head. My dad was the first arrival for this one.
These both happened in the ’80s before I was born, but my mom says she’ll never forget the look on his face when my dad came home.”
So Close To Happiness
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“Back when I was a young military police officer, I got a call to a car accident. When I arrived, I saw this black SUV smashed almost entirely flat on the side of the road (it had been hit by a semi). One of the first things I noticed was a car seat and stuffed animals all over the road. My heart skipped a beat, I had just become a father myself, and that was all I could think about. Luckily, the driver of the SUV didn’t have his kid in the truck when he decided to run the red light while impaired.
Both the semi driver and the driver survived, but when the semi hit the truck somehow it knocked off the hood of the SUV, and it skipped and rolled and found its way to a motorcyclist three cars down from the Intersection and killed him instantly, his wife said he had just got back from Iraq. One of the first things he spent his money on was a motorcycle, and he was just out enjoying an evening ride, just happy to be back home.
That’s a horrible thing, finally getting home after months and months of hardships, just to be killed by an impaired driver. I always considered myself one of the easy-going police officers that let people off the hook and just wrote warnings, but after that, God forbid I catch an impaired driver.”
Why?
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“My dad is a police officer and told me this story once. He responds to a call about a woman standing at the edge of a bridge looking like she was going to jump. Another car radios that they’re closer to the bridge, so my dad heads to the underside just in case she jumps.
As my dad is getting out of his car officer radios, ‘She’s tossed a bag or something – and she’s gone.’ My dad gets down to where she landed, and she’s died from the impact. The ‘bag’ was her three-year-old son. Apparently, she was going to lose custody, and that was how she decided to handle it. He told me it was the closest he’s ever come to losing it at work, that even though she had died, he wanted just to kick her in the head. It probably didn’t help that he had four young kids at home when that happened.”