JULIE CABE
My Personal
Relationship With J.C.
at Firestone South
I’d bet you thought this
was going to be some kind of a spiritual testimonial about my relationship with
my personal Deity. Sorry this time it is about my friend, trainee and former
partner, Deputy Julie Cabe.
I think I first met Julie Cabe sometime after I went
to Firestone in late 1969. I recall
Captain Wert allowing the ladies to go out and ride with us during their slower
hours on the desk. Julie seemed to like
working early mornings and she wanted to ride with us many times. She had never encountered the wild variety
of sounds and noises that penetrated the dark nights in South Central Los
Angeles. She learned first hand that
there were frequently sounds similar to wolves howling at the moon. She also heard verbal invitations to come
see many popular 1950’s rock and roll entertainers at the El Monte Legion
Stadium live each Friday night. She
learned that the Lone Ranger and Tonto were alive and well riding their trusty
steeds throughout the NorthEnd, the Brook and Carson too. She even heard first hand the sounds of the
Lone Ranger yelling, “Hi Ho Silver”, and Tonto shouting, “Get Um Up Scout’.
Both their horses raced across the territory in their ongoing search crushing
crime as they came upon it throughout the city. This of course was accompanied by what sounded like the, “William
Tell Overture”, blaring loudly over a public address system.
Julie was a bright girl with an insatiable appetite to
learn all she could about working patrol.
Regardless of her sex she was the single most dedicated, committed and
openly willing trainee I ever encountered.
At the time Pat Sullivan got fired she had been exposed to many
different situations. She seemed to have learned for the most part all she
needed to know about handling most any kind of call that was dispatched to her.
All she needed from me was a bit of polish in her investigative techniques and
some direction as to how to handle herself physically when trying to physically
fight with a larger male suspect. It
almost seemed like Julie believed that if she kept working out she could bulk
up and keep up with the real men. I had
to convince her that no matter how much work she put into her muscle mass she
would never be a Stu Reed. Stu had one
of the most highly developed upper bodies for his size I had ever
encountered. He was short compared with
Baby Huey at 6’7”, or me at 6’5”, but he hit with the force of a kicking mule
or a Roo for those of you who have been down under.
We began working PM shift at first. One day Julie and I were called back into
the station. I had no idea why we were
there but Julie was excited and finally told me they had planned a presentation
for her as one of the first fully trained female deputy rape investigators in
our department. We went downstairs
where there were a group of ladies seated in the briefing room awaiting Julie’s
arrival. I believe, LeRoy Baca, the
community relations’ lieutenant, introduced her. Julie got up and explained
what her official training consisted of.
She told of her new commitment to the victims of rape and her skills in
handling these women. She told the audience
just how important it was to her to do the very best job she could. I recall
that there was even refreshments of coffee and cookies.
After the presentation was over we returned to our
area. Within just a few days we got our
first rape call sometime in the early afternoon. Julie went in and interviewed the rape victim all by herself
because I wasn’t welcome under the new rules.
When she returned she had learned the name and address of the
suspect. She was chomping at the bit to
go find and arrest this perpetrator as soon as possible. We checked the local area in an attempt to
locate and interview the suspect. He
was not at home and we only had the name of the company where he was supposed
to work located somewhere west of our location. I went to the station and checked the directories for the name of
the meat packing plant where the suspect was supposedly working. I found a similar name in the directory
located somewhere in Lawndale. We were
supposed to handle the call to its conclusion so off we went just a little out
of our area.
We drove the distance and ended up locating the
suspect at a meat packing plant in Lawndale.
I went inside the company office and asked for the man by name. The person I talked to obviously respected
the man very much and was quite concerned if he would be going to jail. When the suspect walked out of the plant
area he was dressed in a white shop coat.
He appeared to be well groomed, clean with articulate and clear speech.
He didn’t talk jive or any kind of Ebonics.
Julie was really jumping up and down ready to put the hooks on him without
as much as one question of interview. I
motioned to her to put her cuffs away and to come and talk to the man with
me. She got pissed off, took his
driver’s license and went back to the car to run him for warrants. She did this with the outside speaker on so
everybody at the plant could hear what she was doing. She really got upset when they asked what her 10-20 was and she
had no clue where she was.
There was a spot
right outside the back door of the business where there was a double handrail extending
down the entry ramp. The suspect and I
sat down on the rail and I asked him to tell me his side of what happened
between he and the victim. He explained
that he asked her out and they went somewhere together then returned to his
home. It was there that they engaged in
consensual sex. When he finished he
took her home and left her they’re thinking that everything was all right. He couldn’t understand why she would claim
that he raped her because they had sex fairly regularly. All of a sudden he recalled that she had
asked him to practice oral sex on her after they finished. He forgot her request, as she was fairly
messy after sex. He seemed to be a very
responsible person who owned his own home and had money in the bank. Julie came back about then and was still
having a kitten about getting the hooks on him. I did what I did next just to teach her something about
investigations. I asked the man to come
into the station right after work to be interviewed by my partner and I. I thought Julie was going to go ballistic
but she said was,“Sled, you’re a son of a (-----).” Indicating that she thought
that I had descended on my maternal side from a dog. She still had a very cute way of saying that.
I think the suspect was supposed to get off work
around 4:30 PM. Just about 5:00 PM we
got a call that our suspect was at the front desk. I breathed a sigh of relief that he showed up but I was convinced
he would. Julie and I then interviewed
the suspect together. After the
interview she had more than a few questions of the victim. We agreed to let the suspect return to his
home for the night. Julie then went
back to talk to the victim. She was in
there for some time and when she came out she was pissed at the lady for lying
to her. Julie’s first official rape investigation didn’t even produce an
arrest, prosecution or a conviction.
She did learn to be very careful and complete in her interviews after
that. I think it was a really good
experience to teach her to not prejudge people because of her personal bias as
a female toward rape victims. It was
also a very basic lesson on the fundamentals of investigations.
One day right out of the parking lot Julie saw a small
young man walking along in the street just off the sidewalk on 215th
Street. It was fairly warm and he was
carrying a Levi jacket under his arm.
She wanted to go talk to him so I stopped very near his path. Julie got out and started to pat him down as
she was asking non-stop questions. I
didn’t think she was paying much attention to his facial features because she
was so interested in finding some drugs on his person or in his jacket. The young man’s eyes were darting from one
side to the other and back again. If I
had ever seen a potential rabbit this surely was a live one. Just as Julie dug a baggie of marijuana out
of one of his jacket pockets he spun around and took off running.
Julie was a very athletic girl and had run some mini
marathons as well as her daily running for conditioning. I told her to go ahead and chase him if she
wanted to. She took off running just
has he turned south down a side street.
I got back in the car and started following, picking up the microphone
and switching on the PA system. I said
over the PA, “Go get him Julie” she seemed to speed up. A few doors south of 215th Street
there was several people standing in the front yard looking through an open
gate toward the east. Julie seemed to
get angry and started yelling asking,
“Which way did he go”. It was
obvious that he had gone through the back yard and over the block wall.
I attempted to
get Julie back in the car but she was still trying to find some way to run
after him. I then yelled loudly at
Julie to come back and get inside the car right now. She complied and we began driving around the immediate area. The location into which the suspect had
jumped the fence was a tract of three streets with one entrance out onto a
passing main road. I purposely drove to
the northern most street and continued driving westbound past each one of the
three north/south streets carefully looking down each one. We drove to the north end of the street that
was furthest to the west, which was close to where we lost him. We looked down
the street and saw the suspect run eastbound across that street near its south
end.
I immediately backed
up and started down the middle north/south street anticipating the suspect
would appear soon. As we approached the
southern end of the street he ran eastbound across the street in front of us. I told Julie to run after him around the
corner onto the southern most street. I
pulled over against the east curb and parked the car almost into the southern
street then got out. From where I was I
could see Julie had jumped up onto the hood of a car parked in the driveway in
front of the block wall, which surrounded the back yard. I immediately ran back around the corner to
the west and stopped standing at the west backyard block wall. This was
opposite from where Julie was waiting for the suspect. I anticipated the suspect would jump over it
in that area. I drew my baton and held
it with both hands like a baseball bat.
Almost immediately the suspect appeared on top of the wall on his way
over. As his feet hit the grass I hit
him across his mid chest area with my baton and he went immediately fell to the
ground. Within just seconds I heard
Julie running around the corner behind me.
When she saw that I was handcuffing the suspect one more time she
exclaimed, “Sled, you’re a son of a (-----).”
At this point I began to wonder if Julie was going to repeat her
descriptive verbiage concerning my lineage every time we did something
new.
On another afternoon we got a call to respond to CHP
headquarters on Hamilton Ave off the Harbor Freeway around Del Amo. We responded and were led into an interview
room where there was a young boy about seven or eight years old. He turned out to be Hispanic and was unable
to speak or understand English. I
called the station and was told by the dispatcher to do everything I could to
reunite this lad with his parents and/or guardians.
We contacted another deputy who spoke some Spanish and
made meet with him. He interviewed our
little ward and discovered that he was a émigré from El Salvador. He was supposedly here alone without any of
his family. We then learned that he was
currently working for a man who ran a business from the area around the Santa
Monica Pier. We decided to go up to
Santa Monica to see if we could find someone to leave little Hernando
with.
The very next thing we knew we were in full Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s uniforms with our little ward walking westbound on the
Santa Monica pier toward China at sundown.
It was beautiful but it was also many, many, many miles outside of our
assigned area. Julie started to get
concerned and I told her we had something we had to do. We spent over an hour at that location and
eventually located the person with whom little Hernando was living. We released him to his guardian then
returned to our area.
We were assigned to work early morning shift for a
month. We got a call about a possible fire down at the very east end of Deloras
Drive. This was a dirt road, which led
into an area of old junkyards filled with junk cars and car parts. Near where the dirt road ended in a dead end
we found an old couch that had been abandoned there. We walked over to it and noticed that the upholstery was
smoldering in one area. Julie took off
running back toward the car yelling, “ I’m going to request fire
equipment”. I chased after her and told
her to hold off on calling for the fire department. I explained that it would be counterproductive to have them
dispatched because it would tie us up for quite a while over virtually nothing. I then explained that it was usually a good
idea to use your personal initiative to solve simple problems with whatever
resources you have available to you.
I then instructed Julie to sit in the car and look
forward through the windshield while I walked back to where the couch was
sitting. My habit was to drink from 20
to 24 cups of coffee every day. I had
coffee when I woke up, coffee while driving to work, coffee in the station
before and during briefing. I then had
numerous cups of coffee as often as I could at various places while on patrol,
after shift I always drank coffee while returning to my home in Mission
Viejo.
Coffee is of course a
diuretic and causes your body to loose a lot of fluids through the urinary
tract. By the time I reached the
location of the smoldering couch I really had to void my bladder. I did so onto the smoldering portion of the
cushions with real gusto. Apparently it
was done so fastidiously that it in fact extinguished the fire which we came
back to check on at least a couple of more times that shift. We found the fire
was completely out.
While I was busy
extinguishing the fire Julie couldn’t help but see the cloud of steam caused by
the liquid being sprayed onto the fire through the rear view mirror.
Incidentally when I walked back to the radio car and got in Julie said “Sled,
you’re a son of a (-----).” She
continued to have a very cute way of saying it though.
On another night we
got a call of a suspicious person on top of a grocery store building in our
area. We rolled to the location, which
was on Carson Street. We checked the
location out by driving completely around the building and checking any
possible point of access. I explained
each of the possibilities to Julie and pointed out what shoe scuffmarks looked
like when someone climbs up a pipe to the roof. In my mind I eliminated every possible access to the roof from my
inspection of the exterior of the building.
Julie however was much more zealous in her attitude. There was no cotton-picking way I wanted to
do anything to subvert Julie’s enthusiasm.
She was bound and determined that she was going to climb up and check
out that roof. She asked me how I would
get up on the roof. I looked around and
told her that she should look for whatever resources were available to access
the roof.
She started to get angry at me then she asked me, “What do you mean?” We were parked behind the store and I shined
the spotlight up onto a power pole against the wall of the building. There were a series of galvanized steel bars
screwed into opposite sides of the pole at regular intervals that were there as
steps for linemen. The lowest one was
at least 10 feet above the ground. She
then said, “How on earth am I going to get high enough to climb onto the first
one of those steps?” I again told her
to use whatever resources she had available to her. She then asked me, “What sort of resources do you mean?” I told her to take a look at the Dempster
Dumpster parked against the fence over there.
She jumped out of the car and ran to the dumpster and
tried to push it with her body. She
couldn’t budge it and I got out and to check it and discovered it was filled
with rotten produce. It probably
weighed close to a ton. Julie began to
get angry again asking me, “What do I do now I can’t possibly move that thing.” I told her to look for whatever resources
she might have that could help her move the dumpster to where she may want it
to be. At this point she really got
angry. She raised her voice and said
sarcastically, “Just what kind of resource could I possibly find to move the
dumpster?” I asked her if she had
considered the radio car. I thought
she was going to go ballistic. She
started yelling at me, “Just how am I going to use the car to move that huge
thing?” I told her to get back into the
car then pulled it around so it was behind the dumpster. I gently used the car to push the end of the
Dumpster with the push bar until I moved it over next to the power pole against
the building. Julie jumped out of the
car and scrambled up on top of the dumpster.
One more time she was
obviously getting really frustrated with the whole thing. She still couldn’t reach the steps along the
sides of the pole. I tried to calm her
down when she snapped at me, “What can I do now to get up that pole?” I told her to look around and see what else
she had in the way of resources she could use.
She really got anxious and told me there was nothing else there. I then asked her, “What do you have here
that resembles a ladder”? She nearly
screamed. “Nothing, nothing at all”. I
then told her to take a good look again at the radio car. She didn’t understand what I was getting
at. I explained to her to look at the
car and see if it couldn’t possibly be used as a resource to climb up high
enough to reach the steps on the pole.
I then pointed out that if she did whatever was necessary to get her
foot onto the bottom window frame of the door she could then climb up to the
top of the car. From there she could
easily climb to the top of the light bar where she would possibly be high
enough to reach the steps on the pole. Julie then stated, “Sled, you’re a son
of a (-----).”
She did manage to climb up the pole and onto the roof,
which she checked out completely by herself.
When she came down I gave her an atta
girl for all her effort because it was good police work. I really thought that Julie learned a lot
that night in particular just because I got her to think about what resources
we had to take advantage of to use for something other than what they were
manufactured for.
Just after she began driving the radio car I had a
lengthy conversation with Julie about stray animals in the street. She had in the past found loose stray cats
and dogs and taken some of them home.
She nursed them back to health and apparently kept several of them. I told her in no uncertain terms that if
she were driving while responding to a hot call and saw an injured or even
stunned animal in the middle of the road under no circumstances is she to take
any evasive action or think about slamming on the brakes. The best and safest course of action in this
case is to press the accelerator pedal to the floor and continue in a straight
line. It is better for us to survive
and continue on to the call to help someone than to get rear ended by a driver
following us if we decide to try to stop for or avoid an animal in the
roadway.
A short time after my lecture Julie and I were at
Harbor General Hospital. As we were
leaving we got a hot call somewhere south of Carson Street. We drove east to the Harbor Freeway then
entered the on ramp to southbound.
Immediately after entering the freeway Julie and I both looked in front
of the car and saw clearly in the headlights a cat lying in the middle of the
lane ahead of us. It’s head was
extended upward it mouth opened crying its body and legs appeared to have been
crushed in some previous accident.
Julie looked over at me then turned back forward gulped hard. She pressed the accelerator to the floor and
continued in a straight line running over the cat as we heard a fairly loud
thump. I turned to her and gave her an
atta girl for her actions.
After midnight one
shift all the Carson units got a call about some suspicious persons inside a
commercial business off Figueroa near the 405 Freeway. It wasn’t terribly busy so before we arrived
at the location there were two or three units already on the street surrounding
the location. I purposely parked almost
a quarter mile away and pulled out my binoculars. Julie was really antsy and wanted to roar up to the
location. I pointed out how there were
already units there some with their red lights on. I also asked her to make note of how many cars were driving
slowly or quietly around the location.
It appeared that every one of the units at the location were roaring
around like they were responding to some emergent call. Julie wanting to race over and drive around
the commercial location where three suspects were seen with all the other
Carson units that were speeding up and down the streets. I made her calm down and tried to explain
the situation. She said once again, “Sled, you’re a son of a (-----).” I
believe it was at this point I accepted that this particular quotation from
Julie would be an ever-present modicum of verbiage within our continuing relationship
I wasn’t going to be able to live without.
Most of the
time when there are suspicious persons inside any large location and police
show up in marked vehicles making themselves obvious by loud noises such as
accelerating up and down the surrounding streets or displaying bright or
emergency lights the suspects go to ground.
Sometimes they will not attempt to come out of the location for many
hours’ even days. Most of the time the
best way to catch them is to stay some distance away from the location where
you could see at least two sides of it.
You then sit and watch the location through binoculars looking for what
appear to be little dark lumps coming over the fence sometimes carrying things
with them. I told Julie that I had
captured a number of suspects this way and it worked very well. We sat on this yard for some time then I
took Julie over to the adjacent street and showed her how you could drive along
the wrong side of the street with all your lights out driving in and out
between parked cars very slowly. I
explained how I had learned this technique and been quite successful with
it. I used it to drive right up almost
on top of a fairly large group standing in the middle of an intersection. The folks standing there didn’t even notice
us until we were within less than 30 feet of them.
One night while we were working Willowbrook we were
enroute to the fire station located on Redondo Beach Boulevard for some
reason. I don’t recall the station
number but it was the one where you could go any time, Deputy Nicolenko, was
working anywhere near the brook and find Nick there. We were driving westbound along the street when we saw what
appeared to be a dog that had been hit by a car. The dog appeared to be severely injured lying on it side with
both front legs dangling as if they were crushed. Its head was covered with blood and it was madly kicking with
both back legs as its body spun round and round in a circle leaving a wide path
of bloody flesh all over the street.
I stopped and turned
on my excuse me lights, got out of the car and drug the dog up onto the
planting area between the curb and the sidewalk where it continued to spin
round and round. I then requested
animal control respond to our location.
The RTO came back with a two and half-hour delay. I told her to 10-22 my request I would
handle the problem to conclusion myself.
At this point I had made up my mind what had to be done. Just because I didn’t want to endanger Julie
while I was shooting rounds toward the ground I told her in no uncertain terms
to sit right where she was and not get out of the car under any
circumstances. I then walked back to
where the dog was still spinning round and round. I drew my Smith & Wesson
model 66, 4” from my Hoyt holster, and put 2 Remington Peters, 125 grain
jacketed hollow points right through the dog’s circle X ring. The dog bless it heart immediately stopped
spinning round and round. When I
returned to the car I was greeted by Julie as she said, “Sled, you’re a son of
a (-----).”
We were very close to where the animal control office
was so I drove down there to inquire as to what their policy was when an
officer had to put down a dog. I was
given a special plastic bag to put the carcass in and asked to bring it back to
their office. We drove back got the
dogs remains put them into the bag and returned them to the animal control
office.
When I finally released Julie from training I felt
that she was going to be an intelligent, well trained, proficient field officer
capable of doing an outstanding job on the streets. From what I heard of her work it sounded like she did excel at
her chosen profession. This especially
considering she was one of the first ladies in patrol. Later when I was off IOD I started hanging
around the Long Beach Airport. I heard
that she had been transferred to Aero Bureau as an observer. Later I ran into her and learned that she
sold her red Porsche 911 to pay for her own helicopter lessons and earned her
ticket. She then becoming the first and
only female helicopter pilot in law enforcement in this nation. She was clearly before her time in that
field. All I can ever say about that
girl is, “ATTA GIRL JULIE CABE”. In my
opinion she deserves any and everything she earned in return for her total and
complete dedication and commitment to this job. She certainly was going against all odds and I think she
accomplished an awful lot.
.