[00:16] Meg: Welcome to Desperately Seeking the 80s. I am Meg and this is Travis, who is very kindly filling in for Jessica. So welcome, Travis.

[00:26] Travis: Well, I am so, so excited to be back, Meg. Although I'm sorry that our beautiful blue eyed friend is not here with us today. And let me mention that too, I bet many of your listeners don't realize just how lovely Jess eyes are. Doesn't she have amazing eyes?

[00:40] Meg: She does, absolutely. And I'm sure she will love to hear that.

[00:43] Travis: Those bright blue eyes with that black hair, it's. It's a plus.

[00:47] Meg: I'm sure that she is sad that she's missing you in person.

[00:51] Travis: Well, I'm sad I'm missing her in person.

[00:53] Meg: Just imagine you're telling all of this to her and. And she'll just listen to it in what, like a week and a half or something?

[00:59] Travis: Okay, very good.

[01:00] Meg: There you go. So, Travis, as I'm sure most of you know, but just to fill in the blanks, Travis was. I'm just gonna start from the very beginning.

[01:09] Travis: Go ahead.

[01:09] Meg: In your youth, you were an 84th street bomber in Yorkville, correct?

[01:14] Travis: I was.

[01:15] Meg: And then you became an NYPD officer.

[01:19] Travis: I did.

[01:20] Meg: And then you became an author of the Tommy Keene detective series.

[01:25] Travis: Corey. Correct. Which is what I am now.

[01:28] Meg: And on top of that, since the last time we spoke, you're a podcaster. Oh, yeah.

[01:32] Travis: I almost forgot. Shame on me. That's right. I am the host of the Another Nobody podcast because I am everybody's favorite nobody.

[01:41] Meg: And you're on YouTube too.

[01:43] Travis: Yes, we do both. Unlike you guys, which I don't understand because you're so much more attractive than I am, why you don't do the YouTube and the audio. But I know, it's another thing.

[01:52] Meg: It's another thing. And as you know, every time you add on one more thing, you think, oh, it'll just be. We'll just throw it up. I mean, we are actually on YouTube, but we don't do video.

[02:03] Travis: Oh, interesting. Now I'll have to pay attention to you on YouTube.

[02:06] Meg: Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing. We just have audio on YouTube with just a logo up and an image. And a logo. A lot of people do that. Yeah. And every once in a while we have this series called the More We Know, where we just, like, school each other on New York City Facts. And that's kind of fun. So we throw those up on video periodically. But really, for the most part, we're just like, hanging tough on the podcast.

[02:30] Travis: Yes.

[02:31] Meg: So is it fun, like all your new Podcasting life.

[02:34] Travis: I enjoy it. I enjoy it. I do. I didn't know everybody. I kind of got. I don't want to say pushed into it, but talked into it because everybody kept telling me, travis, you have to have a presence. You know, I never. I don't have Facebook. I never had an Instagram until recently. You know, I didn't do any social media stuff. I just. I wasn't my thing. I'm a little too old for that, I think, you know, and. But with the success of the books, they kept saying, you have to have a presence. You have to have a presence. So I started the Instagram. I started coming on podcasts. Like, I mean, I think I've. I think this is gonna be my fifth time doing something. Wow.

[03:06] Meg: Yeah.

[03:07] Travis: Be the. A number one guest you guys have ever had. All right.

[03:10] Meg: I'm not gonna argue.

[03:11] Travis: I don't know. Certainly not in popularity, but in how many times I've been on your show, because I think this will be the fifth time.

[03:18] Meg: Now, do you remember how we met you?

[03:21] Travis: I did not.

[03:22] Meg: This is my memory. You wrote in to the website and you said. Because we were talking about the 84th street gang.

[03:31] Travis: I remember now.

[03:32] Meg: And you wrote in, and you were like, well, guess what? I'm one of those. And I was also an NYPD officer. And I was like, what? Oh, my God, all these things together. There's so many stories. How do we even begin to scratch the surface? And so then we started doing exactly that.

[03:50] Travis: Yep. You were talking about us, so I wanted to set the story straight, so to speak.

[03:55] Meg: Yeah. Okay. I think we should dive in because I know we have so much to talk about.

[04:00] Travis: Yeah. And you don't want to eat up all our time just chatting away because, you know, you and I will do that for hours.

[04:05] Meg: Absolutely. No doubt. So, Travis, you know that I always ask Jessica an engagement question.

[04:22] Travis: Yes.

[04:23] Meg: And so for today's story, you were a police officer in the Bronx, correct?

[04:28] Travis: Correct.

[04:28] Meg: Could you just tell me a favorite memory of the Bronx?

[04:33] Travis: Oh, Jesus. Single favorite memory. Oh, I wish I was prepared. But I'll tell you something. I really do love the Bronx. And I still do. Okay. The Bronx has a bad rap. I consider it to be the forgotten borough that nobody cares about.

[04:46] Meg: That's actually why I was asking.

[04:47] Travis: I really do believe that.

[04:48] Meg: Okay.

[04:49] Travis: The Bronx is full of. Although it is, you know, a very poor, beaten up area and has had the reputation it has had for decades and decades. It is loaded with really beautiful people, really wonderful people, really hardworking people that many People don't realize just how many people are keeping New York City alive. Live in the Bronx.

[05:11] Meg: Absolutely. And I've learned so much more about the Bronx just doing these stories and doing research and realizing that a lot of the people who come up in these stories, like, oh my goodness, no, they were just, they were in the Bronx.

[05:25] Travis: Well, you know what, I have to immediately backtrack because I'm really gonna be in trouble when I get home now. I met my wife in the Bronx.

[05:32] Meg: There you go. Now that's a beautiful memory.

[05:35] Travis: Used to work at a diner called Pete's Donut. And that's where we met and I started dating her. And that was over 35 years ago.

[05:42] Meg: Perfect.

[05:43] Travis: That's a wonderful answer. That's my favorite thing from the Bronx would be my wife. Okay.

[05:48] Meg: Couldn't get better than that. My sources are the New York Times, Hellgate, which is a website, and tell her story by lashawn Harris, which was just recently published about this event. On Monday, October 29, 1984, 67 year old Eleanor Bumpers woke up early in her one bedroom apartment at the Sedgwick Houses at 1551 University Avenue and West 174th street in the High Bridge section of the Bronx.

[06:20] Travis: I know it well.

[06:22] Meg: Her grown daughter Mary was planning to visit her later that day. There was a cool breeze, which was a relief after a very muggy week. I mean, interesting. October 29th, that's not so far off from when this drops.

[06:36] Travis: Yes, and it's a month away from today.

[06:38] Meg: Right? At 9:30am, a group of 10 to 15 people comprised of. Now these are all different groups of people who have all come together. Members of the Emergency services unit at the nypd, the city marshal, New York City Housing Authority workers, EMS technicians, one of Eleanor's neighbors and a Department of Social Services caseworker stood outside her fourth floor apartment. They were there to remove her from her apartment for not paying her rent. They discussed, quote, her state of mind, her size, and about the dangers the eviction team faced. So most of these quotes are coming from court documents. When they eventually interviewed the participants, she paid $89.45 a month in rent to the Housing Authority who provided apartments in the Sedgwick housing development for low income residents. And they claimed she was five months behind on rent. Eleanor told the Housing Authority she had been communicating with them over the last few weeks that she would not pay the rent because she was having problems with her hallway light and stove. In the meantime, Eleanor told her daughter Mary that someone in the Building was harassing her, and Mary told her she should keep her door locked. Eleanor told the Housing Authority on the phone that, quote, people had come through the windows, the walls and the floors and had ripped her off on October 12th. So that's a couple weeks before the morning that we're discussing. Maintenance workers found no problems with a hallway light or stove, but they did find several cans of human feces in the bathtub. Eleanor claimed these came from, quote, Reagan and his people. On October 25th. So now we're four days before the event, a psychiatrist visited Eleanor and diagnosed her as psychotic and recommended hospitalization. A social services supervisor recommended that the best thing to do was evict her first and then hospitalize her. Now, before we get into what happened next, I just want to give a little bit of history on Eleanor. She was born in Franklin County, North Carolina, in 1918 and grew up in a working class family. She moved to New York in the 40s and was the mother of five. Her children say she loved to dance and cook. She was institutionalized a number of times in the 70s. The famous photo of her in the New York Daily News, which I'm sure Travis, you're familiar with, and I will definitely post on the Instagram, shows someone who has been through the wringer. Yes, life had taken its toll. And here she was on a Monday morning with a crowd of people outside her door, demanding she let them in. So the authorities had a twofold issue. They had a tenant who was not paying rent, but more to the point, she was not paying rent because of her psychosis. Now, they couldn't hospitalize her against her will without cause. This was. We did a story on when Ed Koch tried to hospitalize Billy Boggs against her will. And that happened three years later. So that's like in 1987. And that's a callback to episode 51, Billy's stay at Bellevue and Andre's reign at Vogue. We could go into this in depth, but in brief. In the 60s and 70s, a lot of psychiatric institutions had gotten in trouble for mistreating.

[10:28] Travis: Well, and that was the huge deinstitutionalization.

[10:31] Meg: Exactly.

[10:31] Travis: Which was twofold. A lot of them had gotten in trouble for being lousy places, but also the government didn't want to pay for these things anymore.

[10:39] Meg: Exactly.

[10:40] Travis: And sadly, we feel that the ramifications of that today because there still are no mental institutions available. Okay. And any New Yorker knows now you got crazies walking all over the place. It's something that we always had when you and I were children. You know, we had, you know, for lack of a better word, we'll call the bums. You know, half the bums that walked around were more than just drunks or winos. A lot of them were completely out of their minds and were not being taken care of. And it was. I seem to remember it was in that early to mid-70s type thing where homelessness exploded in New York City. It really did. And we had, you know, in Yorkville and down in the Village where we had an apartment there, too. All of a sudden, you went from the one or two bums that you knew regularly to literally dozens.

[11:30] Meg: I have that memory, too. I can't tell you what year it was, but I definitely remember knowing each one by nickname. And the difference between that and just like when I was in high school, where it was a whole different situation altogether where there were so many. You didn't keep track so much.

[11:51] Travis: Yes. No, it really is a tragic, tragic situation.

[11:55] Meg: It is. No doubt.

[11:56] Travis: If we weren't talking about this, I could tell you dozens of stories, but go ahead.

[12:00] Meg: She wouldn't open the door to even have the conversation about her rent. So it's a bit of a standoff. According to court reports, they announced, quote, Mrs. Bumpers, this is the Housing Authority and police. Please open the door. And their plan was this. They did have a plan. The Housing Authority officials and the city marshal planned to officially evict Eleanor, put her in the ambulance that was waiting outside, and release all her possessions to the moving company, which also had a truck waiting outside. They would take her furniture and clothes and photo albums to a city warehouse. Then their job was over. The hospital would take it from there. When she would inevitably be discharged from the city hospital, there would be no home or possessions to return to.

[12:56] Travis: Correct.

[12:57] Meg: Eleanor was probably unaware of all of these details, but she did know she was scared. The Emergency Services Unit of the NYPD was there to, quote, preserve peace in the course of the eviction, not to carry out the eviction itself. Eviction is a civil process that is carried out by city marshals.

[13:18] Travis: Correct.

[13:19] Meg: Now you know more about the esu, so I'll just say what I learned and then you can fill in. The ESU was the Highly Skilled Heavy Weapons Unit of nypd. They were trained to use shotguns, anti sniper rifles and submachine guns. And they were called in for riots and hostage situations and suicide attempts. They were equipped with restraining devices such as nets and mace to handle emergency calls that involved, quote, violently disturbed persons. It was commonly said when a citizen is in trouble, he calls a cop. When a cop is in trouble, he calls Emergency service.

[14:00] Travis: Correct? What I will add, you've done so much research. You always do. Meg, you're so good at this. What I'm going to add to this, though, what people quite often don't understand about ESU as a whole, it is Emergency Services unit. And these guys are very well trained, and they are phenomenal. Everybody thinks that they are swat, like the special Weapons and tactics. The first thing that you read, that's what everybody likes to say.

[14:23] Meg: They probably look like that.

[14:24] Travis: Well, they are that. But what's combined with that, okay, is for instance, a young guy wants to go on the job and become ESU because he thinks it's cool. Learn how to be a locksmith, Learn how to be a welder so you can cut doors off their hinges. You see what I'm saying?

[14:40] Meg: Okay.

[14:40] Travis: They also do a lot of hostage negotiation, although they're not hostage negotiators. They are the guys that climb the bridges to pull the jumpers off the bridges to pull the jumpers off the. The Empire State Building. It was a very good friend of ours who used to own Ryan's Daughter. Okay. A pub I know you're familiar with. All right. One of the old owners from there, Mike, was an ESU guy, and he was famous for grabbing one of the jumpers off of the Twin Towers back when the Twin Towers still existed.

[15:06] Meg: Oh, my God.

[15:07] Travis: And they do amazing, amazing stuff. And literally, when they have a team of guys, each guy can do like five or six, 10 different jobs so that they have all of these different bases covered when they show up. They're very, very, very skilled, highly trained guys. I'm sorry, go ahead.

[15:23] Meg: Yeah, no, my understanding, too, in addition to that, is that they are there to protect other policemen, backup.

[15:30] Travis: Exactly. Like an ESU guy, too. I did many, many warrants in my time when I was in Narcotics and when I was on the SNHU team, which is a street narcotics Enforcement unit. But if you're not in a particular unit like Narcotics, who do warrants all the time, you call ESU to serve

[15:48] Meg: your warrants because they have a specialty.

[15:51] Travis: They have a specialty. They come in, they take the door, they'll go through with their weapons, make sure it's safe, clear all the rooms, and then the detectives and or police officers will go in for their searches to conduct the warrant. The ESU guys will just make the entry. So literally, they'll make the entry, and five minutes they're gone because the.

[16:11] Meg: That answers a Question. I was about to have the A

[16:14] Travis: team or the A truck. I'm not sure if I'm getting it right. It's the A team, which I think works the A truck for esu. Okay. They only do warrants. That's all they do all day. So they might do five, six, eight warrants in a day because they just do the entry and then they'll leave it to you to do the warrant and that.

[16:33] Meg: I didn't quite understand that when they said, oh, ESU is just here not to do the eviction. So I thought eviction meant the entry.

[16:45] Travis: No. So how it would have worked here,

[16:46] Meg: the eviction would mean taking her out, but the entry is, in fact their job.

[16:52] Travis: Correct. So what would have happened here is the marshals would have shown up or the sheriffs, both do evictions. Okay. And they would have shown up. Eleanor would have given him a hard time. All right. And what had happened in this case, okay. Is she had threatened them through the door that she was going to throw boiling lie on them. I don't know if you have that in there or not. Well, getting there, but supposedly they had threatened them. So they would have called ESU after the fact.

[17:19] Meg: In other words, oh, ESU isn't there yet.

[17:22] Travis: They will come because they're called in

[17:24] Meg: a response to it.

[17:25] Travis: Yeah. They're not going to go to every eviction. And on a side note, just because you mentioned it, I don't want to get off track here, but my uncle Mark used to work for Liffey Movers, and part of Liffey Movers, who were located up on 86th street here on the east side, they would do evictions for the city.

[17:42] Meg: Okay.

[17:43] Travis: So my. My uncle would do many of those evictions for the city and get all

[17:46] Meg: of her stuff out of the apartment.

[17:48] Travis: Yes. So once. Once the marshals went in and removed you physically from your apartment. Okay. Either forcibly and. Or you just say, okay, I'll go now because you're here. Okay. They would package up all your stuff, put it in a truck, and then put it in storage for you to come pick up later on.

[18:05] Meg: Right. In the city warehouse, is what I read. And what happens to this stuff then? Do you know?

[18:10] Travis: Well, it stays in the warehouse. How long? I couldn't tell you, but I will tell you. And anybody who knows who's ever had their car towed or been evicted, getting anything back from the city is an absolute nightmare.

[18:21] Meg: Yeah.

[18:21] Travis: And it was for us, as police officers, believe it or not, when we would have stuff of evidentiary Nature. I mean, it was a nightmare. You'd spend the whole day trying to get your car back.

[18:30] Meg: Right? You know, hopefully it's easier now.

[18:33] Travis: I'm sure it's not.

[18:34] Meg: Okay.

[18:34] Travis: Sorry.

[18:36] Meg: All right. So. Okay. And this is in response to something you just said. The Housing Authority expected this eviction to be a, quote, messy job, so they'd already called ESU. According to the 1984 NYPD ESU Operational Policies and Tactics Manual. Officers should remember. This is a quote from the manual. Our relationship with the mentally ill is based on society's desire to help, not to punish. The department recommended to officers. Don't be in a hurry. Evaluate the situation. Keep your own emotions calm and cool. Be honest and avoid force if possible. These suggestions may prove helpful. And from what I read, they didn't have, like, this is exactly what you're supposed to do. This is exactly how you're supposed to go about this. This was just a recommendation. And that the officers should use their best judgment.

[19:38] Travis: Yes. Discretion.

[19:39] Meg: Right.

[19:40] Travis: Which is that gray area that lies between black and white. And let me tell you, absolutely everything in the world is gray because nothing is black or white. Also, just to paint a little picture, now, the patrol guide is about this thick. People can't see me. It's about 7 inches thick. It's a big giant book with all the rules. But what the city does and the police department does again, to protect itself is they. I'm doing the bunny ears, everybody, quote, unquote, call it a guide. Why? Because the second they want to hammer you, okay, they'll. They'll take that giant book and bring it down your head because you didn't follow the guide. However, at the same time, the city will never be held liable for what you may do outside of the guide. Because it's just a guide.

[20:27] Meg: Exactly. So it's protecting the city. It's not really protecting the officer.

[20:31] Travis: It covers the ass of the city. Exactly. I want to make that part understood.

[20:36] Meg: Yeah. No, for real. The esu, when they were called in, had been told by the Housing Authority that Eleanor was a, quote, an emotionally disturbed person, a knife thrower, and that she had a history of throwing lye. Now, as it turns out, these rumors were never substantiated. She had no record of violence, but the police didn't know that. They just knew why they were called in and why and what the Housing Authority. There were rumors swirling. The housing police removed her lock. And when they look through the hole now, I'm thinking, do you think the housing police removed the lock or do you think the ESU removed the lock?

[21:20] Travis: Well, I don't know. Now, ESU most certainly could have and it would have been in their wheelhouse to do so.

[21:26] Meg: Okay?

[21:26] Travis: That doesn't mean that the Housing Authority didn't do it because they brought their own locksmith to do it, okay? Because again, you know, they have people that do everything in the Housing Department. Another side note, my wife's father, my father in law, Neil, was an electrician for the Housing Authority. There you go.

[21:45] Meg: So housing police, someone official removed the lock. And then when they looked through the hole, they saw Eleanor holding a knife and they could smell fumes and they feared those were lye. They later determined that the fumes were in fact raid. They called out, we are the police. Come out. We want to make sure that nobody gets hurt. We don't want to hurt you. Don't force us to come, we'll break your door down. We're coming in now. Eleanor's neighbor Florence was out in the hallway too, and she called out to her as well. Mrs. Bumpers, this is Florence, your neighbor. I live down the hall. Please don't let them disgrace or take away your dignity. Please give them the apartment. Ms. Bumpers, don't do anything irrational. They're talking about taking the lock off the door. They're going to break it down. Eleanor, in response, cursed out everybody and yelled back, huh? I don't have any neighbors. And let them take the door down. Housing has enough money to buy another one. If somebody comes through the door, we'll see who gets hurt. Go away. If you don't go away, I'll have something for you. If you come into my house, I'll kill you. Get away from my door. Leave me alone. In response to that, ESU officers entered her apartment. Does it make sense that they would enter, they would then get like engaged in this way because she said, I'll kill you.

[23:20] Travis: Well, what it comes down to, and I will say yes, with the caveat that this did not happen in seconds and happened in many, many, many minutes. Could it have been 10 minutes, 15 minutes, a half an hour? I'm sure they negotiated for quite some time.

[23:35] Meg: Where it all happened, the whole thing, from start to finish was half an hour. She died in the hospital a half an hour later.

[23:42] Travis: All that really needed to happen for ESU to take charge of the situation, got it, is for the marshals and, or the housing police, whoever were there to step back and wipe their hands of it. Fellas, we're not doing it. You have to. We're done now, you know, and that's it. It's their job to now gain entry. And that's what we call it. We call it gaining entry. Okay. Which is forcible entry.

[24:08] Meg: And once they gain entry, would it also be their job to remove her?

[24:14] Travis: Well, it would be their job to make sure that everything is safe. Okay, so in the event that she's gonna fight with them, it's their job to, you know, put her in cuffs, Restrain her. It's restrain her. Yeah, exactly. Yes. To make sure that the situation is safe and ended. And I would imagine if things hadn't gone the way that they had, all right, they would have either arrested her

[24:37] Meg: at the time for threatening them. Why would she be arrested?

[24:41] Travis: As far as, again, this comes down to what the marshal wants to do, I have no idea. So once they gained entry, if everything was cool, they probably just force her, verbally force her to sit in the corner in a chair while the marshal did their paperwork, had their stuff signed, and then forced the eviction. However, they. I've never done an eviction, so I don't know exactly how it works. But in the event, again, anything becomes physical, then, yes, the police have to end it right there. They have to take, you know, take charge of the situation, which is exactly what happened. So go ahead.

[25:11] Meg: Officer Elter entered first with a six foot restraining bar. And officers Adams and Tedeschi entered next carrying plastic shields. Officer Sullivan held the 12 gauge pump action shotgun. Eleanor was sitting on a stool with an 8 inch butcher knife. They asked her to drop it. She didn't. The officers claim she lunged at them. Officer Sullivan shot her in the hand, blowing off three of her fingers, and shot her again, hitting her square in the chest. She crossed her arms over her wound and slumped against the wall. The EMTs came in and tried to assist her, but she fought them off. After finally managing to stabilize her, they removed her from her home. One witness said, this is somebody who was watching her being carried out. Quote, they carried her out of the building with no clothes on. She was naked. Naked. They didn't even cover her up. She was naked for everyone to see. She had a big hole in her chest. One of her hands was blown off. They didn't even put her in an ambulance. They put her in the back of a housing authority car. According to an emergency room surgeon, she's now at the hospital. She was barely alive when she got there at 10:00am she was, quote, without spontaneous breathing and a pulse and bleeding profusely. She'd lost well over half of her blood volume. Her right hand was a bloody stump with the thumb and index finger completely missing. And the fourth and fifth fingers were all crumpled over and sort of dangling down by pieces of skin that weren't fully attached to the hand. She died shortly after. There was a huge public outcry in response to the killing of Eleanor bumpers. Before we get into that, is there anything else you want to add to, like how it all went down?

[27:17] Travis: Well, I know the story.

[27:18] Meg: Yeah.

[27:19] Travis: Very well.

[27:19] Meg: Of course you do. Yeah.

[27:20] Travis: And you know, and you described it pretty much how I remember. Happy. Except that you did seem to figured they did, I do believe, try to net her.

[27:29] Meg: Oh, I didn't read about that.

[27:31] Travis: They, they attempted to net her and she was able to either overcome the net, step over the net. You know, these things don't always work all the time, but it's. It's another. They have these like nylon nets that they try to loop over you, you know.

[27:43] Meg: Yeah.

[27:43] Travis: Eleanor bumpers, what, for listeners may not know, was a very large woman. I've heard that she's £300. Whether you guys can say 5 foot 7, between 275 and £300, I don't know. It's a 25 pound difference. But that's a large woman all the way around. And so it's very possible that the, you know, she was able to get. I was surprised, I didn't realize that she had actually fought the EMTs off when they first tried to help her, you know, which is surprising. A little shocking to me, to tell you the truth, Because I thought being shot, when she was shot in the chest, that was the end of it, but obviously it was not.

[28:20] Meg: No, it was not. So, yes, huge public outcry. She was an elderly, mentally ill black lady up against heavily armed officers. The police benevolent association took out radio and print ads stating, quote, this 300 pound woman suddenly charged one of the officers with a 12 inch butcher knife, Striking his shield with such force that it bent the tip of the steel blade. The nypd did develop a mandatory course in the wake of all this to train police officers to work safely and effectively with emotionally disturbed people. Officer Sullivan was acquitted on charges of manslaughter for using excessive force. In March 1990, the city agreed to pay $200,000 to the Bumpers estate. Two supervisors at Social services were demoted for failing to seek an emergency rent grant for Eleanor and for not getting her proper psychiatric care. Since 1985, members of the NYPD Emergency Service Unit have carried tasers to use instead of firearms when dealing with the mentally ill. I mean, you've filled in a lot of questions that I had about, I mean, basically in a situation like this, and I would think that this sort of thing would happen not infrequently, to be honest.

[29:46] Travis: All the time. Things like this happen literally every day. People forget. That's another thing people don't realize. New York City is the most populous city in the country. It is a giant, busy, busy city. We have, I do believe, and I could be wrong, but I do believe we have the most housing projects of any city in the nation. And I think we have the most dense, the most densely populated housing projects. Because unlike many cities, everything in New York City goes up and down, you know? You understand what I'm saying? High rises.

[30:19] Meg: Yes.

[30:19] Travis: Where in other places you're more spread out.

[30:23] Meg: Yeah, exactly. So we're dense.

[30:24] Travis: I mean, even our middle income housing, like, you know, right around the corner from you, Here is thy town. You know, it is a city upon itself in a way. It's a neighborhood upon itself. Just Stuy town.

[30:35] Meg: So if this happens all the time, why do you think this particular event just hit people so, so hard?

[30:44] Travis: Well, like the same problems that we have today. Okay? And everybody's gonna think I'm gonna tell you a whole bunch of stuff now. Everybody think I'm gonna be copping out here. I am not. Okay, Copping out exactly is I think that the media got ahold of it, okay? And then once. So I'm going to back it up a little bit and I'll say what happened? Everything that happened does not surprise me one bit. Okay? And when I say surprise me, things happen. Things go sideways very, very quickly in situations like this. Okay? Now Stephen Sullivan, the officer who pulled the trigger, he's the one that became the, the devil in this. All right? Stephen Sullivan had 19 years on the job, 14 of which he spent in ESU. He had over 18 different commendations for medals. Medals. Commendations meaning medals for bravery. Again, like I was saying, pulling jumpers off of buildings, off of bridges, you know, all kinds of really crazy, dangerous things that he's done.

[31:45] Meg: I know that he hadn't ever shot anyone before. He had shot his firearm twice. And both times it was like to a dog attacking. And then there was another event, but again, it wasn't a person.

[31:59] Travis: Another thing that ESU guys do. They're the guys that show up, up when you have a crazed rabid dog or something like that. Something I've called them for before when we had scary Pit bulls that would be loose in buildings, you know, we call ESU because they have the tranquilizer darts. They have a truck full of stuff, you know, now when they entered into this apartment, they had a truck full of stuff. They attempted to net her. They had the shields. She was still resisting. Something that nobody will ever understand. And unless you've been trained and understand this and, you know, look it up on YouTube, you'll find out if somebody is 20ft away from you. Okay? 20ft is wider than your apartment. It's a very 20ft. If you take somebody 20, it's longer than the sidewalk. It's like two sidewalks lengths from the building to the street. That's about 10ft. So do that twice, okay? 20ft away. You should shoot them. That's how quickly they can put that knife to your throat. It sounds insane, but it happened so unbelievably fast. Now here we have a woman, even with the shield. Well, we weren't there. We don't know. Okay? Now here he is. He's got his two guys in front of him. He's the one with the weapon, okay? They tried to net her. Didn't work. She attacked them. Supposedly true or not, when she struck the steel, she actually bent the knife, okay? Now, had this been somebody's face, skull, arm, hand, whatever, even an arm injury to your arm, you could bleed out before you get to the hospital, okay? It is his job to end it, okay? And that's exactly what he did. And you would say, well, why don't you shoot her in the hand? Why didn't you shoot her here?

[33:43] Meg: I did shoot her in the hand.

[33:45] Travis: You always shoot center mass, which is dead center of the chest, okay? You. That's where you shoot. Because why it's not. To kill somebody is to stop somebody. If you shoot somebody in the hand, in the leg, in the knee or whatever, that doesn't mean they're going to stop. All right? If you shoot them, always dead center, and you always shoot twice, it's called a double tap, bang, bang, okay? To make sure that you're stopping them. And that's what he was doing. Now back to Stephen Sullivan. Just so everybody got their record straight year again. 19 years on the job, 14 of them in ESU, all kinds of decorations. He never even had a civilian complaint for cursing at somebody. You know, which I find how anybody can make it 20 years, and I get a civilian complaint for something a little bit surprising. So I will say unequivocally, and, you know, I know people will be unhappy with me, I do not believe Stephen Sullivan did anything wrong. Now also understand, unlike the general public, police officers are tried twice. Stephen was tried twice. He went to court twice for this. Once by the city of New York, and once by what we call the trial room, which is the NYPD court, where they see if they're gonna give you the boot or not. Okay. Both times he was exonerated. He was acquitted of all charges and found. Not only was he acquitted of wrongdoing. Let me make this point clear, too. He was found of no wrongdoing. And that's how it's worded.

[35:20] Meg: I guess my response is it's less about the individual, it's less about the ESU officers who were there, and it's more about procedure, where it seems to me like de escalation is just the wise move. And I'm surprised if they are trained in hostage crises. You know, if they can talk somebody off the edge of a building. It does not seem like there was a lot of effort put into de escalation in this situation. Because to your point, I'm, you know, this, this happened in a really short period of time. This, this wasn't like a two hour standoff. This happened very quickly.

[36:08] Travis: We don't know what we're getting from the media.

[36:10] Meg: No court. No court. Oh, again, like, they were there at 9:30 and she was in the hospital at 10.

[36:17] Travis: Well, I can tell you that every. Everything I've ever been mixed up, I've probably been in the newspaper at least a dozen times. I'm talking media now, but the courts are the same thing. I've been into court hundreds of times. Okay? And I have yet. And the dozen times I've been in the paper, it's either been me specifically and. Or a case that I'm attached to. All right? Never once has it been correct. Sometimes it's a little bit wrong. Sometimes it's like, where'd you guys get this story? Because I was there and none of this happened. So I'm sure there's a lot more that goes onto it than what the New York Times has reported.

[36:53] Meg: Well, I'll just say I hope they figure out a better way to deal with it than what they did. I just. I can't even imagine that there isn't. And it seems like they have since, to be honest, they did do some things in response to this case, that they did give special training after all of this happened. Maybe because they were pressured to or maybe because they realized that actually, you know, this isn't really the Best way to deal with people who are emotionally disturbed.

[37:18] Travis: I will again. And I don't want to sound like I'm arguing with you, because I'm not. But I'm just. I'm just.

[37:22] Meg: You can argue with me.

[37:23] Travis: I'm showing you the other side.

[37:24] Meg: Yeah, absolutely.

[37:25] Travis: Where you could not have had a more seasoned, more trained guy show up.

[37:31] Meg: Then why didn't they deescalate?

[37:33] Travis: But it's easy to say, but you weren't there. You see what I'm saying? I can't say the same thing with all of my experiences. I wasn't there. But I have to give credit, okay, to the guys that I know, had the experience, had all the toys to work with, okay? And in the end, if somebody's charging you with a knife, I don't care if it's an 8 inch, a 12 inch, a 15 inch or a 3 inch, a 3 inch knife doesn't make a difference. You might as well be 10ft tall, okay? You have to stop it, and you have to stop it immediately. And that's what you're doing. You're not killing somebody. You're stopping somebody.

[38:09] Meg: And I did read that they had mace with. They didn't have tasers with them.

[38:14] Travis: They did have tasers, were a fairly new thing which came out.

[38:16] Meg: Exactly, exactly. And I think possibly, maybe even in response to this.

[38:21] Travis: So in my time in the police department, throughout the 90s, all right, when they had Tasers, the only people who had tasers at that time, you'll see them at every cop's hip. Now, at that time were the sergeants. You want to know something even crazier than only the sergeants having tasers? They had to keep them in the trunk.

[38:39] Meg: So that's not obvious.

[38:41] Travis: Not at all. Because you have to go number one. I have to call a sergeant to show up. The sergeant shows up to the job, then he has to leave the building to go get the taser and come back.

[38:50] Meg: Right?

[38:51] Travis: You see? But this, again, happens all the time where, for lack of a better word, bureaucrats make the rules. All right? When they don't know what they're choking. Choking is always a big thing. We see it on the news all the time. Choking, choking, choking. Now police officers are no longer allowed to choke. I was taught to choke in the academy. And I will tell anybody at all. And I'll argue this at the end of the day, anybody that says you can't choke has never had a fight in their life. If you're gonna fight somebody a True fight. You absolutely have to be able to choke them. And police officers today choke people every day, because if you're in a true fight for your life, you're going to choke them. Now, as somebody who was trained to choke people, somebody who practiced choking people, like in jujitsu class and stuff like that, I have put people to sleep several times intentionally, where you choke them out until they're unconscious. Used to do it in the bars and clubs all the time. Okay. It's not illegal in the bars and clubs. It's a fight. But now you've taken that tool away from police officers because of one Michael Stewart, 10. Well, different people who have died. But you also fail to realize that's out of millions of arrests. So it is 0.000 whatever percentage of people that are choked by the police that actually die. But now you've removed that tool. And every time you remove a tool, you up. You up it to the next thing. So if I can't beat you with my hands, now I have to go to a stick.

[40:24] Meg: Right?

[40:24] Travis: You see what I'm saying?

[40:25] Meg: Yeah, I do.

[40:25] Travis: Would you rather me hit you with my hands or with my stick?

[40:27] Meg: I don't know.

[40:28] Travis: No, no, neither. And then, of course, they give you the tasers. Okay. I personally would prefer a stun gun to a taser because tasers don't work very well or all the time.

[40:38] Meg: I didn't even know there was a difference.

[40:40] Travis: A stun gun is a solid gun. You've seen them where it goes in between. Okay. But anyway, they shoot you with those tasers. Okay? They're easy to rip out, especially if somebody is an edp. Mentally disturbed. They're very easy to tear out. Okay. And if they don't land just right, they don't work at all.

[40:59] Meg: Okay.

[41:00] Travis: Okay. And so now you're doing something different than what you should be doing to get it done. Mace is another thing. Mace is great when it works. It does not always work. It's not always work with crazy people.

[41:11] Meg: Exactly. That's what they said in this case, that they. They didn't have tasers with them, but they did have mace with them. And people were like, well, why didn't you just mace her? And they said that they felt that it would make her crazier.

[41:26] Travis: And. Well, also, I can also back that up a little bit too. We're talking about 1984.

[41:30] Meg: Yeah.

[41:31] Travis: The early Mace. Mace is gone. Everything is way different than it is now. I bet we did not have pepper spray back then. The Pepper spray that we have now.

[41:39] Meg: Again, I didn't even know there was a difference between mace and pepper spray.

[41:42] Travis: It's just more miserable to get hit with than the old Mace, which was just a chemical base. Okay. Which, again, is different than, like, cs, what we used to use in the army, which is. CS stands for controlled substance, which sounds like drugs, but it's actually the mace that we use. And that stuff is. You get hit with that. It is amazing. I mean, I've seen. Not to be gross, I've seen when we would get gassed on purpose. I've seen snot go from your nose to your foot because your body is rejecting absolutely everything. You know, it's wild stuff. I'm sorry, but go ahead.

[42:12] Meg: No, no, no, no. I was just gonna say. Actually, a friend of mine just told me the other day, she was walking in Times Square. She's. I'm gonna say she's 5 foot 3, maybe 95 pounds, and some guy just came and pepper sprayed her right in her face. And she was just telling me the other day, like, the experience of it and what happened to her. I was just like, oh, my God. Just hard.

[42:36] Travis: It is a miserable, miserable experience. One more thing. With the mace and pepper spray, as a police officer, we would oftentimes not use it when in a confined space, because if we were in a kitchen, a small, hot project kitchen that we're talking about. I'm macing everybody in the room.

[42:54] Meg: Right, Exactly.

[42:55] Travis: You see what I'm saying? People don't think of these things. Now, an experienced guy would know. I mean, I've had to. It used to be a joke that we'd say, you know, the cops are the only ones that get maced, because once it's let loose, you know, it engulfs the room and the cops end up suffering more than the bad guy.

[43:10] Meg: Right. You know, I'll just say, like, in conclusion, and I really do, I appreciate so much you coming and filling in a lot of the gaps for the story. And obviously, your perspective is so valuable. I think the fact that it landed so hard on the city. Maybe it's, as you say, it's because, you know, the media talked about it, but it's also because it was a story that felt very close to home to a lot of people who felt disregarded and helpless.

[43:41] Travis: I never knew Eleanor Bumpers. Obviously, at that particular time, I was off in the army doing army stuff. But I know Eleanor Bumpers. I know sad old women who live by themselves. And this is something, before we go on to Another segment here, I want to get straight. The true tragedy of Eleanor Bumpers was not her being shot by Stephen Sullivan. Everybody say, what are you talking about, Travis? This is what I'm talking about. And this is happening today in every city in America, okay? Eleanor Bumpers was a completely forgotten woman, okay? She was completely forgotten. They went to evict her. She owed less than $400 in rent, okay?

[44:24] Meg: Ridiculous.

[44:24] Travis: She was a schizophrenic. Yeah, okay, she did have. You didn't mention. She did have an arrest record. She was in trouble.

[44:30] Meg: Oh, yeah, no, I mentioned who did ment.

[44:32] Travis: Sorry. Okay, so she had been in trouble with the law before, but here, immediately, we'll say, well, the city didn't take care of her. And I don't want to talk ill about the dead or in this case, the dead's relatives. Like I'm going to. Where was her son and daughter? Well, just two years prior, okay? To me, just two years prior, I was still. I was working in a liquor store right over here on First Avenue, okay? And between my minimum wage pay of $2.50 an hour and my tips, I was making like $200 a week so I could have paid her rent for two months. And here she had a son and a daughter, both grown people, okay, Who I know nothing about. I know the daughter went on to be a nurse or something like that,

[45:13] Meg: but, yeah, she's an activist.

[45:14] Travis: Probably was a nurse at the time, okay? But her son. How did nobody help her out with the rent?

[45:21] Meg: I don't know the answer.

[45:22] Travis: How did nobody take care of her? How did the. Again, social services not get her into a hospital or see a doctor or get some medicine?

[45:30] Meg: I'm more inclined to. If we're gonna put blame on anybody, I'm more inclined actually to the social services because they knew the full story and they understood, and they also had the resources to help her.

[45:44] Travis: Like all of these sad, broken old people that walk our city streets every day, okay? They are all completely lost and forgotten about. It wasn't her children. It wasn't the police. The police didn't know who she was until they showed up that day, okay? It was. Wasn't social services or the marshals or Ed Koch, okay? It was all of them. She fell through the cracks every single time. And that's where the true tragedy lies, if you understand what I'm saying.

[46:15] Meg: I do, yeah.

[46:16] Travis: It's because immediately people will blame, you know, one individual in this particular case, you know, Stephen Sullivan, who ended up retiring early and leaving the job because he couldn't go through the stress. He wanted to retain his pension or whatever. And he had a three year court case going through two different trials, blah, blah, blah. We can talk about that to nauseam. That was the end result of years and years of neglect. Years of neglect from everybody that stepped in and out of Eleanor Bumper's life. And that's where the true tragedy lies.

[46:49] Meg: I mean, you know, the neighborhood that I live in, we're recording right now on 23rd Street. I am very close to the VA. I've got a. Bellevue is right around the corner. NYU Medical Center. I would say that there are probably more lost, forgotten people who walk up and down this strip of the city than probably a lot of strips of

[47:15] Travis: the city like you just mentioned. Go sit in the lobby of the VA hospital, right? I've been there myself. I've been there as a patient in the VA hospital.

[47:22] Meg: I walk by and talk to this sad, sad place. And there's. It's actually, I will say, let's end on a positive note. Right outside the VA hospital, which I walk my dog by there every morning, there's a tent where some of the vets are selling. I don't even know if they're selling. I think they've just got hats and, you know, just sort of paraphernalia. But really they're just sitting there and hanging out with each other. And Fozzie, you've met Fozzie. Oh, my God, do they love him? And Fozzie loves them. And they always, you know, when somebody nice is walking by, they want everybody to stop and hang out. And in that sense, I' very grateful that I live very close to the va, but I also, you know, I can see the traffic going in and out of that place. And it is. It is heartbreaking and it absolutely is. I hope that this city figures out something better to do than how they've been handling it.

[48:20] Travis: I don't know. I mean, it's been going on for the last 60 years of my life.

[48:34] Meg: Travis, I so appreciate you having that conversation with me because it's not easy. You know, I mean, we're just talking about facts, but we're also talking about opinions. And, you know, people disagree with me. People disagree with you. And the fact that we can sit across from each other and have a completely reasonable conversation about something that is absolutely, really hits hard, I think, for all of us.

[48:59] Travis: Meg, that's one of the reasons I love to talk to you and the lovely Jess, who again, is absent today. We always say there's always three sides to the story. Yours, mine, and in between lies the truth.

[49:10] Meg: Right.

[49:10] Travis: Okay. And what I was actually, I don't want to say excited to have this conversation with you, but I wanted to let your listeners know that the one sided story, okay, that was portrayed predominantly in the media and of course, by, you know, who was it at the time? Al Sharpton and Maddox. It wasn't Maddox.

[49:33] Meg: Mason and Maddox were.

[49:35] Travis: It was. I can't get his name. It doesn't make it. Let's not waste time on that. But anyways, you know, is to see it from all the different sides because, you know, had you been there yourself and you were the one with the shotgun in your hand, I'm sure you would have a very different outlook on what was happening, you know, or if you were the one that was holding that shield where, you know, she was trying to reach over the top to stab you in the head, you might have been yelling, shoot her. Shoot her. Because you would have been terrified. You know what I'm saying? There are things that go into it, and if you think that the police aren't scared when they do these things, we absolutely are. In fact, if you are so inclined, I will tell you a story of my own that does not quite mirror this situation, but is very similar.

[50:17] Meg: Yes, please.

[50:18] Travis: You like that?

[50:19] Meg: Yes.

[50:19] Travis: Okay, so we're gonna fast forward it because we're what, October of 84, right? So let's go to February. I want to say February 28, 1995.

[50:31] Meg: Okay.

[50:31] Travis: Okay. And I'm pretty sure I got the date right there. All right. I was a young patrol guy working the 52nd Precinct, the 52 Precinct, as we say in the Bronx. I was sitting in the car with my almost all the time partner, Nikki, all right? And a call came over for a domestic dispute man assaulting his daughter. And it actually wasn't in our sector. A sector is where you work. But we were sitting on Creston Avenue at St. James park, and we could look right across the park to Jerome Avenue, which is. It's only a block wide, it's a very small park, and we could see the building that the call was coming on. So my partner Nikki said, we'll take that central. In other words, we're to take this job.

[51:11] Meg: Now, let me ask, when you hear that call, assaulting, were you given like a number or something? Like a code? Like It's a code 52 or something like that?

[51:21] Travis: Yes. And you know what? Shame on me. I can't remember. Okay.

[51:23] Meg: I'm just curious, like so you get the code and you understood it to be assault, which means the number.

[51:29] Travis: But then you also usually get a description. Okay, so it'll be, you know, 10, whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[51:36] Meg: Right.

[51:36] Travis: And they'll give you something else. Okay. And in this particular case, it was a man who was assaulting one of his children.

[51:43] Meg: And what does that mean specifically to you? Like physically, like hitting them?

[51:48] Travis: Yes, but we don't know. We don't know what we're getting ourselves into until we get there. Yeah, you know, so 104 Central will take the job. And again, it was not our job to take, but we were. We could see the building. So, you know, drove around the corner. Get out of the car. I'll walk you through this so I can paint a little picture just so you know what it is. Because we're talking cop stuff now. Yes, please, to be a policeman. All right, so we get in there and it's an elevator building, all right? And I believe. I want. It was the third or the fourth floor, I can't remember exactly. But we walk in and we push the button. And this was not a, like a high rise building. It was like maybe a six story, you know, 50, 60 family building. All right? The elevator comes down, but then we take the stairs. We do this so that when we take the elevator up, the bad guy doesn't come running down the stairs, but the elevator is now on the first floor with us. It's tactical. You see what I'm saying?

[52:38] Meg: Okay, yes, I do.

[52:38] Travis: And these are the kind of things that cops do when they want to catch the bad guys and when they want to make sure again that everybody is safe. That's why we're being called. Right?

[52:46] Meg: Right.

[52:47] Travis: So the elevator comes down, and then we turn around and walk up 3, 4 flights of stairs anyway, so that again, we're being tactical. Nobody's. No children, the bad guy. Nothing's happening where people are running down the stairs and escaping while we're being lazy, taking the elevator. We get there immediately, we can hear the screaming from the apartment. Okay, the apartment is at the end of a long hallway, and I'm the lead. I go up and I can hear the screaming through the door. And it's a fairly nicely kept building. It's not a terrible building. All right? Clean hallways, you know, typical steel apartment doors. And I bang on the door. Bang, bang, bang. Police open up. I back up against the wall because I could hear the screaming. I unlock my weapon. My partner Nikki, again is behind me, and we're both up against the wall. Because there's no way to get to the other side of the door because it. That's the end of the hallway. All right. We hear more screaming and more screaming. Male screaming, female screaming. I bang again really hard on the door. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Police open up. More screaming goes. And then the door flies open. Bang. And a man named Lito Fuentes, I don't know, probably about 5 foot 10. Turns out he weighed 279 pounds, I believe. Comes out screaming. Howling, though, like a wild animal howling. With two knives in each hand, up high, almost like. I don't know if he was trying to put them on his head. Like. Like they were horns or kind of like a picador. You know, the guys that do the bull fighting thing, Whatever it was. Yeah, he was nuts. And he comes screaming, running out. Now, here is a situation just like the Eleanor Bumpers case, where I should have shot him dead immediately and. Or my partner Nikki should have shot him dead immediately. We should have for our own safety.

[54:29] Meg: Yes.

[54:29] Travis: But the way things sometimes happen and why you say things, you know, sometimes get crazy. I was almost too close to shoot him. He was just right on top of me. The second he came out the door, I switched my hips on him to try to kind of deflect him and throw him to the ground. Okay. Which turned out not to be so easy because he was such a big guy. And I struck him in the head, I don't know, two or three times with my very heavy stainless steel pistol, I struck him across the head. Now, during this same time, while we're kind of wrestling around, and this is just a matter of seconds, but I mean, so many things are happening within these seconds. He stabs me through my pocket. Okay. Does not cut me. He does not get it into me with an 8 inch hunting knife.

[55:13] Meg: Oh, my God.

[55:14] Travis: But I'm gonna say, luckily for me, what had happened was his hand went inside my pocket with the knife and he was tangled. He couldn't get it back out. And we both fell to the floor.

[55:25] Meg: Now you are gesturing to like the area, right?

[55:29] Travis: My left hand side. My left hand. Jacket pocket.

[55:32] Meg: Your jacket pocket.

[55:33] Travis: Correct. My police uniform.

[55:36] Meg: Got it.

[55:36] Travis: Jacket pocket. His hand literally went inside of my pocket. Just the craziest thing.

[55:41] Meg: Oh, my God.

[55:42] Travis: We've both fall to the floor. I hit him again two or three more times, as hard as I can. So ask me, how hard did you hit him, Travis? As hard as I possibly could because I am fighting for my life.

[55:53] Meg: Yeah.

[55:53] Travis: Okay.

[55:54] Meg: What is Nikki doing?

[55:55] Travis: At this point, well, Nikki is now helping me. He's actually put his foot on or his hand on. I can't remember what it was. I believe his foot or his knee. On the other hand.

[56:03] Meg: On the other hand with the other knife. Yeah.

[56:04] Travis: Okay. We get him to be unconscious. We flip him over on his stomach, cuff him up. Okay. As I stand up, the knife falls out from underneath my jacket onto the floor, clackety clack. And we're like, holy crap. You know, it happened so fast.

[56:19] Meg: Easily just gone into your side, into your.

[56:22] Travis: Well, it actually cut my vest. Okay? So it caught my vest. And what people don't know, like your bulletproof vest. My bulletproof vest.

[56:29] Meg: Got it.

[56:30] Travis: Okay. So I could have been and should have been cut, but my vest was in the way. So the jacket helped me and the vest helped me. But also understand, people don't know a knife can go through a vest. The way a vest works, the Kevlar actually wraps around the bullet.

[56:43] Meg: Okay.

[56:44] Travis: And holds it. It's just like you're making a fist around your finger. That's what happens to a bullet. A blade, if sharp enough and done properly, can cut right through a vest. People don't realize that, but luckily for me, I was not injured. Okay, so now we have him all cuffed up. His wife and daughters come out of the apartment with the neighbors. His wife is hugging me with everything that she has. Okay? He's got. I remember two daughters, one who looked to be like a very young teen, 13, 14. And the other one who was maybe 6 or 8 in that neighborhood.

[57:22] Meg: That's okay.

[57:23] Travis: Okay. Then his sister comes up the stairs. Okay? She was the one that called. Because what had happened was the wife called the sister at her apartment, okay? The sister called the police. We showed up, and we beat her to the job. Okay? So we're all standing there.

[57:40] Meg: Thank goodness you got there first, because he probably would have killed his sister.

[57:44] Travis: Well, we don't know.

[57:45] Meg: We don't know.

[57:46] Travis: Well, again, he was.

[57:47] Meg: I mean, I'm just imagining the guy with the two knives.

[57:49] Travis: I don't know what kind of assault was happening to the children, whether it was sexual or just physical or whatever. Turned out he had a long history of drugs. He had a long history of arrest. He was not a good fella. Okay, so let me continue with the story. We're standing there, and Nikki looks down. He tells me, I don't think he's breathing. All right? We're like, oh, shit. You know, we flip him back over. He's not breathing.

[58:13] Meg: Oh, my God.

[58:14] Travis: So we start doing the cpr, all right? And just as we're doing the cpr, we had already called for a bus. A bus is an ambulance. That's cop talk for ambulance. All right? We'd all already called for a bus and a supervisor to show up. Both of them. The ambulance shows up with two MTs and the sergeant and my good friend Jody showed up at the same time. And they're coming off the elevator altogether. Scoop him up, put him on the stretcher, take him away. All right? And all four of them leave, luckily for us. Okay. At that time, and this was a big piece of luck, in my opinion, because things can go any different which way? Okay. Lido Fuentes was dead. He's gone.

[58:56] Meg: Oh, my God. But why did he stop breathing?

[58:59] Travis: Well, I hit him in the head four or five times with my pistol. He also had enough drugs inside him to kill a horse. Even though he was the size of a horse at 278lbs, he was loaded with crack. Okay, so he's off to the hospital. Okay. To St. Barnabas, I believe he went to. What saved the day for us was the great work of. Who was it? Danny Horahan and Neil Reardon, who were two detectives at the time. We were very, very lucky that at that time they were available and came straight over. Had there been a missing child, another homicide, something else to take them away, they would not have come immediately because they would have been busy. They came immediately. They took the entire family and the neighbor to the station house, got statements from everybody. And at that time, because they were so angry, so upset with their father, brother, neighbor, husband, they all wrote very, very damning statements about him and courageous statements about us.

[01:00:04] Meg: Okay.

[01:00:04] Travis: Okay. All said and done, Lido Fuentes is dead. He died of what they reported as cocaine psychosis. Crack was a very new thing still back at the time. We were at the height of the crack epidemic back then, and cocaine psychosis was something that would happen quite often when you were just. Your body was so overloaded with cocaine that it would fry your brain and your heart would explode. Okay? That combined with fighting, with us taking the beating that he took, it's like a heart attack. Oh, yeah, his heart. They believe his heart exploded, which. I don't know how that works, but that's the way it was described to me. And again, I never had. It was not my case. I was not a detective on it, but that's what it was described to me. So again, Neil Reardon, Danny Horahan, in my opinion, saved the Day, okay? Because they had everything on paper immediately. It was only made the papers in the Daily News and on 1010 WINS. Because nobody liked the story. You see what I'm saying? It was not a juicy story for the media. No activists were involved until like 10 days later when they decided they wanted to get together and sue the city and have a march and do all of these things. But then they realized that the juice was kind of gone from the story, if that makes sense to you. Number one, it's the Bronx and nobody cares about the Bronx, all right? Number two, this was a Puerto Rican family, not a black family. So we didn't have the black white thing, okay? And sadly, even your activist types care less about Puerto Ricans than they do blacks. It's just a crazy, messed up thing. And I'm not trying to be racist or racial. I'm just talking about street stuff here. This is the way the world works. They did not care much about the Lido Fuentes story for whatever reason. All right? Strangely, at the same time, and I wish I could remember their names, I should have looked it up before because I knew I was coming here. There was a case that was on the front page of the paper, which had just gone to trial at that time, where a white cop had shot a black cop on the subway. If you remember that it was friendly fire thing. Oh, and the.

[01:02:10] Meg: Like he was aiming for someone else.

[01:02:11] Travis: No, the white cop was off duty. The black cop was on duty, but was in plain clothes and came running down the stairs or up the stairs with a gun in his hand. That's bad. But there was no shield that was out, okay? Now he had shot him and just put him in the hospital. They hugged and made friends in the hospital. It was, well, okay. And then of course, he sued the city and got millions of dollars anyway. Well, I mean, well, who wouldn't? The only thing is, come on, he

[01:02:38] Meg: got shot for doing his job.

[01:02:40] Travis: Well, he did. But did the other cop do the wrong thing? Well, again, people, this is what I'm trying to say.

[01:02:49] Meg: Yes, absolutely.

[01:02:51] Travis: It always comes down to some craz racial incident. Believe me when I say, are there bad apples? Absolutely. But they are so few and far between. And believe me, people aren't going to say, well, geez, I think I'm going to go out and shoot some poor old lady in the projects today or beat some guy to death in a hallway for the fun of it. Because it ruins your life too, you see? It ruins your life too. Yeah, that guy on the subway, you know, did not shoot him because he was a black guy. He shoot him because he was a man with a gun who was running down the stairs like a crazy person, told him to stop, identified himself. But it happens in seconds, literally to snatch your fingers, bang, bang, bang. And you have to make that decision. You know, I know a very, very, very nice young man, a Spanish kid whose name is going to escape me now. I'm sorry if you hear this story and I'm forgetting your name, who had a shootout in the Bronx. And although he was victorious in shootout, one of the bullets that missed the perp hit an innocent person. And he has to live with that for the rest of his life. The rest of his life. He has to know that he shot somebody that was innocent. You know, it's a terrible thing to live with.

[01:03:58] Meg: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you said that, you know, and I don't know anything about this friendly fire situation that you just talked about, but isn't it a good thing to know that the city and the police force will always think about every single incident like this and dissect everything that happened and try and think about how it could go better? Because obviously nobody should get killed, especially for not paying their rent, you know, or for being on the job that you know that there's got to be some sort of self reflection and an improvement. Otherwise one thing that I would say that is a nightmare out there.

[01:04:38] Travis: Just sad about that. And we'll get back to the bureaucracy of it, okay? And I'm not again, blaming what. Oh yeah, I am, I am. I'm pointing the finger and blaming the city and the bureaucracy and the people who quite often come up with the rules is again, it is the old CYA thing to cover their ass. Okay, back to like the choking thing. They made it illegal to choke people because of the handful of deaths that have happened. Okay? But if you've ever been in a real fight in your life, you know, you have to do it. You know, it took so, so long for them to go to automatic weapons before then you had a six shot revolver, okay? And you couldn't because it was insulting to people on the street. It was deemed bad. You couldn't wear like the bullets on your belt like a cowboy did, okay. Or have speed loaders, which is a little cylinder that holds the bullets that you can drop right in. You had to carry six extra bullets in a tiny little velvet bag with a string on it that you would carry in your pocket that you have to remove and take the bullets out one by one. And drop them in while bad guys are shooting at you. It was insanity, absolute insanity. And only old cops are gonna know what I'm talking about when I talk about that because it is such a bizarro thing. But they refuse for decades to go to automatic weapons. Silly things. Like, if you remember, you're old enough to remember back in the 70s when cops used to wear leather jackets. Okay.

[01:06:08] Meg: Just from the movies.

[01:06:09] Travis: Just from the movies. Okay. But that was taken away because people felt they looked too much like the Gestapo. Okay.

[01:06:15] Meg: Oh, interesting.

[01:06:17] Travis: It was just a look thing. Now the only people that still have them are the motorcycle cops and the horse cops. They still have leather jackets. But the regular patrol, I mean, in the big picture, who cares? But it's the silliness that they worry about instead of, again, getting Eleanor Bumpers to get the care that she truly needs. If that makes sense to you.

[01:06:36] Meg: Absolutely.

[01:06:37] Travis: I think so often that the. What is it? The old forest through the trees saying?

[01:06:41] Meg: Not being able to see the forest for the trees.

[01:06:43] Travis: Exactly. And they get it wrong again and again and again. I mean, so much of the in service training that we would receive over the years, some of it was just completely bizarro. Like, are you kidding me with this training? Because it was useless and a waste of time.

[01:07:08] Meg: All right, Travis, so we have just told two harrowing New York City stories. I hope this isn't too personal to ask.

[01:07:18] Travis: No, please, go ahead.

[01:07:19] Meg: You mentioned just now the police officer who shot somebody by accident. A passerby was shot. Do you carry anything from the man whose heart blew up?

[01:07:31] Travis: You know, I get asked this quite often when I'm doing my. When I'm a guest on police type podcast. Usually when I talk to you girls, it's New York City stuff. I don't think I've ever told police stories on here.

[01:07:42] Meg: As a matter of fact, yeah, we just sort of. We tried to keep it in the 80s, and you were a police officer in the 90s, so we haven't talked specifically.

[01:07:49] Travis: Okay. So I believe. And I always say, although my daughter will argue with me because she is a psychologist. All right. That I do not suffer from ptsd. Okay.

[01:08:00] Meg: That you do not.

[01:08:01] Travis: That I do not.

[01:08:02] Meg: But she says you do.

[01:08:04] Travis: She says I do. All right. But there are things like, you know, my 911 story. Okay. I could tell you all about my time at 9 11. And so when 911 comes around, when it's on TV, I turn it off.

[01:08:17] Meg: Oh, yeah.

[01:08:18] Travis: I don't want to. I don't want to see that. I don't think I am by any. I don't have nightmares. I'm not shattered by it. I'm not depressed by it. I'm not, certainly not suicidal about it. But there are things I was, you know, I. Over the years I've done dabbles a little bit with real estate. And when I'm looking at an old beat up old building or house that I'm interested in purchasing. I was on a. Looking through a house one time with a guy I was going to do, a friend of mine that we were going to do this house together with, right? And he brought to my attention that every time I opened the door, I would put my hand would raise towards my right hip where my pistol used to be. And he said, I just noticed it. Travis, every time you open a door, your hand goes to your hip.

[01:09:00] Meg: That is wild.

[01:09:01] Travis: Which is just a strange thing.

[01:09:03] Meg: The body knows.

[01:09:04] Travis: The body knows because you did it so many thousands of times before.

[01:09:09] Meg: But I think that's also what PTSD is, is that your body remembering things that you have no control over intellectually. Always possible vestiges.

[01:09:22] Travis: For me, I am a very happy go, lucky guy. You know, I am blessed that in my opinion, I still like to say I keep the heart of a child. I'm a fairly childish, silly person. You know, when I was in the army, I used to have a first sergeant that used to. This real cranky old black Vietnam vet. He couldn't have been a more stereotypical old beat up paratrooper. All right. And he would always call me the smiling Private. Said, look at you, the smiling Private dancing down the hallway again. Because I was just always in a good mood when everybody else was trying to be tough. I was, I was having fun. You know, that's just my personality.

[01:10:00] Meg: Well, that's also a survival mechanism, right?

[01:10:02] Travis: Well, that's very possible.

[01:10:04] Meg: So we usually do a tie in. What do the two stories have in common? I think it's pretty evident what they have in common, although both are very different stories.

[01:10:16] Travis: Can we both have a tie in?

[01:10:17] Meg: Yeah.

[01:10:18] Travis: Can we figure out what it is? Cause this is my first time doing a show just with you. So I will say my tie in. All right. Things are not always what they seem. Okay, how's that? Does that work as a tie in? Is that allowed? Okay, good.

[01:10:31] Meg: Yeah, absolutely. Everything's allowed.

[01:10:32] Travis: Okay.

[01:10:33] Meg: And remember, we promised each other that we would do a wrap up that included information about your podcast, which is again, what is it?

[01:10:43] Travis: The Another Nobody podcast and your books, the Tommy Kain detective series where do

[01:10:49] Meg: we find you on YouTube?

[01:10:51] Travis: Yes, I'm on YouTube, which, again, is for Boston's media. For Boston's media is the YouTube channel. But I do believe that is gonna be changing soon to the Another Nobody channel. I don't know how that's gonna work. Those are for people much smarter than me.

[01:11:05] Meg: And I'll provide links on the Instagram.

[01:11:08] Travis: Yes, but you can see all kinds of fun. I do some kind of silly things. Back to my childish ways.

[01:11:14] Meg: I know you do a lot of pop culture.

[01:11:15] Travis: I do. It's fun, old pop culture.

[01:11:19] Meg: It's highly recommended, and the production value is top notch.

[01:11:23] Travis: Oh, thank you so much.

[01:11:24] Meg: Very impressive.

[01:11:25] Travis: Because, believe me, it has nothing to do with me. I'm surrounded with good people. All right. My lovely bride is one of my producers. Who? No way.

[01:11:34] Meg: I didn't know that.

[01:11:34] Travis: Oh, she is phenomenal. Except that she's so mean to me, making me do it over. Do it over, do it over. No, I don't think that's gonna work.

[01:11:42] Meg: Travis, I had no idea you'd roped her into all this. That is amazing. I love that it's a family affair.

[01:11:49] Travis: It is. And she's a good girl.

[01:11:50] Meg: Thank you so much, Travis. This has been wonderful.

[01:11:53] Travis: No, well, thanks for having me. I love coming to visit you guys.

[01:12:03] Meg: Sam,