Officer Down
Kevin Cummings
Bryson Alexander Howard was the first person I knew that died. He was only 19 years old. We weren’t really close friends, but he was someone I could always share a good conversation over a cigarette with. I’d always know Bryson as the kid who could laugh anything off, the kid who would come to school in jerry curls with a pimp cane, and the kid who had my back at alternative school and saved me from getting my ass kicked on more than one occasion. It felt strange when a friend called to tell me that Bryson had been shot by the Dallas police last fall. I felt as if I should have been a closer friend, or have said something more when I jokingly said “I feel that,” when he told me he dropped out of school because the white man was bringing him down.
It happened around 5:30 in the evening on February 13th, 2012 in the Timberglen Apartment complex that sits just west of George W. Bush freeway in North Dallas. Timberglen is an average looking apartment complex, far from the crime ridden neighborhoods like Oakcliff and Fair Park in South Dallas. A black metal fence surrounds a relatively well taken care of property. The tan buildings with red brick trim offer no indication that such a tragic and violent crime could occur here. However, after a fight with his aunt, Bryson took her phone and walked out of the apartment with a .38 revolver tucked in the waistband of his khaki shorts and hidden by his gray hooded sweatshirt. He walked around the corner and dialed 911, saying “there’s a guy walking around my apartments in a gray hoodie with a gun. I think he may hurt someone.”
The first officer to arrive on the scene was 66 year old Ronald Workman, a ten year veteran of the Dallas Police Department. When he arrived, Bryson fired three shots. Two shots went into the windshield of Workman’s squad car. The first shot shattered the window, but missed Workman. The second, however, hit Workman’s lapel microphone. It ricocheted off, and went through his neck, lodging itself in his lower jaw. The third shot, Bryson put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The gunshots echoed violently off the walls of the apartments, while three spent shells made a hollow metallic sound as they bounced off the concrete.
“There is no question in our mind that his intent was to lure us there and ambush us,” Police Chief David Brown said in a statement made to the public. Unfortunately, this type of incident is not uncommon to the Dallas Police Department. Over the past two years, the department has seen a 29% increase in the number of fake calls made with the intention of bringing officers into an ambush. In fact, earlier in the day, a similar call was made a couple of miles away on Lake View Road, where a man made a false report and hid behind a corner until the police showed up. He fired eight shots in the officer’s direction, missing every single one, and was eventually shot and killed by the police on the scene.
While I read the police report, it was hard to imagine the guy that I used to know, the one who never stopped smiling, pulled the trigger on a cop, and finally on himself. I mean, I knew Bryson wasn’t the most upstanding citizen. After all, he was a member of the Crips, but how gangster can you really be when you go to school in such a sheltered suburban town as Plano, Texas? All I could think of was the person I hung out with when we both got kicked of school, and sent to the Special Programs Center. Over the course of the semester there, Bryson and I had talked a lot. We had P.E. class together, which was one of the only classes that you were allowed to talk in, it was also the class that most fights occurred in.
One day, while we were walking along the track outside, a kid named Juan came up to me, pointing his sharp long fingernail that he used to take bumps of coke off of in my face, asking “hey man, do you wanna join the Latin Kings?” Now, being a white kid and straight A student from a decent middle class neighborhood, I had to decline. Before I could respond though, Juan told me that one condition of the deal was that I “had to hate black people.” I turned, and looked at Bryson. “You see that guy over there, man? He’s a friend of mine,” I told him.
“Well, fuck you man. You from the East side,” Juan asked. I told him I was, not really thinking anything of it, when he scowled, saying “well then, I’m going to have to kill you.” Before Juan could even throw the first punch, Bryson took off the white tank top he was wearing, and landed a solid hook on Juan’s face that knocked him to the ground. Then, Bryson took Juan’s bandana that symbolized his gang, and spit on it. I just stood there a little shocked, thinking what a badass he was. Right before the school’s police officer came out, Bryson gave Juan a good kick in the ribs, looked at me and said, “Yo, man, I got your back.” I managed to say thanks, before the cop took him away, feeling pretty lucky.
A couple of weeks later, we both went back to Clark High School. We kind of lost touch once we got back. We would say “what’s up” in the hallway, and smoke a cigarette every now and then as we walked home from school, but that was it. A few months later, Bryson moved in with his aunt, and transferred to a school in the Dallas school district. I saw him a handful of times after that, whenever he would be hanging out with some friends on the steps of his old apartment. Then, I moved out to Lubbock, and never saw him again.
I don’t really know what Bryson was doing with his life after I moved away, but I was taken aback when I heard he was dead. His family was as well. Bryson’s mother said she never saw anything like this coming, that he was a good kid, a good son, and a good older brother, not the kind of person to commit suicide in such a violent manner. Like his family, I also wish I knew what led my friend to do this. The police analysts said that it had to do with held up frustration and aggression. That it was because he was a young man without a high school diploma and no job, which led to him becoming disdainful of authority figures, and eventually to taking it all out by calling in a fake emergency call and firing on the first officer that showed up. This explanation didn’t offer any real reason for his friends and family though. It didn’t explain why the kid who had eaten dinner and laughed with his family the night before would be dead the next day.
It is hard to look at pictures of him on his Facebook page, pictures of him smiling and hugging his sister on her graduation day, or pictures of him in the middle of a family portrait, and think that this is the same person who tried to kill a police officer and killed himself. It’s also hard to think back on the person I knew, the friend who had my back, who never seemed to let anything bring him down, and know that I will never see him again. Reading the police reports and news articles is difficult as well. They only recognize him as Bryson Howard, 19, black male. Just another name and a number on a page. Also, the articles only know him as a cop killer. Don’t get me wrong, the events leading up to his suicide are both terrible and tragic, but they don’t show the side of him that the people who knew him will always remember him by.
Last time I went back to Dallas, I drove over to the Timberglen Apartments. I don’t know what I was expecting to see or feel. It was just another normal looking apartment complex, people walking to and from their cars, or sitting on their patios. I knew there would be no police cars, that Officer Workman had long since been taken to a hospital in Plano and made a full recovery, and that Bryson had been buried months ago, but I wanted to go there and see where my friend’s life had ended. I tried to find the place where it had happened, to stand in the spot where he died, but I couldn’t find anything to indicate where it was. There were just endless rows of uniform apartment buildings. No sounds of sirens or gunshots, just the splashing of kids playing in the community swimming pool, and car engines passing by on the highway. I walked around for a bit longer, smoking a cigarette, thinking about what I had written to Bryson’s family in their online ledger for the funeral. “My heart goes out to the family and friends of Bryson Howard. Your smile and presence was a constant source of illumination. Rest in peace, my friend,” I had written. My words sounded trite and unfulfilling in my head.
I stuck around for a few minutes longer, and then headed back to my car. I drove to the nearest corner store, and bought a forty of Olde English. Now, I’m not going to pretend that I know much about it, but in street and gang culture it is customary to pour out a little from the top of your forty ounce of malt liquor in the ground for your dead friends. It’s a way to show respect, and to show that you are always thinking of them. The cap made a loud crack as I twisted it off, and I poured some out for an old friend, then took a good pull from it myself.