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1

I was standing at the gate of Potter Correctional Institution staring at him when he was killed.

Waiting to be buzzed into the pedestrian sally port, my view slightly impaired by the chain-link fence and razor wire, I was gazing into the back of a trash truck.

The hot July sun reflected off the razors like the mirrored shades of a redneck police chief, waves of heat dancing through circles of steel, and the air was thick and difficult to breathe.

The clear, blue, cloudless sky offered no shelter from the sun’s assault, nor any promise of rain for the parched planet beneath my feet.

I had no idea what I was witnessing at the time. A murder? An accident? A suicide?

At first, all I could see was a young correctional officer with a bad complexion and wide hips standing on the back of a white Ford flatbed pickup truck thrusting a long metal rod into the trash bags piled on it.

His hips were so wide and strangely shaped, it looked like he was wearing football pants with full pads. Sweat poured off his face, and his light brown uniform was soaked through. It wasn’t the young officer’s odd appearance but the enthusiasm with which he executed his task that caught my attention.

I was awestruck by the violent blows each bag received.

Obviously there were more effective and efficient ways to search the trash before it was removed from the institution, which meant the manner in which he was doing it was a warning to all the inmates looking on as much as it was any kind of actual hunt for an inmate trying to escape.

Like a prehistoric sign language or an antiquated form of Morse code, every violent stab was a character of communication. Taken together, they sent out a concise message for all who had the eyes to see—attempting to escape PCI in the back of a trash truck was a bad idea.

Even though inmates were sometimes treated like trash and at times acted like trash, they were not going to escape by pretending to be trash.

What a strange, surreal little claustrophobic world I was entering.

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the need for a certain type of security. I did.

And I knew an officer had to check every vehicle and everything in those vehicles before they left the institution. Recalling just one of the many real-life horror stories of escaped inmates recited during my recent new-employee orientation was more than enough to convince me of that.