Mott Haven Diarist: On Patrol
with Men for All Seasons

By DAN ACKMAN

"This man was dead," said the ambulance chief J.D. DeSantis.  "This man was dead." 

Except then he wasn't.  Less than an hour before, the man had no vital signs whatsoever.  Now he had a pulse and a blood pressure.  He was breathing, too, with the help of a respirator. 

Fire Department Emergency Medical Technicians found the man, Luis Diaz, on the floor of the second floor bathroom of a McDonald's restaurant on 149th Street in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.  His pants were around his ankles and he had fallen over face down on the floor, apparently from a drug overdose. 

Police Officer Jose Trinidad and his partner John Caruso arrived moments later, soon enough to help the EMTs drag the 240-pound Diaz out of the toilet.  The officers secured the scene while the ambulance workers worked to bring Diaz back from the beyond. 

Diaz's face and hands were turning blue.  His jaw had locked shut, making DeSantis and his crew pry open his mouth so they could insert an E.T. tube into his trachea.  They pumped air into the addict's lungs with an ambubag. 

Meanwhile, DeSantis selected the narcotics that would jump start his heart: Epinephrine, Atropine, and Lidocaine, to regulate his heartbeat, followed by blood sugars.  Next they shot him up with Narcan to reverse the effects of a drug-induced coma.  When the first doses failed to work, they injected more.

The EMTs worked methodically, with a calm that might be expected considering that they save lives daily.  The reaction of the McDonald's staff-- that was more surprising.  At one point, the restaurant sent an assistant manager upstairs.  The woman, who looked no more than 19, asked Officer Trinidad for his name and badge number.  She needed the information, she explained, for a form. 

McDonald's, it seems, has a form for when a customer overdoses in the men's room.

Ambulances raced Diaz to Lincoln Hospital.  There, doctors in the trauma unit took over.  The EMTs' last job was to tell the doctors how they found Diaz and what they had done to save him.

"I'm about done here," DeSantis said.  "I'm going to get me another one."

Trinidad, 29, and Caruso, 24, working out of the 40th Precinct, still had work to do.  It was their job to inform Diaz's wife about what happened.  When they couldn't find her, they reached out for his mother-in-law.

The policemen visited the woman in person, finding her in her fourth-floor apartment, past an entranceway was bashed in long before and up a flight of stairs that hadn't been painted in decades. 

Trinidad, who was born and raised in Puerto Rico, spoke to the woman in Spanish.  Hearing her complain of her own health problems, he told her only that her son-in-law had collapsed and was in the hospital and that she should find her daughter as soon as possible.  On the way out her explained that he spared her the worst for fear she might have a heart attack of her own.

Later in the day, after he had negotiated an uneasy truce between a man and his former common law wife, Trinidad said, "When you put on the uniform, you become a father, a mother, a priest, a teacher, a student, and a counselor." 

Cruising Mott Haven, these men for all seasons are called in for nearly everything.  Domestic disputes, not ordinary crime, make up the majority the calls, Trididad says.  Police work in the sense of arresting lawbreakers seemed almost an afterthought.

Late in the shift, the patrolmen took a call from P.S. 157.  An eight year-old boy had told his teacher he wanted to kill himself.  Though the boy, whose name was Michael, had nothing more lethal than a plastic fork, the law says that such statements must be taken extremely seriously. 

This time, the officers got there first.  A guidance counselor took Trinidad and Caruso to her office, where they were soon joined by his teacher, another administrator, and a pair of medical technicians.  If Michael was looking for attention, he had it. 

Trinidad tried to talk to the boy, asking him to repeat what he told his teacher.  When Michael finally admitted what he'd said, the officer and his teacher tried to impress on him how grave such words are. 

They asked Michael, who is in foster care, if there were problems at home.  He said there were none.  But his teacher told the police that Michael had recently developed behavioral problems in class. 

Michael seemed a sullen child.  His brother Marques, who arrived later, appeared bright and happy.  Marques was celebrating his seventh birthday that day and he showed a visitor his Pokemon cards.

The ambulance men prepared to take Michael to a hospital where he would be examined by a psychiatrist.  They said the episode would give Michael a "psychiatric record."  The record, they said, would dog him, through childhood and into adulthood in the way even a juvenile criminal record would not.  

On the way out, school administrators asked the officers to sign a form acknowledging their responsibility for the boy.  The cops would not be accompanying him to the hospital and refused to sign.  The EMTs wouldn't sign either since a teacher would be joining Michael in the ambulance and they said the teacher should assume responsibility.

On a day where they were called on to revive the dead and aid the living, the cops and ambulance drivers drew the line at that.