Member-only story
The Worst-Case of Child Abuse That I Had Ever Seen
Life in an inner-city hospital in D.C.
Back when I was much younger and could get into foot pursuits I worked as an SPO (Special Police) at a pediatric hospital. When you’re doing your rounds shift after shift, day after day, medical personnel all begun at the very least recognizable faces. You have to schedule to keep but you do stop from time to time to chat it up and build a rapport.
On my rounds one day I noticed a local cop standing guard outside a patient’s room. I had the morning briefing that there would be someone on guard, but we weren’t given specifics. I stopped by the room and peeked in.
“May I?”. The cop gave me a nod to enter.
A little heads-up would have been nice.
Mind you that I’ve had to release a dead body from the morgue to a funeral home so I’m not squeamish. But what I saw in that room first shocked me, then sickened me, then pissed me off. You know the kind of pissed off I’m talking about. Not the ranting and raving and ready-to-kill kind. I’m talking about the smoldering white-hot low simmer kind of pissed off.
I had a conversation with the nurses at their station and they gave me the details. The child had been so severely beaten that she was black and…
