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Transit Police Officer Thelonious “Theo” Clarke, a beefy five-foot-ten twenty-one-year-old African-American, stood near the concourse exit as he scanned the crowd stepping off the just-arrived southbound train.
Clarke had served six months on the force of three hundred that policed the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority mass transit system, the trains and buses of which servicing, as its name suggested, the City of Philadelphia proper as well as the surrounding four suburban counties.
If there appeared to be some similarities with the Transit Police and the Philadelphia Police Department, that was not by coincidence. SEPTA’s officers went through the same Philadelphia Police Academy training as did Philly’s officers. Thus, it was not unusual for SEPTA’s officers to later join the PPD, which, with manpower of more than six thousand, was approximately twenty times larger in size.
And, while not nearly as common, the reverse of PPD cops joining the SEPTA force also was true—right up to the top cop.
The police chief of SEPTA had served, prior to his transfer, as head of the PPD’s elite Highway Patrol Unit. Like many cops in both departments, it was said he had multigenerational blue blood running in his veins. The chief could in fact count on the fingers of both hands how many family members served in, or had retired from, the ranks of the Philadelphia Police Department, uncles and cousins and nephews and nieces—and his father, who had retired after rising to the level of deputy police commissioner.
While Clarke liked that—he devoutly considered his brothers in blue to be family—he was the first of his biological family to become a law enforcement officer.
Theo had grown up in Spring Garden, a tough section of the city wedged in just north of the wealth of Center City. In his senior year of high school he learned that one could apply to the Philly police at age nineteen, but that PPD required sixty hours of college credits, or a mix of education and experience that could be military service or two years in the Police Explorers Cadet Program and hundreds of hours of training.
His joining the army or navy simply was not a viable option because he needed to be near home to help care for his mother, who suffered from diabetes and could not get around by herself. So he had enrolled in Community College of Philadelphia to acquire the necessary credits—then about a year thereafter, while talking to another student as they scanned a bulletin board in the school’s Career Center, learned that SEPTA required only a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma.
Theo Clarke, anxious to do something job-wise, thought that he could put in time as a SEPTA transit officer—policing was policing, he decided, and he would get to go through the police academy same as the others—and continue with school and then at some point possibly look at transferring to the PPD.
He found that he actually liked being a SEPTA transit officer, especially because transit cops had authority all across the mass transit system, not just limited to one small area of the city.
While pursuing and arresting people who jumped over the turnstiles to evade paying the subway fare did get somewhat repetitious, he found that it could occasionally get interesting.
The bad guys whom the SEPTA police chased on the trains were, after all, if not the exact same bad guys who the Philadelphia Police Department chased—and oftentimes they were—then they could be equally as bad. They committed the same crimes—assaults, robberies, illegal drug sales, and the like. They just happened to do it on SEPTA property.
And of course there always was the steady stream of fare evaders.
The philosophy of the SEPTA police chief was that the bad guys—and, too often, the bad girls—who jumped the turnstiles were of course guilty (a) of theft of service but also (b) of being generally up to no good. They weren’t, to put a point on it, jumping the turnstiles during their commute to and from work or school—they were looking for an opportunity to commit a crime.
Thus, it wasn’t just a philosophy—and when the chief mustered his SEPTA patrols to crack down on fare evaders, there followed an immediate drop in the rates of other more serious crimes committed on the mass transit system.
Which was why Transit Officer Theo Clarke often found himself watching, as now, the crowds embarking and disembarking the train cars at the elevated Somerset station.
This being Kensington, he knew it was only a short matter of time before he would nab some miscreant leaping over—or, his favorite because they looked so ridiculous, crawling under—the rotating arms of a turnstile.
And, also entirely probable, committing a worse offense.
Clarke had been standing by the concourse exit for not even ten minutes when his eyes caught sight of a male walking in a crouch at the back of the last group exiting the train.
His first thought: That dude’s hiding something that’s making him walk that way.
Clarke saw that the male was short, maybe five-four, and chunky. He looked Hispanic—Probably Puerto Rican, Theo thought—and maybe around his own age. He wore a black stocking cap pulled low on his head. He had on a gray sweatshirt—the right cuff of which he suddenly realized was blackened.
Like it’s been on fire. What’s up with that?
Transit Officer Clarke started walking toward him to get a closer look, and then saw that the male was very carefully cradling his hand—That’s why the dude’s walking funny—and that the flesh of the hand was a bright red with black streaks.
Clarke intercepted him.
“You okay?” Clarke said. “What happened to your hand?”
When the male looked up and saw a uniformed policeman looming over him, his tired eyes grew wide.
Clarke
knew that wasn’t an unusual reaction to occur in Somerset station, where he figured at any given time a majority of people could be under the influence of some drug, legal or illicit, and thus Clarke, though remaining cautious, did not immediately read anything into it.
The injured male, whose arm with the burned hand then began shaking uncontrollably, did not respond to his questions.
“What’s your name?” Clarke pursued.
