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Editorial: Street Justice

By Eugenia Klopsis
The New York Sun
Copyright 2007 The New York Sun, One SL, LLC
All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: Klopsis is an emergency medical technician on an ambulance in Brooklyn. This column details her observations and experiences. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.

We’re driving around East Flatbush wondering which jerk chicken place to dine at when Bronson remarks that we haven’t had any violent jobs lately. “A good gunshot wound or stab or something,” he says.

The restaurant we choose — a hole in the wall with no sign and no tables or chairs — is just getting its chicken delivery: a man tossing plucked carcasses in loose plastic bags into a heap on the concrete floor. I don’t even care that the health inspectors must have been paid off. I point invisible six-shooters at Bronson and whisper, “Bring on the e coli.”

But we don’t even have a chance to order before we get a call to back up medics on an “unconscious.” Inside the ambulance, I read on the computer screen that an anonymous female caller said a man is lying in an elevator on the second floor of a building with blood everywhere. “It’s a shooting!” Bronson says. “It’s a person shot!”

“No, no,” I say. “It’s a stabbing. Stabbings usually have more blood.”

“Betcha a dollar.”

“Deal.”

We turn onto the street. PD and the firemen are there. We enter the crumbling old apartment building and find the guy sitting in the decrepit marble lobby, all beaten up, dried blood on his face and in his mouth and ears. One eye is completely swollen shut. “Looks like somebody danced on your face,” Bronson says.

The crumbling plasterwork and blocked-up fireplace whisper that once, this section of Brooklyn was safe and desirable. “Some shooting,” I snort to Bronson.

He does a rapid physical assessment. “He’s not stabbed, either,” he replies. “You owe me a buck.”

Out of his good eye, the guy looks at us like we’re mad. “I got jumped,” he says. “In the elevator.”

“You got jumped?” I ask, incredulously. But he’s not saying anything more. “What really happened?”

His good eye glares. “I ain’t telling you nothing.”

Bronson cancels the medics and we both walk him to the ambulance. I give him icepacks and offer to clean his face up.

He declines. “That’s all right,” he says.

I don’t know what else to do for the guy. En route to the hospital, I take his vitals and appear busier than I really need to with my paperwork. When I’ve fussed with my papers all I can, I finally give up, put my pen down, and stare at the guy’s swollen eye. It’s been a boring shift, and I figure the least he can do is spice up my day a little. “Look,” I say. “The cops are gone. What’s the deal?”

We splash through a rain puddle. “I know ‘em,” he says. “We had a beef over money.”

His face looks misshapen. “Musta been a pretty bad beef. Why didn’t you tell the cops?”

He’s stoic. “I don’t need no cops. I’ll take care of it later, myself.”

We hit a bump in the road. “Street justice?”

His face is like stone. “It’s the only kind.”

We drop him off at Kings County, wash up, and go get our jerk chicken. Three hours later, we’re on another call en route to the same hospital when we overhear a job for a person shot on the same block as the beat up guy. Bronson is driving and I’m in the back of the bus trying to fit an oxygen mask over the face of a very thin 12-year-old having a sickle cell anemia crisis. The school nurse said it was her third crisis this year, interrupting her schooling once again. I’m trying to be as gentle as I can with her when I hear the job description come over the radio attached to my hip.

“It has to be the street justice guy!” Bronson shouts back to me.

I shout back, “Is he likely?” I mean likely to die.

Bronson reads the computer screen while he’s driving — not a good thing but, four sheets to the wind, I’m about as scared of an accident as I am of the e coli. “Doesn’t say,” he shouts.

The girl removes the oxygen mask from her face. “What?” she says weakly.

I stroke her hair gently. “Just some guy we picked up earlier who got even with someone who beat him up,” I say. “He said it was street justice.”

She puts the mask back on her face and closes her eyes. “I guess they have nothing better to do.”

When we drop her off at Kings County, I ask the triage nurse where the beat up guy we brought in earlier was. She laughs. “Oh, he checked himself out,” she says. “His cell phone rang, and he ran out before we could even clean him up.” She looks at me knowingly. “Guess he had important business.”