By David Staba
A little after 7 p.m.
last Friday night, New York State Police Superintendent Wayne Bennett stood in
a field in the town of
|
|
The head of the New
York State Police had just finished his second media briefing of the day, one
with the same central theme as the first: Despite three close encounters with
Ralph Phillips in about seven hours early that morning, hundreds of officers
still hadn't caught the fugitive known simply as Bucky.
After answering dozens
of questions, many of them mind-numbing, repetitive or both, he patiently took
a few more. On the story for The New York Times, I needed to clarify an
answer I'd missed when he had turned the other way while giving it.
Earlier, Bennett had
explained how troopers and officers from other agencies conducted the search by
setting up a rectangular perimeter measuring roughly two miles on each side,
then conducting a grid search of a smaller area of about one square mile. Three
sides of the smaller perimeter remained static, he said, while the other moved,
officers walking nearly shoulder to shoulder through the high grass and brush
where they believed Phillips lay hiding.
I repeated the question
from earlier: Did he expect to know by nightfall if the fugitive was in that
smaller space or if he had somehow, impossibly, slipped away once again?
The superintendent
pursed his lips, looked at the ground in front of him for a beat, looked at me
and nodded.
"I do," he
said.
Like most of the troopers
he commanded, his face showed the strain of the five-month search, which
intensified tremendously after Trooper Sean Brown was shot with a .38 caliber
revolver in the Chemung County town of Veteran by the driver of a stolen Ford
Mustang on June 10, and again on Aug. 31, when Troopers Joseph A. Longobardo
and Donald Baker Jr. were ambushed by a sniper in the woods near the home of
Phillips' ex-girlfriend. Trooper Longobardo died of his wounds three days
later.
Three sightings and
subsequent escapes in seven hours early Friday, one when Phillips dove from a
moving car with troopers in pursuit, made it impossible to not at least
entertain the notion that somehow, some way, he was gone again.
After the
superintendent returned to the Masonic hall that served as command central for
the day's search, the assembled media started making plans for the weekend.
Some called hotels in
With the light slowly
dying a little before 8 p.m., I thought about checking into my hotel room,
getting something to eat, reading over the story for Saturday's edition of the Times
that reporter Mike Wilson was about to file, and coming back to the field later
in the evening.
Then I recalled
something the superintendent said about the police's definition of daylight
stretching a little longer than that of civilians and decided to stick around a
little longer. I noticed Trooper Mark O'Connell, one of two officers in charge
of dealing with the media throughout the search, call out to the other one,
Trooper Becky Gibbons.
"B.G., come
here," he said, the urgency in his voice getting the attention of several
remaining reporters.
She broke into a trot
up the hill toward the Masonic hall, and they both went inside. A minute later,
Associated Press correspondent Carolyn Thompson's cell phone rang. She hung up
a moment later.
"Dave said, 'They
got him,' and hung up," she said, referring to AP photographer David
Duprey, whose image of a dazed, exhausted Phillips in the back of a police
cruiser would appear on front pages and Web sites across the country over the
weekend.
The instant reaction
among the media, given the circumstances, was skepticism. For about 30 seconds.
Then a cheer burst out of the hall as the officers inside got the news.
For an hour, as
reporters and photographers returned and dozens of police cars pulled up, we
waited for the superintendent to walk down the hill to the makeshift podium for
the third time that day, flanked by Gibbons and O'Connell.
Instead, at 9 p.m.,
hundreds of troopers, sheriff's deputies and city police officers from all over
New York and Pennsylvania descended en masse, applauding as the superintendent
walked through them to make the announcement just about everyone had been
awaiting.
After Bennett described
the capture, spread the credit among officers from both states and, for the
first time in quite a while, flashed a joyous smile, he returned to his troops.
As officers started
returning home shortly after the capture, a cheering crowd in the hamlet of
Frewsburg -- a couple miles from the spot in
Phillips got a very different
greeting in
Through his court
appearances in
He seemed relieved,
too.
David
Staba is the sports editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter. He welcomes
e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com.
|
|
www.niagarafallsreporter.com |
September 11 2006 |