A po-leece friend in Texas ...

In a just-concluded episode of Castle, a character was shot in the head but did not die, nor was he seriously wounded. Capt. Beckett wondered how such an event could occur. She said, “I realize it was only a .22-caliber…” 

About 30 years ago a police detective friend said, “The first shooting case I got, dispatch said there was a gunshot victim at the emergency room, self-inflicted wound to the head. I figured, OK, go get statements from everybody, do up the paperwork, case closed.”

Not so, not so, said the muses of po-leece work.

Robert demonstrated the shooting, with an index finger as the pistol barrel. “He shot himself with a .22, put the muzzle against the middle of his forehead and pulled the trigger.”

The lead slug easily penetrated the thin skin covering the man’s skull, but the muzzle must not have been horizontal, because the slug went under the skin, followed the man’s skull up, across the top of his head and exited at the very back. 

The man was very much alive when Robert reached the ER. He had a bad headache, but he was alive.

“You never know what a .22 will do,” Robert said.

He didn’t mention what, if anything, the man was charged with.

(Use of “po-leece”: That is the way a police lieutenant friend pronounced the word when telling a “po-leece story,” as opposed to a run-of-the-mill cop tale. The lieutenant was also department public affairs officer. One morning at the station, Rex filled me in on details of a man who hit a stop and rob in the Texas town a few days before, and was shot dead in Kentucky the night before. The man robbed other stores in Arkansas and Tennessee before attempting a similar holdup in Kentucky. Police arrived before the man made his escape, Rex said. “He then decided on suicide by po-leece and began firing at the responding officers.”

“Suicide by po-leece.” First time I heard that phrase. TV news people sometimes describe “suicide by cop.” That does not have the same definition or finality as does “suicide by po-leece,” but is a Big City way of reporting.)