News

Police Beat

by Charles Mudede

Man of Her Dreams/Lake City/Sat Nov 6/10:08 pm: It was the Russian Formalists who defined poetry as being in the condition of strangeness. Ordinary language is ordinary language because it is ordinary. It does nothing surprising. Poetic language is poetic because it is defamiliarized, strange. The objective of most police reports is to be ordinary, but some reports, such as this one by Officer Stephen Hirjak, are so strange that they mirror the Russian Formalist's definition of poetry. This, however, was not the intention of Hirjak's report. It was written with all seriousness and is about a very unfortunate incident. Indeed, the report is strange because Hirjak reports exactly what he was told by the victim.

Officer Hirjak writes: "The complainant came out and asked what we were doing there. We explained that she had called us. She said that she was sorry, but she didn't need us. Her eyes were watery and she seemed to have a hard time concentrating. I asked if she was intoxicated or on some medication. She said she was not, but that she had multiple sclerosis.

"I asked why she called and she became irate and showed me a bruise on her upper left arm. She said, 'I'm left-handed, that's why I have this!' She was very confused and refused to answer any questions. She would then cry. She also exhibited other odd behaviors, such as not paying attention to the person she was talking to or trailing off to a completely different subject.

"As we were about to leave, she pleaded with us, saying 'You're gonna let him get away with this?' I asked her what she was talking about. She said [the suspect] was going to hurt her. For the next 30 minutes, I attempted to get a story out of her. She told me of an incident involving hair washing, a subsequent argument with [the suspect], and falling asleep, only to be awoken by [the suspect] pulling the mattress out from under her. She told me that this one incident happened on Thursday (two days earlier), then Wednesday, then Friday, then this day.

"I asked her what started the argument and she first said the argument occurred in the kitchen because he wouldn't help clean. Then she said it was in the dining room over cremated remains that are no longer there. Then she said it occurred in the bathroom. Then she said it occurred in the bedroom. She said [the suspect] assaulted her and gave her the old bruise. But she also said she did not know how he did it. She became angry when I asked how she was hurt. She told me that it appeared to her that he must have grabbed her and the bruise was consistent with that. She then went on tell me that she couldn't have grabbed herself and given herself the bruise because she is left-handed.

"We checked the house for the suspect, but did not locate him."