Boyd endures jail; officer alert, patient during shift

Monday, October 31, 2016

Rachel Hornback paced outside the Cape Girardeau County Jail, failing to soothe her nerves with another cigarette. Not wanting to be late to visit Renee, she’d come early on this particular Thursday. But now in the afternoon drizzle, she couldn’t sit still.

It was March 3 — more than a month after police arrested her, saying she assaulted an officer and a paramedic. Rachel, having seen the incident, saw it differently. Where police saw punches, Rachel saw her girlfriend, confused, off her medication and out of control after being tackled in the dark by the officer.

Renee Boyd, in the midst of an episode caused by her mental disorders, scuffled with patrolman Jonathan Ortmann after he tried to conduct a welfare check. That was Jan. 27 — just weeks before the Cape Girardeau Police Department began training officers how to better approach mental-health crises. Had Renee’s incident occurred later in the year, that training might have de-escalated the situation.

But that was in the past; all Rachel could do now was focus on making Renee smile.

While incarcerated, the only way Renee could see Rachel was through scheduled 15-minute visits. The video-based visits weren’t much better than Skyping on a laptop.

“This is for Renee,” she said of the eyeliner she rarely wore. She still was in her typical oversized hoodie and jeans, but the makeup was “so she won’t worry about me.”

It finally was 2 p.m.

Renee Boyd poses for a portrait in Scott City on Tuesday.

LAURA SIMON ~ lsimon@semissourian.com

A woman with two sullen teens bickered with the jailer about a canceled appointment at another video terminal.

Rachel’s terminal worked, bringing Renee’s face up on a 3-inch monitor with her rectangular glasses and shoulders in orange. She waved, blowing a virtual kiss.

Rachel asked whether she was doing OK, how many books she’d read and whether she was really sure she was doing OK.

Renee said she was. A tic showed slightly, but it only made her look flustered, like a bad stutter.

Which was good, considering she hadn’t had all her medications since going inside.

She took her prescribed antidepressant but still couldn’t get her antipsychotic. The jail considered the latter “mind-altering,” she later explained, but without it, she found the Prozac little help.

Proper medication levels for mental conditions often are difficult to dial in and are derailed easily by missed doses.

The couple’s 15 minutes went quickly.

“We have some shows we can watch when you get out,” Rachel assured her. “You want Chinese when you get out?”

They hoped that would be soon. She hadn’t gotten out sooner, Rachel later said, because they had been unsure about how best to address her $15,000 bond.

The prosecution called it appropriate, citing the pair of felony assaults, but to pay a bondsman even 10 percent of that was daunting to the couple.

Plus, they hadn’t done this before; neither had criminal records. They also worried hiring a bondsman would jeopardize Renee’s ability to keep her public defender, Arryn Carson.

Their hope was to get her bond reduced first, which Carson planned to do the next Monday, when Renee was arraigned.

“I love you,” Renee said as their time ticked to a close.

“I love you, too, baby,” Rachel said, scooting toward the monitor and blowing another kiss. Then it was over, with Rachel still in the lobby of the county jail and Renee still inside it.

“Every time I see her,” Rachel said, turning to leave, “I feel better.”

Citizen training

Two days later, on a Saturday, the Cape Girardeau Police Department conducted training, but not for officers.

For untrained civilians.

During what they called the Citizens' Police Academy, the department gave 17 volunteers paintball handguns and chargeless Tasers and ran them through eight scenarios set up in the Cape Girardeau Central Junior High. Each was based on a high-adrenaline call that Cape Girardeau officers can expect to see in the field.

The point was to illustrate the types of split-second decisions police officers sometimes have to make.

In one, they were made to confront a man with a gun and a hostage.

In another, they “responded” to an unconscious adult in an unpredictable crowd.

None of the scenarios was easy, and participants often were lucky to complete an exercise without getting tagged with a paint round or comically violating some sort of procedural standard.

But when the calls really happen, they’re no joke, and patrolman Mike Kidd said officers see the situations more often than they’d like.

In Kidd’s exercise, actors played a husband and wife who summon police to their home when their adult son — played by another police officer — threatened to kill himself in the midst of a mental-illness episode.

Cape Girardeau police, Kidd said, had “pages of calls like this over the past year ... at least 21.”

Routine, however, doesn’t mean easy.

One by one, the “officers” responded to utter chaos. The “parents” were hysterical. The “son” would enter, raging, in a hoodie and a paintball mask to stalk the other end of the room. He’d bellow and curse, swinging a desk chair through the drywall they’d built specially for the exercise. The parents would wail and clamor around the officer, begging him to do something and warning him not to hurt their son.

The first participant tried.

As a veteran who’d served in Iraq and Afghanistan, Rocky Everett figured he could restrain the man physically without using a gun or Taser. He was wrong. The son pulled a fake knife and stabbed him.

Kidd told Everett afterward he’d underestimated the situation.

“You have to get some distance between you and this guy,” Kidd said.

A concealed knife, he pointed out, can cause serious physical injury fast, and suspects can be dangerous and unpredictable.

People usually don’t understand that, Kidd said, but officers must. They’re trained until that vigilance is second nature, as it was for him and the officer playing the mentally ill son: patrolman Jonathan Ortmann.

On patrol later that night, Ortmann and fellow patrolman Brian Eggers started back down Broadway as the gold sedan they’d just searched drove away.

Let them go

The car had smelled of marijuana when they had come upon it parked, Eggers said. The officers detained the two young black men inside when they admitted to having a pair of joints in the car.

But when the search turned up nothing more, the officers confiscated the weed and sent the men home.

They were sober, college kids, Eggers said, and had been cooperative. Still, he said with a smile, they couldn’t believe the officers weren’t going to cite them.

“He’s gonna be looking for that ticket in the mail,” Eggers told Ortmann, shaking his head. “But it won’t come.”

It was nearing midnight, and the officers had pulled shifts on the first weekend of downtown walking patrols. The patrols were to ensure safety but also represented a step toward police chief Wes Blair's vision of a more community-focused approach to policing.

“We obviously want to limit crime down there, but at the same time, it provides us an opportunity to engage with the community,” police spokesman Sgt. Adam Glueck told the Southeast Missourian when the patrols began. “Community relations are something we’re always looking to improve on.”

And it wasn’t a bad gig, Ortmann and Eggers agreed.

Passers-by often thanked them — the drunk ones, especially — and it was a chance for some fresh air.

“We’re stuck in our cars for 12 hours otherwise,” Ortmann said.

The night likely would be prevention, maybe a noise violation or a protective-custody call, and soon enough, at the corner of Main and Broadway, they found a slack-limbed 20-something propped up against a parked car.

He greeted the cops, drunk, and slurred something about his friends being gone.
It was too much to be ignored, Eggers said.

In his state, he was liable to flop into traffic and get himself run over. The officers eased him upright, asking a nearby group whether they knew the man. They didn’t.

He slurred something rude but didn’t resist as the officers cuffed him, fishing a cellphone from his pocket.

“Can you call someone?” Ortmann asked him, unable to unlock the man’s phone. “Can you call your friends?”

The man scoffed. It was no use. Eggers fetched the patrol car, and they loaded him grumbling into the back.

There would be no charge filed, Eggers said — just take him into protective custody and let him sleep it off in the drunk tank.

“The major thing is knowing how to pick your battles,” Ortmann said. “Not in a lazy way, of course, but just, ‘What’s the most productive use of your resources?’”

As Eggers shuttled the man back to the station, Ortmann continued back up Broadway, stopping to watch a thumping college bar. A small crowd hung around the entrance, nursing cellphones and cigarettes.

A sweaty, long-haired fraternity type strode out of the bar, tugging at his collar and stepping over the vomit-stained sidewalk. He stuck out his hand to thank Ortmann for his service.

Ortmann didn’t turn, only reached across his body for a brief and tepid handshake and left it at that.

“So this is what you do?” the man asked Ortmann. “You do this?”

The officer nodded, glancing down the alley.

“Cool,” the guy said. “Cool.”

When the man didn’t leave, Ortmann did, continuing his patrol elsewhere.

The man almost certainly had not been a threat, he explained, but officers are trained to be vigilant.

You don’t let conversation distract you. You don’t shake hands without being ready to defend yourself. You especially don’t let people cozy up on your gun side.

“An officer’s head is always calculating for the worst possible outcomes,” he explained, turning down Spanish Street.

It’s difficult, he said, but if you can’t commit to vigilance, absent-mindedness could kill you.

Of course, he admitted, if you can’t turn it off, exhaustion might, too.

The way he frames it, there seems to be a line between self-preservation and cynicism. What there’s not, though, is much margin for error.

“You have to compartmentalize,” he said, and hobbies help.

Ortmann’s is woodcraft. He even operates a small woodworking business on the side with his wife. She does the designing, and he works the lathe, turning pieces of cedar, walnut, even cocobolo and others into fine writing implements or sometimes butcher blocks and wine racks.

At their booth at the Home and Garden Expo a few weeks later, he would hold demonstrations and talk of his hope to “really get [the business] off the ground.”

Continuing down Spanish, he said a friend of his father’s had inspired him to be a police officer, but sometimes the idea of something a bit quieter holds a certain appeal; maybe a park ranger.

He shrugged the thought away, though. A police officer’s job is important, he said, and doing that job obviously was important to him.

The bars closed before long, spilling people back into the streets. Ortmann and Eggers were left to shoo them back to sidewalks, but it was a safe evening for the officers and the community. A good evening.

Renee Boyd, left, and her girlfriend Rachel Hornback stand at the 1000 block of North Middle Street in Cape Girardeau where Boyd was arrested in January.

Laura Simon ~ lsimon@semissourian.com

A moment of sunshine

The Cape Girardeau County Jail’s upstairs processing room smelled like a used ashtray and looked about as bleak. It was two days after the police citizens training, a Monday.

A trio of bitter-sounding women sat on one side, waiting to be fingerprinted. On the other, Rachel sat with Renee’s mother and grandmother, talking weather and lunch and Flappy Bird, waiting for Renee to walk out the heavy gray door.

She’d served 39 days.

But that morning, public defender Arryn Carson had gotten her bond reduced to $5,000 — of which they paid the bondsman $500 — and had helped Renee formally enter a plea of not guilty.

Her mother and grandmother had driven more than four hours from Tennessee to help her through the arraignment and bond processes.

When they’d arrived with Rachel at a quarter to 3, they were told it would be a 20-minute wait. An hour later, they still were waiting. The door kept groaning open, but it never was her.

Until a brown head of hair with rectangular glasses bobbed past a window.

“Was that her?” Rachel asked. Her hand shot to her heart. “I think that was her.”

The door rolled open, and a female jailer leaned out.

“She says not to look at her legs,” she instructed.

Renee shuffled out in a gray Army T-shirt and gym shorts. Her family hugged her, hairy legs and all. They walked out of the jail happy but not jubilant.

“Oo!” Renee said, shielding her face from the parking-lot sun. “It hurts my eyes.”

The rest of the day was for going to dinner, maybe pizza, and maybe walking around the downtown riverfront to relax a little. Then they’d go home.

Coming next: Both sides tell a judge what happened the night of the arrest.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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