Am I wrong for what I did to a grown man at the county fair last Saturday? Because half the people I know think I’m a hero and the other half think I should lose my badge.
I’m 42, been a sheriff’s deputy in Hardin County for nineteen years. I was off-duty, out of uniform, wearing my Road Kings MC vest because it was our club’s annual ride to the fair. My wife Denise and our two boys were supposed to meet me at the gate. I was early, killing time near the livestock barns, eating a funnel cake.
That’s when I heard it.
A kid – couldn’t have been older than eight or nine – was standing by the rabbit cages with a corndog he hadn’t touched. He had leg braces. The kind with the metal bars that run from the ankle to below the knee. He was just standing there looking at the rabbits.
Three boys, maybe twelve or thirteen, were behind him. One of them kicked the back of his brace and the kid stumbled forward into the cage. The other two laughed. The kid caught himself, turned around, and didn’t say a word. His chin was shaking.
I started walking over.
The tallest one grabbed the kid’s corndog out of his hand and said, “What are you gonna do, run after me?” and they all cracked up again.
I was about ten feet away when a man – big guy, Carhartt jacket, sunburned neck – walked up behind the three boys. I figured it was a parent about to handle it. Thank God.
He looked at the kid with the braces. Then he looked at the three boys. Then he said to his son, the tall one: “He’s not gonna do shit, Brody. Come on, let’s go see the tractors.”
And he WALKED AWAY. With all three of them. Like nothing happened.
The kid with the braces was just standing there. Alone. A red mark on his forehead from where he hit the cage.
Something in my chest caught fire.
I found them at the tractor pull fifteen minutes later. I walked straight up to the father. I’m six-three, 240, full beard, leather vest with patches. I got close enough that he had to look up at me.
I said, “Your boy owes that kid an apology.”
He looked at my vest, looked at my arms, and his whole face changed. He said, “Mind your own goddamn business.”
I said, “I’m making it my business.”
He puffed up. Told me if I didn’t back off he was calling the cops. His wife pulled out her phone.
I smiled.
I reached into my back pocket, pulled out my badge, and said –
Go Ahead and Call Them
“Good idea. Tell them Deputy Ron Haskell sent you.”
I held it open long enough for him to read it. Long enough for his wife to see it too. She stopped dialing.
His face did something interesting. The red that had been climbing up his neck since I walked over went a different direction. Drained, kind of. He looked at the badge, looked at me, looked at the badge again.
“You’re a cop,” he said.
“Sheriff’s deputy. Nineteen years. And your boy put his hands on a disabled kid and stole his food, and you told him that was fine. So. We’re gonna go back to the rabbit cages, and Brody’s gonna find that kid, and he’s gonna apologize. Or we’re going to have a much longer conversation.”
Brody, to his credit, looked like he wanted to disappear into the dirt.
The father’s jaw was working. He was doing the math. I could see it. He was a big guy, probably thought he was the biggest guy in most rooms. Today he wasn’t. And the vest wasn’t helping him any, because he didn’t know what the vest meant, and that uncertainty was doing more work than my badge was.
“This is harassment,” he said. Not loud anymore. More like he was testing whether the word would do anything.
“You want to go that route, we can. I’ll call my sergeant right now. We’ll get a report going. Assault on a minor. Theft. Your boy’s what, twelve? Thirteen? That’s old enough for juvie processing in this county, depending on the duty officer’s mood.” All of that was technically true. None of it was likely. But he didn’t know that.
His wife put her hand on his arm. She said his name. Gary.
Gary.
He looked at her. She gave him the look that wives give husbands when they’re about to make something so much worse. Twenty years of marriage in one look. Maybe more.
The Walk Back
Gary told Brody to come on.
The other two boys – his friends, apparently, not his brothers – got left with Gary’s wife, who looked like she’d done something similar to what I did about ten seconds after they walked away from the rabbit cages. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
It was a long walk. The livestock barns were on the far end of the fairgrounds from the tractor pull. We went single file through the crowd, me behind Gary, Gary behind Brody, nobody talking. A couple people looked at us. A woman with a stroller moved out of the way and I don’t think it was because of Gary.
I was still holding the funnel cake. I’d forgotten I had it. I threw it in a trash barrel outside the goat pen.
The kid was still there.
I don’t know why I expected him to be gone. He had nowhere to go, I guess. He was sitting on a hay bale about fifteen feet from the rabbit cages, and he had a new corndog, so somebody had bought him one. He was eating it and watching a rooster in a cage across the aisle like the rooster was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
He heard us coming. He turned around and his whole face went careful. The way a kid’s face goes careful when they’ve learned that adults showing up doesn’t automatically mean things are about to get better.
I hung back.
Brody stood in front of him. Gary was standing behind Brody with his arms crossed, jaw tight, looking at a point somewhere above the kid’s head.
Brody said, “I’m sorry I kicked your thing and took your food.”
It wasn’t poetry. His voice cracked on the word sorry. He was thirteen years old and humiliated and I’m not going to pretend I didn’t feel a small, ugly flicker of satisfaction about that.
The kid looked at Brody for a long moment. Then he looked at me. Then back at Brody.
He said, “Okay.”
Just that. Okay.
What Gary Said
Brody walked back to his dad. Gary put a hand on his shoulder and steered him away without looking at me.
He got about six feet before he stopped.
He turned around. His voice was low, the crowd noise swallowing most of it.
“You didn’t have to do it like that,” he said. “In front of everybody.”
I looked at him. “You walked away.”
He didn’t have anything for that. He turned back around and they were gone into the crowd, and that was the last I saw of them.
I stood there for a second. The kid on the hay bale had gone back to watching the rooster.
I didn’t introduce myself. Didn’t make a whole thing out of it. I walked over and stood next to the hay bale and watched the rooster too. It was an angry-looking bird. Brown and black with a red comb, strutting around its cage like it owned the whole barn.
“He does that all day,” the kid said. “I’ve been watching him.”
“Looks like a full-time job,” I said.
The kid almost smiled.
His mom found us about four minutes later. She had a funnel cake and a look on her face like she’d been moving through this fair at a controlled panic for the last twenty minutes. She saw the red mark on his forehead and her voice went up. He told her he bumped into a cage. He didn’t look at me when he said it.
She thanked me anyway, because she could tell something had happened and I was somehow involved. I told her it was nothing. She looked like she didn’t believe me but was too tired to push it.
I found Denise and the boys at the gate ten minutes after that.
What Denise Said
She knew something was up immediately. Nineteen years of marriage. She looked at my face and said, “What happened?”
I told her while we walked to the midway. All of it. She listened without interrupting, which she only does when she’s really listening.
When I finished she was quiet for about half a block.
Then she said, “Did you have to pull the badge?”
And there it is. That’s the question. That’s why half my department thinks I overstepped.
The argument against is straightforward. I was off-duty. In a biker vest. Using my badge in a personal confrontation, even to de-escalate, even without making an arrest or threatening one, is a gray area. My sergeant, Dale Pruitt, called it “a judgment call he personally would not have made.” Another deputy told me I got lucky the guy didn’t file a complaint. My buddy Terry Mack, who’s been on the force longer than me, said I was out of pocket and I knew it.
The argument for is also straightforward.
A father watched his kid assault and rob a disabled child and said, effectively, good. Then he walked away. The badge got him back to that hay bale. Brody apologized. That’s the whole story.
What I Keep Coming Back To
Here’s what I can’t shake.
That kid’s chin was shaking. He wasn’t crying. He was trying so hard not to cry that his whole jaw was vibrating with the effort of it. Eight years old, or nine, and he’d already learned that crying in public when somebody hurts you makes everything worse.
He learned that somewhere. From experience.
And when Brody stood in front of him and said sorry, the kid said okay, and he meant it. No drama. No satisfaction. Just okay, like he’d been waiting for someone to close the loop and now they had and he could go back to watching the rooster.
I think about that a lot. That okay.
I’ve been doing this job for nineteen years. I’ve talked people down from ledges, I’ve worked accidents where I had to keep my hands busy so I didn’t think about what was under them, I’ve told families things that broke them in front of me. I’ve done the hard parts of this job without flinching, mostly.
A kid saying okay to a half-assed apology at a county fair is not the hardest thing I’ve seen.
But it’s in my head this week in a way some of those other things aren’t.
Maybe because the badge was the right call and the wrong call at the same time. Maybe because Gary wasn’t wrong that I embarrassed his kid in front of people, and I’m not sure Brody learns the right lesson from being marched back by a large man in a biker vest rather than by his own father’s conscience. Maybe because the father who should have handled it will never handle it, and I can’t fix that, and I know it.
Or maybe it’s just the okay.
Said like he was surprised anyone bothered. Said like it was more than he expected.
I keep thinking he shouldn’t have expected so little.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on. Someone you know has seen this exact moment play out and did nothing. Maybe they need to read it.
If you’re still in the mood for more stories about lines being crossed for the right reasons, check out what happened when I Let Fifteen Bikers Show Up for a Nine-Year-Old Boy or when My Foster Child Has to Testify in 19 Days. And you definitely won’t want to miss when The Judge Looked at Me Over Her Glasses and Said Something I Wasn’t Ready For.
