I (38M) have been with the department for fourteen years, and I’ve spent the last six of them as the liaison officer for St. Dominic’s parish on the east side of Macon. My wife Denise grew up in that church. My kids go to Sunday school there. If something happens to that congregation, it happens to my family.
Three months ago, a man named Dale Pruitt knocked on the side door of the basement during our Tuesday food pantry shift. Big guy, maybe fifty-five, wearing a vest with a Copperhead MC patch. He had two other men with him, both in their forties, both built the same way – the kind of men who look like they’ve spent a long time being ready for something.
I had my hand on my radio before he even said a word.
He told me they weren’t there for trouble. He said they’d been tracking a man named Terrence Howell through four counties, and that Howell had been using the Wednesday night AA meetings at St. Dominic’s to get access to kids in the neighborhood. He slid a folder across the folding table. Printed-out screenshots. Dates. Addresses.
I told him I was going to need all of this through official channels.
He said, “Officer, we tried official channels in Bibb County six months ago and a little girl named Cora waited four more months for someone to help her.”
My stomach dropped.
I knew the Cora case. Everyone in the department knew the Cora case.
I told Dale I needed twenty-four hours. He gave me twelve. What I found in that half a day – cross-referencing the names in his folder against case files I had access to – was enough to make me sick to my stomach and keep me up until four in the morning.
So I made a call I’m still not sure was right.
I told Dale his group could use the basement on Thursday nights. I set up the parameters myself – no weapons inside the building, I would be present, and they would share everything with me in real time. Father Mendez knew only that we were running a “community outreach coordination.” I didn’t tell Denise. I didn’t tell my captain.
For six weeks it worked. They built a full picture of Howell’s pattern, his contacts, three other men operating the same way in the same network.
Last Thursday, we were forty-eight hours from having everything we needed to hand to the state attorney’s office with a bow on it.
That’s when my captain walked down those basement stairs.
Someone had called it in – I still don’t know who – and he stood at the bottom of the steps and looked at me, and then at Dale, and then at the wall of photographs and documents we had pinned up behind the folding tables.
He looked at me for a long time.
Then he said, “Kevin. Step outside with me right now. And before you say a single word – “
What He Said Before I Could Say Anything
He said, “Don’t tell me you can explain it. I can see what it is.”
We were standing in the alley behind the church, next to the dumpsters. January in Macon isn’t brutal but it was cold enough that I could see his breath. He had his arms crossed. Not the posture of a man who’s about to yell. Worse. The posture of a man doing the math.
Captain Roland Fitch has been with the department twenty-six years. He’s got a face like a catcher’s mitt – worn in, not ugly, just used. He ran the Cora case himself, at least the first three weeks of it, before it got handed up the chain and stalled. I knew that when I made my decision six weeks ago. I told myself it meant he’d understand.
Standing in that alley, I wasn’t so sure.
He said, “How long.”
I said, “Six weeks.”
He said, “Anyone else from the department?”
“No.”
“Father Mendez?”
“He knows they’re meeting here. He doesn’t know why.”
Fitch looked at the dumpster for a while. A car went by on the street. Then he said, “You know what this does to a prosecution if it goes sideways. You know what a defense attorney does with a cop who ran an unofficial operation out of a church basement with a motorcycle club.”
I said I knew.
“Do you?”
I said, “Yeah. I do. I thought about it every Thursday night for six weeks.”
He looked at me then. Really looked.
“Show me what you’ve got,” he said.
The Wall
Dale didn’t flinch when we came back in. He’d been in situations where authority walked through the door before. He just stood to the side and let me walk Fitch through it.
The wall was three folding tables pushed together under a corkboard we’d borrowed from the Sunday school room. There were still crayon drawings of Noah’s ark on the edges of it, which felt wrong every time I looked up, but we’d never taken them down.
Terrence Howell, fifty-one, worked maintenance for a property management company that handled six apartment complexes on the east side. That was the access point. He’d been doing it for eleven years. The AA meetings at St. Dominic’s were newer, maybe two years, and that’s where he’d started building relationships with women who had kids. Single mothers in recovery. Women who needed someone to watch a child for an hour while they talked to their sponsor. Women who didn’t have the bandwidth to be suspicious.
Dale’s guys had three names beyond Howell. One was a man called Gary Speck who drove a school bus in Warner Robins. One was a man named Dennis Fulmer who ran a youth soccer league in a suburb I won’t name here. The third one I’m not going to put in this post because the case is still open.
Fitch stood at that wall for maybe twelve minutes. Didn’t say anything. His jaw was doing something tight and controlled.
Dale said, from the corner, “We’ve got two witnesses who’ll talk. They’ll talk to law enforcement. They wouldn’t before because of what happened with Cora – the way that got handled, the way it came out in the news. They didn’t trust the process. They trust us.”
Fitch turned around and looked at Dale the way cops look at people they’re still deciding about.
“And why do they trust you?” he said.
Dale said, “Because we found them first. And we didn’t make them feel like evidence.”
What Fitch Did Next
He sat down in one of the folding chairs. The plastic kind, the ones that have been in church basements since 1987. He put his elbows on his knees and he looked at the floor for a while.
I stood there. Dale stood there. One of Dale’s guys, a quiet man named Pete who I’d learned was a former Army medic, stood near the door like he’d been standing near doors his whole life.
Fitch said, “Kevin, I’m going to need you to step out for a minute.”
I stepped out.
I stood in the hallway between the basement and the stairwell. There’s a bulletin board out there with the parish calendar on it. February’s fish fry. The Lenten schedule. A sign-up sheet for the food pantry with Denise’s handwriting at the top because she’d organized it this year.
I thought about what I’d told her six weeks ago when I started coming home late on Thursdays. I’d said it was a community meeting. She’d said, “What kind of community meeting?” and I’d said, “The boring kind,” and she’d laughed and gone back to her book.
I’d stood in our kitchen and lied to my wife.
About fifteen minutes passed. Then Fitch opened the door and told me to come back in.
The Deal
He didn’t call it a deal. He called it a “structured handoff with documentation of chain of custody for all materials.” But it was a deal.
Dale’s group would turn over everything. Every photograph, every screenshot, every piece of paper on that wall. They’d submit to interviews with Fitch and one detective of Fitch’s choosing – no one else in the department yet. The two witnesses would be contacted through Dale and brought in on their own terms, meaning Fitch agreed to let Dale’s people be present when they first spoke to investigators.
In exchange, Fitch would not document what had happened in this basement for the last six weeks any more than he had to. He was vague about what that meant exactly. I didn’t push it.
Before we shook hands, Fitch looked at Dale and said, “I need to know your interest in this. Men like you don’t do things like this for free.”
Dale said, “One of the women Howell targeted. Her son rides with us now. He’s twenty-two. He was nine when it started.”
Fitch nodded once.
That was it. No other questions about the Copperheads. No questions about what else they did or didn’t do or what their record looked like county by county. He just nodded and that chapter closed.
What Happened to Me
Fitch pulled me aside before he left. We stood near the stairs.
He said, “I’m going to have to write something up. I don’t know yet what shape it takes. You may be looking at a suspension. You may be looking at worse, depending on how the department decides to handle the optics if this goes to trial.”
I said I understood.
He said, “You should have called me. Six weeks ago, you should have picked up the phone.”
I said, “I didn’t know if you’d shut it down.”
He said, “I might have.”
Neither of us said anything for a second.
Then he said, “You’ve got kids at this church.”
“Yeah.”
“Howell knew that?”
“His pattern suggests he knew which families had kids in the AA network or adjacent to it. Father Mendez sometimes mentions families in his announcements. It’s a small congregation.”
Fitch looked at the stairs. “All right,” he said. And he went up them.
Where It Stands Now
That was four days ago.
Howell was picked up Tuesday morning. Gary Speck the bus driver was picked up the same day. Dennis Fulmer turned himself in through a lawyer Wednesday afternoon. The third name I’m not writing here – that one’s still moving.
I’m on administrative leave. Paid, for now. I’m sitting in my house writing this while Denise is at work and the kids are at school.
She knows now. I told her Sunday night. I sat at the kitchen table and I told her everything from Dale knocking on the door to Fitch walking down the stairs. She listened the whole way through without interrupting, which is not her default setting. When I finished she was quiet for a while and then she said, “You lied to me for six weeks.”
I said, “Yes.”
She said, “About something happening in my church.”
I said, “Yes.”
She got up and refilled her coffee. She stood at the counter with her back to me. Then she said, “Were you scared the whole time?”
I said I was.
She said, “Good. You should have been.”
She hasn’t asked me if I’d do it again. I think she already knows the answer, and I think she hasn’t decided yet how she feels about that answer.
I don’t know what the department does with me. I don’t know if “administrative leave” becomes something I can’t come back from. I’ve got fourteen years in. I’ve got a mortgage and two kids who need orthodontia and a wife who is currently somewhere between furious and something I don’t have a word for.
What I know is that Terrence Howell is in a cell. Gary Speck is in a cell. The Wednesday night AA meeting at St. Dominic’s is still running, and the people who go to it are safe, and my kids are still in Sunday school in that building.
I don’t know if that makes what I did right.
But I know what it makes it.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
If you’re still in the mood for more tales of unexpected turns and moral quandaries, you might enjoy reading about My Captain Has No Idea What I’ve Been Letting Happen on Clement Street, or perhaps a story about family surprises in My Dad Vanished When I Was Fifteen. He Showed Up Saturday With a Coffee.. And for another dose of eye-opening revelations, check out My Seven-Year-Old Saw What I Refused to See. Then My Mom Told Me Why.
