And so Maura Walsh slowly bled to death, alone in that dark alley.
Which made it all even more tragic.
This last part really got to me. I could imagine what it must have been like for Maura Walsh – lying there in the dark, terrified, in terrible pain and knowing she was going to die. I understood what she felt in those last minutes of her life because the same thing had happened to me when I’d been attacked in Central Park twelve years earlier. Someone found me in time to save my life, but Maura Walsh hadn’t been so lucky. She’d remained conscious for fifteen minutes to an hour, the ME’s office said. I just hoped it was closer to fifteen minutes and that she didn’t suffer for the whole hour. A massive search of the area afterward turned up nothing. No suspect, no real evidence, no witnesses. The police had questioned known persons who were in the Little Italy neighborhood that night; suspects with a background that fit this kind of crime; ex-cons who might have had some sort of grudge against Maura Walsh – all to no avail.
The prevailing theory these days was that it was a random shooting. She stumbled into the midst of an ongoing crime or just ran into some lunatic looking for someone to kill. That person accosted her, stripped her of her gun, shot her and left her to die.
Back at my desk, I called up a YouTube video of the press conference the police had held the day after Maura died.
Her father, Deputy Police Commissioner Mike Walsh, was front and center at the press conference. He was a tall, silver-haired man who stood ramrod straight in his uniform, staring straight ahead without any visible emotion as everyone talked about his daughter’s death.
I had come across a newspaper article about the Walsh family when I was looking through all the materials on Maura Walsh’s background. It had run in the Tribune some time ago. The headline was: CARRYING ON A FAMILY TRADITION: MAURA WALSH IS TRUE BLUE ALL THE WAY. There was a picture of an athletic-looking, red-haired young woman standing in front of a police station house. Maura Walsh, with her father standing proudly next to her. It had been taken right after she graduated from the Police Academy and received her first NYPD assignment. I’d seen other pictures of her, but in this one she looked so young, so pretty and so full of hopeful ambition for the future.
The article described how the Walsh family’s connections with the New York City Police Department went back for generations. Maura Walsh’s grandfather was a cop, his father before him and so on. Some of them went pretty far up in the NYPD hierarchy too. One had even been a police commissioner.
Maura Walsh had been following in that tradition. She graduated Phi Betta Kappa from Baruch College with a degree in criminal justice and then with honors from the Police Academy. She had an exemplary record during her five years on the street as a police officer and seemed to be on the fast track to becoming a detective soon. She’d been transferred six months earlier to a new post at the 22nd Precinct on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. That was particularly noteworthy because it was the same precinct where her father had once been the commanding officer.
I watched the entire press conference now about Maura Walsh’s murder. Most of it was pretty standard stuff. Updates from police officials about the search for her killer and medical details about her fatal wounds and then more detail about her movements that night prior to the shooting.
At one point, a reporter asked Deputy Commissioner Walsh to describe his emotions at this painful moment. I was surprised Walsh was even there at the press conference, so soon after his own daughter had just died. But I was even more surprised by his reaction.
“I’m terribly proud of my daughter,” he said, still staring straight ahead. “She always wanted to be a police officer. Always wanted to follow in the Walsh family’s tradition of police service. There are no regrets. Maura knew the dangers involved in the job and accepted them. She was a street cop. She was risking her life every moment out there. A street cop is like a foot soldier in war – our first line of defense against the enemy. I’m proud of my daughter. Proud that she died heroically in the line of duty. Proud that she died doing what she loved best. Proud that she was so able to nobly carry on the tradition of police duty in our family. She was a Walsh. And the Walsh family is true blue all the way.”
Wow, I thought to myself, all the woman did was get herself killed.
There was video and stories too from the funeral for Maura Walsh a few days later. It was held at a church on East 67th Street. Hundreds of cops attended in their dress blues. They listened to a procession of eulogies about what a wonderful person she had been – and the accolades, awards and acclaim she’d won as a police officer during her five years on the job. “Maura was an angel,” one speaker said, “a shining angel who left us much too soon.”
In the front of the church was the Walsh family. Maura’s father and mother, her grandfather who’d spent four decades on the police force, assorted cousins and uncles and other relatives who belonged to the NYPD. I watched Walsh Sr. when the camera focused on him during the eulogies for his daughter. Not a tear, no emotion, nothing at all. Just like he’d been at the press conference the first day. Almost as if he was satisfied his daughter had died in the line of duty.
To find out more about Walsh, I googled some old newspaper articles about him.
There were a lot of them.
The New York City newspapers first made him a hero and nicknamed him “Prince of the City” during a big police corruption scandal years ago, when he was an up-and-coming young officer in the NYPD. Prince of the City, of course, was a hit movie at the time, which starred Treat Williams as a hero New York City cop battling crooked cops who were once his friends.
Just like in the movie, there was a real-life split going on in the department back then between the good cops and the bad cops. The cops who did their jobs honestly, fairly and by following all the rules versus the ones who ripped off drug dealers, took payoffs and brutalized people.
Walsh was one of the good guys. There were always a lot more good guys than bad ones on the force – it was the few rotten apples who spoiled everything, he was on record as saying. I knew from my reporting that it wasn’t always easy being a good guy and a lot of cops tried to straddle the line – keeping their own noses clean but looking the other way when they saw corruption and wrongdoing happening around them.
Not him though.
There had always been an unwritten rule in the department known as the Blue Wall of Silence. That’s not an official term, just an expression used to describe cops’ unwillingness to testify against other cops. Never give up your partner, never give up any fellow cop. It was a long and deeply entrenched tradition in the police department, and most cops adhered to it in one form or another.
So, when a corruption scandal exploded – involving confiscated drugs that were being re-sold from the police evidence room back on to the street – no one wanted to talk. No one wanted to testify. No one wanted to cooperate. No one wanted to stand up and do the right thing.
The police commissioner at the time set up a special task force to investigate the matter, and Walsh was one of the top investigators on it, assigned to root out police corruption in the NYPD. Some people told him he was committing career suicide. He said he didn’t care. He said you could never go wrong by doing the right thing.
There was a total of eighteen police officers arrested in the scandal. Another forty-two cops were either suspended, resigned or fired from their jobs before it was over.