Part 2: A Female Officer In Tucson Walked Into A Dark Backyard At 2 AM And Found A Half-Starved Pit Bull Chained To A Tree — Six Months Later That Same Dog Saved A Woman Who Wouldn’t Open Her Door To Anyone Else In Uniform
PART 2
Mercy came into my life on a Tuesday night in November the year before.
I was twenty-two minutes into the third watch, parked in a small alley off South Tenth Avenue and West 22nd Street, eating a gas-station tamale on the hood of my Crown Vic, when I heard the whine.
It was not a dog whine. It was the small specific sound a dog makes when she has stopped expecting anyone to come.
I left the tamale on the hood.
I walked the forty yards down the alley toward the sound.
A small mesquite-wood backyard fence at the back of a derelict-looking single-wide trailer. A chain. A tree. A shape in the dirt that did not, at first, look like a dog at all.
I called for backup.
I called for animal control.
I waited the seventeen minutes for the warrant exception under exigent circumstances, while a sixty-two-pound brindle pit bull lay on her side in the dirt in November at thirty-eight degrees with the chain at her neck pulled so tight she had stopped trying to move.
When I crouched at the fence and reached my hand through, she did not flinch.
She turned her head — her one good amber eye, the other milky and blind from a buckshot that had grazed her four months earlier, by the vet’s later read — she turned her head and she looked at me.
She did not bark.
She did not growl.
She just looked.
I cut the chain at two-eleven a.m. with the bolt cutters in the trunk of my Crown Vic.
I carried her sixty-two pounds, wrapped in the emergency thermal blanket I keep in the cruiser, the four hundred yards back to the patrol car.
She rode in the backseat to the Pima Animal Care Center on North Silverbell Road.
She was admitted at two forty-seven.
She spent ninety-three days in recovery.
I visited her every Tuesday on my day off for ninety-three Tuesdays.
I brought her a small piece of grilled chicken from the diner across the street every visit.
She learned my voice by the third week.
She learned the sound of my bootsteps in the kennel corridor by the fifth.
I signed the adoption paperwork on a Wednesday morning in mid-February.
I drove her home to my small one-bedroom adobe house off East Silverlake Road in the south side of Tucson.
She slept the first night on the bathroom rug.
She slept the second night at the foot of my bed.
She has slept at the foot of my bed every night for four years and three months.
She has, since the morning I brought her home, sat in the backseat of the Crown Vic for the first thirty-eight minutes of every patrol shift I have worked, watching the streetlights of Tucson go by through the rear window with her one good amber eye.
She did not bark at suspects.
She did not lunge at people I detained.
She sat. She watched. She waited.
She has waited her whole life. That is what I came to understand about Mercy in the first three months.
She is, by every account from every brother and sister officer who has met her in nine years of police work, the most patient dog in the city of Tucson, Arizona.
She had been waiting for the Tuesday night in May when Soraya Ojeda would crack open her front door.
She just did not know it yet.
I did not know it yet either.
PART 3
I want to tell you what happened at one fifty-three a.m. on a Tuesday in mid-May.
The dispatch call came in at one forty-six. Welfare check. East Drachman Street. Female caller — Mrs. Esperanza Vega, the neighbor — reporting screaming and crashing sounds from the small stucco rental next door. Third call in four hours. Previous responding units at nine forty p.m. and eleven-fifteen had knocked at the door and received no answer.
I was the third officer to roll on the call that night.
I parked at the curb.
I walked to the front porch alone, with my radio on my shoulder and my hand resting on the grip of my service weapon the way the academy teaches you.
I knocked.
I knocked a second time at one fifty-six.
A third at two-oh-two.
A fourth at two-fourteen.
A fifth at two twenty-six.
Nothing.
I could hear, through the wood of the door, a small soft sound that I recognized from nine years of domestic-violence calls in the south substation district. It was the sound of a woman crying with her hand pressed against her own mouth so that the man inside the house — or her own fear of the man — would not hear her.
I went back to the Crown Vic at two thirty-three.
I sat in the driver’s seat with my radio in my hand for ninety seconds.
Mercy was in the backseat.
Her one good amber eye was on me in the rearview mirror.
I made the decision.
I called dispatch. I told them I was about to go off-protocol. I told them I had my dog with me and that I was going to try one more knock. I told them to mark me as Code 4 — no further units needed — for the next fifteen minutes.
I clipped Mercy’s leash on. I walked her back to the porch.
I knocked one final time.
I said the sentence I have replayed in my head for four years.
I said: “Ma’am. I know you don’t want to open the door for a uniform. Could you maybe just open it for my dog?”
I want to be honest about what happened next.
I did not expect the deadbolt to click.
The deadbolt clicked.
The chain slid back.
The door cracked open four inches.
A small thin Latina woman in her early thirties looked down through the gap at the brindle pit bull on my leash.
Her left eye was swollen. Her lower lip was split fresh. Her dark hair was pulled back into a hasty bun. She was wearing a thin pink cotton tank top and dark sweatpants and bare feet.
She did not look at me.
She looked at Mercy.
Mercy looked back at her with her one good amber eye.
The woman’s mouth opened slightly.
She said, in Spanish, in a voice barely above a whisper: “¿Es tranquila?”
I said: “Sí. Sí, señora. Muy tranquila.”
She opened the door the rest of the way.
I asked, before I stepped over the threshold, “May I come in with her, ma’am?”
She nodded.
She did not invite me in.
She invited Mercy in.
I followed Mercy.
PART 4
I want to tell you what Mercy did in Soraya Ojeda’s small kitchen.
She walked across the worn linoleum floor without my leash being pulled. She walked the eight feet to the small wooden dinette set where Soraya had collapsed back into one of the chairs.
She did not sniff the kitchen. She did not investigate.
She walked directly to Soraya’s chair.
She sat down on the linoleum at Soraya’s bare feet.
She rested her wide square brindle head on Soraya’s left knee.
She closed her one good amber eye.
She did not move.
Soraya looked down at the dog with her hand on her own mouth.
She lowered her hand.
She placed her thin shaking right hand on the top of Mercy’s head, between her ears.
She started to cry.
Not the careful crying she had been doing through her own hand behind the door.
Real crying. The kind a thirty-one-year-old mother of two does when she has been holding it in for fourteen months and the seal has finally broken in front of a sixty-two-pound dog who is not asking her anything.
Mercy did not move.
I sat down quietly in the chair across from Soraya at the small dinette set. I did not speak. I put my radio on the table face-down. I let Mercy do her work.
Soraya cried for about three minutes.
Then she started talking.
She talked for forty-one minutes.
She told me her husband — a thirty-six-year-old construction foreman named Hector — was in the bedroom at the back of the house, asleep. She told me he had been hitting her on and off for four years. She told me he had hit her with a closed fist for the first time in October. She told me he had broken her ribs in February. She told me he had a small handgun he kept in the bedside table on his side of the bed. She told me her two children — a six-year-old boy named Mateo and a four-year-old girl named Lucia — were asleep in the small bedroom across the hall.
She told me she had been about to leave him, finally, fourteen months ago, when she had found out she was pregnant with their third child.
The pregnancy had not held.
She had not, in the fourteen months since, been able to find the right moment to leave again.
She had her hand on Mercy’s head the entire forty-one minutes.
Mercy did not move once.
At three twenty-seven a.m., I called for backup.
Three additional units arrived at three thirty-one.
Hector Ojeda was taken into custody from the back bedroom at three forty-six a.m. without incident. The small handgun in the bedside table was secured. The two children were placed with Soraya’s mother in Drexel Heights at four-fifteen a.m. Soraya was escorted to the Tucson Family Advocacy Center on East Ajo Way at four forty-one for a forensic medical exam and an emergency protective order intake.
She walked out of that house with Mercy at her right knee the entire way.
She has not, in the four years and three months since, gone back to that house.
PART 5
I want to back up to the buckshot.
I told you in the second part that the veterinary tech at the Pima Animal Care Center pulled sixteen embedded pellets out of Mercy’s hindquarters and her shoulder when I first brought her in.
Two of those pellets — the two she missed on the first surgery, that the senior veterinary surgeon Dr. Annika Sorenson would later remove in a second procedure on day forty-one of Mercy’s recovery — those two pellets had been lodged in Mercy’s right cheek, just under the skin, in a pattern Dr. Sorenson would describe to me at the recovery cage that February morning as “consistent with the dog having been shot from approximately eight feet away, by someone who was aiming at her face.”
The crescent-moon-shaped scar on Mercy’s muzzle — the one I described to you in the teaser — that scar is the scar the second-round buckshot left when it grazed the bridge of her nose and took the vision out of her right eye on its way past her face.
Mercy had been shot in the face by the man who chained her to a tree on South Tenth Avenue.
She had survived.
She had also — and this is the thing I have spent four years thinking about — she had stopped being afraid of the kind of fear that lives inside a small house.
She had been trained by surviving to walk into rooms full of frightened people and sit down at their feet without asking them to explain why they were afraid.
She knew the smell of it.
She knew it from her own skin.
That is what Soraya Ojeda’s hand was touching, in the small kitchen on East Drachman Street at two forty-three a.m. on a Tuesday in May.
Soraya’s hand was not on a sixty-two-pound brindle pit bull’s head.
Soraya’s hand was on the same fear that had been on her own skin for four years.
I did not understand any of that at two forty-three a.m. on a Tuesday in May.
I understood it on a Wednesday morning in June, three weeks later, when I was filling out the formal incident report at the south substation and I went back through the body-cam footage from that night, and I saw — at one minute fourteen seconds into the kitchen footage — Mercy’s tail, which had been still the entire time, flick once against the linoleum.
The flick happened at the exact moment Soraya took her hand off her own mouth and put it on Mercy’s head.
Mercy had been waiting for the hand.
She had been waiting because she had been the hand once, too.
PART 6
The Tucson Police Department chief Frank Maldonado signed a single-page memo on the morning of June 14th of that year.
The memo authorized Officer Mariana Diaz to bring her certified emotional-support canine Mercy on patrol shifts indefinitely, with full department backing, for the express purpose of assisting in domestic-violence response calls in the south substation district.
I clipped a small brass tag onto Mercy’s collar that same morning at the engraver’s shop off South Park Avenue.
The tag is the size of a quarter. It has three lines engraved on it in clean serif lettering.
The first line says: OFFICER MERCY.
The second line says: TUCSON PD K-9.
The third line says: I OPEN DOORS.
She has worn the tag for four years.
She has walked through the front doors of two hundred and eleven domestic-violence calls in the city of Tucson since the morning the memo was signed.
She is, by every measure the south substation has, the single most effective tool in the department’s domestic-violence response toolbox.
She is also nine years old now.
She sleeps a little more than she used to.
She still rides in the backseat of the Crown Vic for the first thirty-eight minutes of every shift, watching the streetlights of Tucson go by through the rear window with her one good amber eye.
She still walks across linoleum floors and sits at women’s feet and closes her eye and does not move until the hand finds the top of her head.
She has not, in four years, missed a single shift.
PART 7
Soraya Ojeda is thirty-five now.
She is a certified medical assistant at El Rio Community Health Center on East Speedway. Her son Mateo is ten. Her daughter Lucia is eight.
She has not, in four years, missed a single one of the annual community appreciation barbecues my partner Officer Reyes and I throw at Reid Park on the second Saturday in May.
She brings tamales.
She brings her kids.
She always sits in the lawn chair closest to Mercy.
She always puts her right hand on Mercy’s head, between her ears.
Mercy always closes her one good amber eye.
Some doors don’t open for the uniform.
Some open for the dog.
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