I opened my door to see two police officers. My mind scoured all of it’s dark recesses to try and figure out what they could possibly be here for, but I came up with nothing. My kids were both too young to really get in to the kind of trouble that required dispatching police and my life definitely wasn’t exciting enough to warrant it. I stood there looking at them, waiting to see what was going to happen.
“Mr. Welsh? Is your son here?”
“They both are, which one are you looking for and what’s going on?”
The taller one with the mustache put his hand on the butt of his gun and leaned in, “Do you mind if we come in sir?”
I should have been angry that he had his hand on his gun while he was talking to me, after all what had I done? I should have been angry, but all that was running through my head was a thought process of trying to figure out why most of the mustache sporting population in the United States seemed to be law enforcement or “really bad stereotypes in gay biker bars on movies. Was there some sort of connection between the two? Before I got too far down this train of thought, I dragged myself back into the moment and said, “Certainly, come on in. Can I ask what this is about?”
Before they answered, the short one, officer Dunlop, closed the door behind them. McSweeny, Mr. Mustache, answered the question, “Sir, we are investigating the murder of Hector Jones, he’s a janitor a your son’s school. We have security footage that looks like your first grader, one…” he paused as he pulled out a small piece of paper from his front pocket and read it aloud, “Sawyer Welsh. We’d like to talk to him to make sure that we understand what we are seeing in the video.”
Ok, I knew they were joking now. There was no possible way that my sweet, funny six-year old had anything to do with some man’s murder. “Ok guys, you had me for a second, but the whole murder thing put it over the top. You should have chosen some crime that was a little more believable. Who put you up to this? Your uniforms look pretty authentic, especially the mustache. Did you grow it just to play the part?”
“Sir, this is no joke. We are here because we believe that your son killed Hector Jones. We need to see him right now.”
“Fine, I’ll go along with your little ruse and follow it to the end, but you guys need to learn when to let the joke drop.” I paused for a second and yelled up the stairs, “Sawyer! Come down here please!”
The sound of a thundering herd of elephants filled the house as Sawyer dropped whatever he was doing and ran as fast as he could downstairs. He ran right up to me and said, “Daddy, I was building an Autobot with my Legos, wanna come see him?”
“Not right now, these…gentlemen,” I was careful to leave out the term officers,”need to talk to you.”
“Ok,” he said and the turned to them,”do you want to see my hamster? His name is Pinechip and I got him for my birthday!”
McSweeny squatted down so that he was at eye level with my son, “Sawyer, do you remember what you did today after school was dismissed?”
“Yeah, I walked home and met mommy.”
“But what did you do before that?”
“Nothing, I was at school!”
McSweeny pulled a smartphone out from his jacket pocket and turned it to show to Sawyer. From over his shoulder, I could see that a video was playing. It was black and white, but clear enough to see that there was a man pushing a trash can in one of the school halls. The “cop” looked at Sawyer as he watched and asked,”Do you know who that is?”
“That’s the janitor!” Sawyer said almost as if the question were a joke.
As another person appeared on screen, he asked, ” and who’s that?”
“Me?”
“That’s right, that is you.”
The janitor said something to Sawyer, you could hear him talking, but not well enough to understand what was being said. Sawyer said something back on the video and a few seconds later, the janitor turned on his radio to some heavy metal song. I didn’t see the rest of the video, because at that instant Sawyer went berserk and launched himself at McSweeny. His fingernails clawed into his face And just as quickly Dunlop grabbed his arms and restrained him.
“GEEZ!” McSweeny screamed and grabbed his cheek in pain.
Now I was panicked, “What the hell? What the hell was that?”
Sawyer was still uncontrollable. McSweeny picked up his phone from the ground and stopped the video. As soon as it stopped, Sawyer returned to his normal self, “Sometimes Pinechip climbs up the wall to his cage. It is SO funny!”
They took him away. After a long time of evaluations from psychologists and a variety of other doctors, it was determined that music by Slayer triggered his murderous rampage. Hector Jones was completely caught off guard as Sawyer beat him repeatedly with the stereo playing the offending music. It wasn’t until the stereo stopped working that he went back to normal and came home.
This was the nightmare that I had the other day. Looking back, it’s actually kind of funny seeing as Sawyer is a happy 40 lb child and I don’t really see him as being able to take down an adult (or being triggered by Slayer).