Requiem for Volunteer Cops' Dreams

The sun had been down for more than an hour, but the air was thick with the warm humidity and pollution of an August night in Manhattan. As steam came up from the sidewalks, David Freed cruised the Central Park roadway in his blue Plymouth Fury, yielding for joggers determined enough to ignore the heat.

Life was good for Freed. A week before turning 21, he had a beautiful fiancee who occupied the passenger seat of his car. He was about to start attending community college part-time, and, in a few days, he would receive a letter at his parents' house informing him of his new job.

It was 9:40 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1976, when Freed's idle drive was interrupted as the radio announced something unexpected. A man was running naked through Central Park, and he was only a couple of blocks away. David Freed honked at a bicyclist and stepped on the gas.

But Freed was no thrill-seeker trying to snap a candid picture of a wacko.

Auxiliary police officer David Freed and his girlfriend, who also happened to be his police partner, were on duty when the deranged, naked man snuck up to their patrol car. Before they could get out to apprehend him, the man opened the back door of the car, pulled out the officers' nightsticks, and proceeded to savagely beat the then-unarmed officers. Freed died the next day, becoming the first auxiliary officer in the history of the city to die in the line of duty. One thousand cops lined the entrance of his funeral chapel in a crowd six men deep.

The NYPD is a medium-sized army of 38,000, whose arsenal runs the gamut from golf carts and nightsticks to assault helicopters, spies in foreign countries, and even the Goodyear blimp. Fighting crime in America's largest city, the department also employs slightly less than 5,000 unpaid volunteers who receive a uniform, badge, and wooden nightstick-but no gun-to patrol the streets.

The members of this beefed-up community watch force rarely die in the line of duty, but because they are lightly armed, they make easy targets.

Last week, more than 30 years since the city's first volunteer cop was killed in the line of duty, Auxiliary Police Officer Eugene Marshalik took cover when he realized the man he and his partner had been pursuing had a gun.

Marshalik, a sophomore at New York University, had signed up to patrol the streets of the Village in his second semester of college. With dreams of becoming a prosecutor, he become an auxiliary mainly to increase his knowledge of law enforcement. His partner, 28-year-old Nicholas Pekearo, an aspiring novelist, had joined to get a first-hand, closer look at whatever remains of New York's mean streets in order to accumulate creative fodder.

Those dreams came to an end last Wednesday. After pursuing a man who had shot up a nearby pizza parlor, slaying a cook with 15 rounds, the officers tried running away when the suspect pulled out a semi-automatic Luger. Shooting Pekearo six times at close range, the killer then crossed the street, stood over the crouching Marshalik, and snuffed his life out with a single bullet to the back of the head.

There are few words that befit the grief of a tragedy like the violent death of an auxiliary police officer, but perhaps "unnatural" fits the bill. It is unnatural for a city to bury one of its finest and unnatural for a volunteer to unexpectedly lose his life for a cause. Perhaps most tragically, it is unnatural for a mother to have to bury her child.

Rest in peace, officers.