“They don’t mess around. They can’t mess around.”
This week a Clark County grand jury declined to indict two Springfield police officers in a fatal shooting Nov. 16. Officers Paul Herald and Jimmy Cosby responded to a domestic violence call at a home at 535 Rebecca Dr., and found Todd A. Williamson, the son of the homeowner, in the garage. Williamson lunged with a knife at the officers, according to police reports, and Herald shot him once. Williamson died later that day.
Marcum, who spent 33½ years as a Springfield policeman and another 16 as a full- and part-time municipal court bailiff, knows something about the mess a shooting can leave behind.
On Feb. 17, 1981, he was working an extra job in the parking lot of Springfield’s Security National Bank when he was called inside and eventually found himself facing a 6-foot-2-inch, 250 pound man coming at him with a hunting knife.
Marcum emptied his gun into 29-year-old Riccardo Hargrow’s chest and watched him fall dead at his feet.
It’s been nearly 29 years since that morning in the bank, roughly the span of Hargrow’s life. And Marcum hasn’t forgotten.
Although he said he rarely volunteers to discuss the topic, he at first said, “it doesn’t bother me to talk about it.”
But a week after agreeing to an interview, a return phone call found Marcum wading through residual feelings.
“It really brought back some not-so-good memories.”
“Some people said I was a little hard” as a policeman, Marcum said. “I don’t think I put up with much foolishness. I didn't think things were funny like a lot of people did.”
A Marine Corps veteran when he joined the Springfield Police Division Aug. 2, 1959, Marcum said the work took on a different feel after he saw two of his favorite officers shot in 1963 on a single domestic violence call.
“I was on that call,” he said.
But even in the period when it seemed the public had turned against the police and regularly called them pigs, he found the work satisfying.
“I felt I was somebody, not a big to-do, but a person doing things to help people,” he told News-Sun reporter Delvin Harshaw, when he retired from the police division in 1992.
More than that, the job of serving others was an organizing force in his life — one he advises others not to take for granted.
“I always tell people to protect your work,” he said. “If everything else goes to hell for you, you need your job.”
After his 16 years on patrol, Marcum was promoted to sergeant in 1975. Ten years later, he began his last seven and most pleasurable years in investigations.
“I really enjoyed the homicide unit,” he said. “It was just interesting, just trying to figure out the puzzle.”
In 1985, the Exchange Club named Marcum Officer of the Year. Two years later, the city recognized him as a Prime Mover.
One other thing distinguished his career — something he’s neither proud nor ashamed of.
“Some officers talk about going through their whole career without ever pulling their gun,” Marcum said. “I wasn’t that lucky.”
Marcum told stories of two times he fired his weapon.
One was in the 1960s or 70s when a parolee had shoved a parole officer and fled. Marcum gave chase and saw the man through a garage and eased around a corner.
“He was getting ready to jump me as I came around, and I shot him,” he said.
With a wound in his leg, “he went back off to prison,” Marcum said.
The second incident involved a family hostage situation that unfolded about 1 a.m.
When a police paddy wagon drove on to the scene, a man shot at it from a second floor window, and when Marcum arrived, he found the shotgun firing at him.
“I was behind some kind of a vehicle in the yard and he said something to me. I ducked down and he shot one over my head,” the impact smacking into a tree above him.
“I had a .30-30 and I shot off a round at him and he ducked down to the floor,” Marcum said.
“Then one of the sergeants shot teargas shells (that) filled the apartment with teargas,” Marcum said. In a few moments, “he was wanting to give up,” Marcum said.
That wouldn’t be the case on Feb. 17, 1981.
“I’ve come to understand (that people) come to points which cause them to do the things they do,” Marcum also told Harshaw for the retirement story. “It’s usually due to a crisis in their life.”
It isn’t clear whether Riccardo Hargrow was facing such a crisis Feb. 17, 1981, or whether the confrontation was all was a result of a blood alcohol level the toxicology report measured at 0.38 percent — more than four times the level that now can lead to a driving under the influence charge.
Hargrow had separated from his wife, Diane, who had moved with their two daughters to St. Paul, Minn. But those who worked with him were shocked at what happened that day.
They were surprised, in fact, that Hargrow walked off the job that morning.
“It was the first time in 18 months that Riccardo had done anything close to that,” Jack Wilson, maintenance supervisor at Springfield Metropolitan Housing Authority, told Judy Rakowsky, a reporter for The Sun.
Hired through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), Hargrow was reliable enough to have been made leader of a drywall repair team and, according to Wilson, “was quite good” at the work.
Although he showed up for work at 8 a.m. that day, he never made it to the worksite. At 11 a.m., Patrolman Floyd Clark pulled Hargrow over for running a red light at Wittenberg Avenue and Pleasant Street, then stopped him a second time at Mulberry and Center streets, this time taking his keys and advising him he was too drunk to drive. “Incoherent” is the word Clark used in the report.
Hargrow walked downtown to Rich’s Jeweler’s and Pawnbrokers, where friend Louis Strodes soon ushered him out after store employees ordered Hargrow out.
Hargrow then walked the few steps to Security National Bank.
Marcum had had a peaceful morning in the parking lot asking people not to park there if they weren’t on bank business. “One of the bank people came out to my car and said there was a drunk inside the bank causing trouble,” he recalled.
The official report says Marcum entered the bank at 12:17 p.m.
Bank staff sought Marcum’s help after Hargrow jumped over a counter and went up to the second level of the bank. There was never any threat of a robbery, they made clear, and Hargrow did have an account there. He’d just appeared drunk and was going where he wasn’t supposed to.
“When I got off the elevator on the second floor, I went into the bookkeeping department and two of the bank employees were with this man,” Marcum recalled.
“He was a large black male, probably 6-foot-2 or -3, at least 250 pounds.”
Although a “big guy,” Marcum said, he didn’t seem threatening.
“They just told him he couldn’t be in that area. He followed them right out, and we got on the elevator and went to the first floor.”
Marcum said he first tried to stop Hargrow from going to the counter, “and he hollered at me, ‘Get your hands off me.’ ”
Marcum then called police headquarters and asked for a paddy wagon.
After a teller produced something for Hargrow to sign, Marcum said, “He looked at me and said, ‘Here, boy, you sign this.’
“I told him he was going to have to leave.”
Marcum said Hargrow removed a wine bottle from his coat, took a drink, then showed a sheath knife in his coat.
Moments later, said Marcum, “He said ‘One of us is going to die.’ ”
Looking for a paddy wagon out the bank window, Marcum saw none.
His eyes then returned to a 4½-blade in Hargrow’s hand.
“He raised it up, and that’s when I pulled my firearm,” Marcum said.
Pointing a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson at Hargow, he ordered him to put the knife down and leave.
“He started an overhead slashing movement with the knife,” Marcum said, “and I started shooting.”
In what would end as a deadly dance across the bank lobby, Hargrow advanced, waving the knife, and Marcum stepped back, continuing to shoot.
They covered a space of about 40 feet with their bodies separated by about 4 feet the whole time.
“I emptied my firearm, and he was (still) sort of lunging forward, and I hit him on the head with my gun, and he fell down on the bank floor,” Marcum said.
“I then handcuffed him. I didn’t know at that point if he was dead, but I thought he was.”
The Clark County Coroner’s report lists the official time of death as 12:51 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17, at Mercy Medical Center.
But Hargrow was likely dead before he left the bank.
Marcum recalls little blood on the floor of the lobby.
But after bullets found both lungs and passed through Hargrow’s aorta, the largest blood carrying vessel in the body, there was massive internal bleeding.
At the least it contributed to the one liter of blood on each side of the chest cavity found in the autopsy.
Current Clark County Coroner Dr. Richard Marsh said that much blood represents about 40 percent of the entire body’s blood volume, and when filling the chest cavity “is going to collapse the lungs.”
“The pathologist said (one bullet) hit a bone and went down and shredded the liver, and that’s what killed him,” Marcum said.
The official cause of death was exsanguination, bleeding to death.
The other significant finding was the Franklin County Coroner’s toxicology report about Hargrow’s 0.38 percent blood ethanol level, an amount the report described as being “consistent with a severe toxic episode.”
After the shooting, Marcum said his fellow officers were “100 percent behind me.” He’s silent on the subject of what official support he received from the department.
At first given time off without pay, Marcum said he was anxious in his time off, “so I just called back in and told them I’m coming back to work.”
Told he couldn’t patrol the street until the grand jury cleared him of any wrongdoing, he had a desk job for a time.
Because Marcum is white and Hargrow was black, some local activists asked the F.B.I. to consider whether Hargrow’s Civil Rights had been violated.
The coroner’s department still has a hand written note from an F.B.I. special agent requesting a copy of the autopsy. No recommendations or actions came from the investigation.
“I’m not sure how I took it,” Marcum said of the shooting. “I’m sure I was” bothered by it.
But at a time before counseling services were routinely provided, “I just didn’t have anybody to talk to at that time,” he said. At least not someone with his point of view in mind.
An officer who had been involved in a shooting sought him out, Marcum said.
“He had a really hard time after I was involved in that shooting,” Marcum recalled. “It seems like I had to do a lot of talking to him. He about lost it.”
According to a 2006 study by the National Institute of Justice of more than 100 officers involved in shootings, fewer than one in five officers reported “severe” reactions within the three months following a shooting. Most, it said, “reported experiencing no negative reactions.”
“Few officers in the study suffered long-lasting negative effects,” the report added, and their reactions were “influenced by the attitudes and actions of investigators, colleagues, family members, and friends.”
About half reported trouble sleeping and fatigue at some point after a shooting; 24 percent reported they cried. The report found 83 percent reported thinking about the incident over time and 40 percent of the 113 officers who responded reported feelings of anxiety. Inversely, 29 percent reported feeling elated at some point, glad they were still alive, the report states.
What reactions officers had, “diminished markedly as attention and activity around the incident lessened,” the report concluded.
Marcum worked 11 years after the shooting.
Then he took a job as a bailiff at Springfield Municipal Court.
“I knew all the judges, knew all the people at the jail, all the attorneys — it was like old home week,” he said.
He worked as much as he wanted — full time at first, then part time, then as a substitute.
“One day, I called in and said I’m not coming in any more.”
That was May 20, 2009 — 49 years, nine months after he’d joined the police division.
After carrying a gun all that time, Marcum still owns one.
“It’s not usually too far away,” he said. After all those years, “it’s a way of life. You sort of feel undressed” without one, he said.
To him, it’s just a tool of his lifelong trade.
“You train and train and train and hope you don’t have to use it,” he said.
“Lord knows, “I was no hero.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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