BENCHED

One

never knows

where a seat

on the bench

will take you

Seeking out a landing spot on a warm summer evening overlooking the bay on Coronado, I spotted an available seat next to an older gentleman preoccupied with a phone call.  As I was making my approach, we made eye-contact, smiled, and I proceeded to land safely.

He quickly concluded the call and immediately informed me that he had been touching base with a sister who lived in New Orleans, who was being pounded by the rain of Hurricane Isaac, but otherwise, was safely weathering the storm.  I asked him if he had lived there, which he had, and for 18 years.  Inquiring about his line of work is where we took off.

Doug had spent his entire life in law-enforcement forensics, going back into the mid-50’s, long before the popularity of CSI and NCIS.  His career had begun with the NCIS, on a naval airbase in the middle of Texas in the 50’s, investigating sabotage by our own guys on training-planes.  They had lost about six planes that had mysteriously lost power and crashed, fortunately, without any loss of life.  He was able to track down, through maintenance records, the same two mechanics that had worked on all the planes involved, but was never able to produce enough proof for conviction.  As soon as the men were reassigned, the crashes stopped.  That was proof enough for him.

He received additional training from the FBI, and with dental forensics at LSU. This lead him to work for the City of New Orleans for many years, and his talents saw him get farmed out to many of the local parishes and small towns in the surrounding areas that lacked similar resources.  He discussed some of his more bizarre cases, describing many gruesome details which will be omitted from this account.  All in all, he loved ‘working the mystery’, despite the context.

After a long and storied career, he took up bench-warming in Coronado.

Who knew that an open seat next to Doug would secure front-row seats inside the Crime Scene tape.