Thursday is one of the busiest nights for the Charlottesville police. Typically, a police officer will receive a consistent flow of calls. Some are minor fender benders and others are more serious domestic matters.
On this particular Thursday, one case consumes the night.
At 8:34 p.m., accelerating at 80 mph down the 5th Street Extension in a Chevy Impala with sirens on full alert, the police radio bleeps in to update Officer Stephen Knick, a 24-year-old, ex-Marine from Virginia Beach.
"Disorder with a knife. Twelve-year-old girl tried to stab her stepfather," the voice on the radio says.
In three minutes, the car arrives at Stone Henge, a middle-to-working class neighborhood southeast of Charlottesville. Two other patrol cars and a paddy wagon, the vehicle used for restraining suspects, already are parked on the premises.
The officers encounter a dispute between two opposing sides - a stepfather and his biological daughter and a stepmother and her biological daughter.
Two officers restrain the upset stepfather, a husky, black man over 30 years old, outside the doorsteps. A teenage girl runs out of the door crying and screaming with a ceramic candle holder flailing in her hands.
"Don't you touch her!" the man orders the officers.
Three police officers restrain the young girl who has a slight cut on her forehead.
The girl with the laceration is the man's biological daughter. The stepdaughter who waved the knife is inside. After two officers, including Knick, enter the house for questions, the man's stepdaughter waves goodbye as he is taken to the paddy wagon. The mother shuts the door.
At the same time, the father screams to the neighbors, who all have crowded around the streets from different directions, "Call my mother!" But the officers continue to pull him away.
One white neighbor, about seven or eight years old, watches from his bike, and a younger black child peers through the police lights to see the remnants of the drama that just unfolded. One middle-aged black woman, who lives nearby, shakes her head and declares, "I've gotta go get me a cigarette."
While inside the paddy wagon, the father continues his protests.
"Man, let me out of here. Somebody let me out of here."
Soon, the cries from the paddy wagon begin to lose their rage and desperation rings clearer.
"I can't breathe. Please let me out of here," the voice says. Through the diamond-shaped metal grids of the paddy wagon's doors, two eyes peer in the darkness.
"Let me out of here, man," he repeats.
The restrained daughter sits on the ground in front of the police car with her arms locked in cuffs behind her. Two officers begin to question her about what happened earlier in the evening.
Through the house's windows, two other officers question the man's wife and his stepdaughter. The two parties are divided on different ground.
Once the father realizes that officers are questioning his daughter outside the car, he begins his protest again.
"Officer, please give me my daughter," he asks.
His voice changes tone. He is no longer polite.
"I'm not allowing you to touch her. Don't answer any of their questions. Do not answer anything. I am your father. You are not allowed to answer any questions!" he instructs.
Twenty minutes have passed. Six cops roam the premises. An ambulance arrives to bandage the daughter's cut.
"No, no, she is not to go on the rescue squad," the father screams.
Concerned and curious neighbors continue to flock to the scene. An aunt arrives to see the father. Along with the confusion, the police lights, the cars and the darkness, she screams and cries, asking what has happened, wanting to know the condition of her family.
Outbursts from the father inside the paddy wagon resume as the confusion erupts.
"Man, get a black cop. I don't want all of these white people here," says the father.
A fed-up neighbor comes to the wagon's door and interjects, "Shut up or I'm gonna beat you."
Whispers grow louder as they see Sgt. Greg Davis retrieve a tazor gun from the trunk of his car. He holds the gun by his side and gives it a few zaps. The neighbors shake their head.
At the police station that night, Davis justifies his actions with the tazor gun.
"The crowd was getting disorderly. And it got their attention," Davis explains.
Officer William Duncan, Jr. reiterates what Davis says.
"In a police arrest, there's an escalation of force," Duncan says, and then describes the methods used as a scene becomes more intense. "You've got your hands-on basic control [handcuffs] to chemical OC sprays to batons to striking or you can go to deadly force."
By 9:22 p.m., the officers begin to pack up.
"We're going to the magistrate's office to see what charges will be made," Sgt. R.L. Hudson says.
9:25 p.m. The mother and her daughter are sitting with two officers in an interview room at the magistrate's office. In the adjacent room, there is a dividing window where the magistrate looks in on the interview from his side.
"We are the first level of the court," Magistrate Wayne Davis says.
The magistrate decides if the police officers have reason to obtain an arrest warrant and whether or not they will keep the suspect in jail.
The interview will last "usually an hour or so max to listen to this sort of [domestic] case," Davis says.
The process assures all sides are heard,
"We have to tell the magistrate what we found," Hudson says. "Then the mother and the father will get to tell their side."
Screams come from the jail cells down the hall. Davis waits to hear yet another domestic case.
"It will get you depressed if you let it, but you have to confine your emotions in your life," Davis said. "You can't let it live and breathe your life."
After the interviews have been conducted, the story emerges. A domestic dispute erupted when the wife and her daughter clashed with the husband and his daughter. A non-relative called the police once events escalated to such a point as each side tried to physically protect their own kin.
Upon leaving the magistrate's office, Knick gets a call that he can have his dinner break at 10:38 p.m. It is his first meal of the day since his shift started at 3:34 p.m.
This job is "eight hours of boredom interrupted with moments of excitement and pandemonium," Knick says as music from radio station 101.9 wafts in the car.
At the police station, the officers at the scene split up the paper work that needed to be filed, because in this particular case, "everybody is a suspect, everybody's an offender, everybody's a victim," Knick says.
"It's not too bad," Duncan says to Knick. "We see it all the time."
Officer Caesar Perkins, who has had five years of experience in juvenile court, adds, "They'll get back together and we'll go back there again. They'll come to court hugging and kissing"
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