Suspect runs across frozen Pittsburgh river; a different kind of winter escape

(845 words)

A Pittsburgh burglary suspect’s daring escape attempt has me recollecting all the questionable adventures I’ve had on frozen bodies of water.

Running from the police isn’t among them.

William McManus, 25, is alleged to have ripped off armfuls of scratch-off lottery tickets from a downtown convenience store.

I say “alleged” because I remember being instructed in journalism school it’s the until-proven-guilty fair designation and because I don’t want to disqualify myself from potential jury duty.

Case details sound fascinating and I’m in one of those periodic slumps where the $12-a-day jury duty compensation would seem like a gaudy windfall.

McManus has a history of petty thievery. Confronted by police with a coat full of stolen lottery tickets, he certainly considered the consequences if caught and convicted.

It’s a choice all criminals face when nearing apprehension: Surrender, fight or flight.

The moment was immortalized in the 1971 “Dirty Harry” movie when Det. Harry Callahan asks the suspect about his intentions as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Callahan says, “‘Did he fire six shots or only five?’ Well, to tell you the truth in all this excitement, I kind of lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would probably blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’

“Well, do ya, punk?”

This, I think, should be part of every suspect’s Miranda Rights.

I’d like to think if the question was posed in that way to McManus, he’d have had the pluck to respond, “I’ve got about a hundred lottery tickets in my coat. Of course I feel lucky!”

Either way, McManus took off.

But he didn’t run to a getaway car or down some dark alley.

He ran straight to the Allegheny River.

Oh, the exhilaration he must have felt because the Allegheny River is frozen solid.

I wonder if he felt like Princess Elsa does when she builds the magical ice bridge across the chasm. He must have been congratulating himself on his genius.

His midnight escape was not without risks. I know this because I once fell through a pond that looked frozen.

I was playing golf.

It was a warm early spring day. The fairways were clear, but the ponds were still frozen, or so it seemed.

Knowing this, I cunningly tried to gain an advantage by skipping my ball off the ice on a dogleg par 5.

The ball came to rest in the middle of the pond. As the match was tight, I didn’t want to lose a stroke so I gingerly crept out on to the ice and took a mighty whack.

I made good contact, but the commotion caused my back leg to break through the ice up to my knee. I was very lucky.

Had both legs broken through I might have been soaked clear up to my waist and forced to miss post-round drinks. I learned that day it’s a very shallow pond.

I was so much younger then. More reckless. Just a stupid kid, really.

It was 2011.

Probably the closest I ever came to truly dying was in 2000. I was doing a story about the ice fishing on Mille Lacs, Minnesota. It’s a 207-square-mile lake that every year freezes solid enough to sustain a population of ice fisherman big enough to qualify as the state’s third largest city. There’s roads, regular trash pick up, pizza delivery — you name it — all on a 3-foot bed of ice.

The problem is vast parts of it are unsafe.

The first thing I did was unwittingly drive my rent-a-car on one of the unsafe parts and begin doing donuts. I was having a great time until I spied a concerned citizen dashing out on the ice waving his arms. He told two or three fools die every year doing what I was doing.

He’d saved my life. Then he took me to a nearby pub and bought me a beer.

I still send him a Christmas card every year. Some years it’s for saving my life, some years for buying me the beer. 

Those are my two best on-ice adventures. 

I’m sure the fleeing McManus thought he was going to have a dandy story. Maybe he thought once he’d made it safely across the river, he was home free.

Wrong.

Because the Allegheny River isn’t an international border.

And in another miscalculation, he forgot there are Pittsburgh Police on both sides of every Pittsburgh river.

In fact, if I’m reading the story right, the officers who’d tried to arrest him on the river’s downtown side simply got in their cruiser, drove across one of our many bridges and were waiting for him as the suspect scampered up the river bank.

Still, I don’t believe the escape was in vain.

A crafty attorney can certainly get the resisting arrest charge dismissed.

After all, McManus in a way obeyed when the officers yelled, “Freeze!”

We’ve been freezing in Pittsburgh all month.

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Them, the jury

Hooray for me! After months of desperation, something I’ve been dreaming and praying about finally happened on Tuesday. Yep, I got a job, important county work.

Jury duty!

Yesterday, a distinguished judge addressed me and about 120 fellow Westmoreland County citizens. He told us how we were there to provide the spiritual backbone to the best judicial system every devised by mankind. Fortunes and lives would rise and fall on the collective wisdom we were about to bestow.

Pay would be $9 a day.

Most people would rather fake their own death before accepting jury duty. Not me. I couldn’t wait. The night before I did a little home barbering, picked out on a nice shirt and coat and took steps to ensure I wouldn’t be too hungover to function for the important first day.

Of course, most people have jobs and obligations. They are engaged in productive lives. Me, I haven’t worked in about five months. To be honest, I haven’t done real work since I turned in my sauce-stained apron down at the old Pizza Hut.

I’m in a sort of transitional phase. I’m trying to move beyond writing magazine articles to becoming a full-fledged la-de-dah author. I’m trying to get my satirical novel published. So instead of spending all my time getting paid to write magazine articles, I’ve been spending my time writing painstaking queries to agents who respond with terse, soul-wounding rejection letters.

Nine dollars a day would seem like a gaudy windfall.

Everyone jokes about jury duty, but it’s a truly ennobling experience. It gives me the same sort of patriotic jolt I get when I walk into a voting booth. Or at least it used to be called a voting booth. These days it’s more of an exposed sort of an electronic voting station that always makes me suspicious either my vote’s not going to count or some angry Republican bully’s going to sneak up from behind and bash me with his briefcase.

It was fun to watch the other prospective jurors walk in. There were so many friendly faces. I made snap judgments about all of them and uniformly came down with positive reactions. Seven hours of confined tedium later, some of those judgments would shift.

And the tedium began almost instantly. I was not among the group of 50 that was called to the courtroom for questioning. That was fine with me. I had my laptop, The New York Times and was eager to dive into Jere Longman’s outstanding book, “Among the Heroes,” about the randomly assembled group of strangers who on September 11 deliberately crashed the hijacked United Flight 93 into a Shanksville field just 40 minutes from my western Pennsylvania home.

The choice of Longman’s book was deliberate. The heroic story of Flight 93 restores my faith whenever I feel humanity is being disparaged. And in the jury room we, too, were a random group of strangers perhaps capable of greatness. We weren’t there to fight terrorists. Our battle was with boredom.

“You know they should have a bowling alley in here to keep people from going crazy,” one woman said.

A bearded man in bib overalls suggested a dart board. A guy in a Cosby sweater lamented that he didn’t bring along some Trivial Pursuit cards.

It was starting to sound like a fine tavern for sissy teetotalers.

I thought briefly about opening up my laptop and entertaining the folks by reading aloud some of of my recent blog posts. But I’m not that kind of extrovert and if I were one day I’d eventually realize it and be forced to throw myself in front of speeding bus.

I was really enjoying having nothing to do but read. It reminded of the Lord Babington Macaulay’s great quote: “I’d rather be a poor man confined to an attic with plenty of books than a king who didn’t love to read.”

Of course, anytime you’re immersed in that vast a sea of humanity you’re bound to run into a crappie or two, and I’m not talking about the freshwater sport fish.

This one wore a Steeler sweatshirt and kept up a running commentary about the soap opera that played on the TV in the front of the big room. He followed each lewd comment with a nervous staccato laugh that sounded like someone had spilled a bucket of empty beer cans down a long flight of stairs.

The guy wouldn’t shut up. Had he been on the ill-fated Flight 93, I wondered if the heroes would have turned on him before dealing with the terrorists. I would have argued that it should have been the priority.

Finally at 4 p.m. the jury commissioner came in, thanked us and said we wouldn’t be needed. We could all go home.

I was being fired!

I went up and pleaded with her to let me come back the next day.

“You’re serious? You really want to come back?”

Yes, I think this is something I could really be good at. I’m a good listener, I didn’t doze off once or try and kill that loud-mouthed jerk in the Steeler jersey.

“Your turn will come again, sir. We’ll let you know.”

Will it be later this month? I’m sure I’ll be available.

“It’ll be in 2013.”

Still, it had been a great day. I’d done my civic duty without incident. The government recognized my service and will pay me $9.

Minus the $6 it cost to park, that leaves me with a tidy $3 profit.

The urge to splurge is impossible to resist.

Tonight, I’m taking the girls out for gumballs!