Sergeant Leroy Durant OIC

By Anthony Woodford

This book is about a black homicide investigator who has great passion for what he does. However, he knows that there was no great defining moment in his life that inevitiablly for told his transition into a career crime fighter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312690264

Book preview

Sergeant Leroy Durant OIC

Sergeant Leroy Durant OIC

by

Anthony Woodford

Copyright © 2014, Anthony Woodford

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-312-69026-4

PREFACE

I woke up this morning with a clear mind.  Free from yesterday, ready to start a new.  Promising nor owing anything to what has been or what is to come.  Yet here I go searching my mind for what’s important to me. First of all what should I be doing today.  Then the flood gate opens.  I am once again a prisoner of my own thoughts.  What do I want?  What do I think I need?  I then inquisitively look down at the floor in front of my bed; I see the clothes I wore yesterday and consider wearing them again today.  Jeans, sweat shirt and brown socks, well I guess life true to form finds me this morning considering the major question of the day to wear or not to wear?  Well it’s time to take my medicine all six pills, let me see three for high blood pressure, two for sugar diabetes and one aspirin for good measure.  How did it ever get to this for me, as if I don’t know?  Hell, I worry about everything.  I worked a very stressful job for almost thirty years and I have survived three marriages, need I say more. Well it’s time to take my shower and get dressed.  While I am doing that let me tell you a little bit more about me before I start my day in earnest.  I am old enough to have an AARP card, 5’7" tall and I weigh 175lbs. give or take; I have a full head of gray hair with a few strains of black hair teasingly mixed in as a sentimental reminder of what use to be.

Well now I am dressed, I will let you guess what I am wearing. But know this I am truly unmotivated to do anything constructive or meaningful for love or money.  However, just a few short years ago I had somewhere to go and a lot of work to do.  Wow, all the way up until a short time before retirement I even thought that, what I did was important and appreciated. You see being the police was my claim to fame.  Over the years as a cop I did everything from walking a beat to investigating homicides and police shootings. 

Let’s take a look at how I became the police, was it fate driven by a need to answer a higher calling or just the only job available that paid more than seven thousand dollars a year in 1977?  You know it’s funny when I think about it, how many of us actually choose a profession and pursue it as our life’s work and how many of us simply take a job because we need the money.  I know I needed the money and there was no soul searching going on driven by a desire to protect and serve the citizens of Detroit.  Well let’s not get all philosophical about this, that’s a little too heavy for me, you know I am retired now.  However, I feel it must be said that I have come to realize that we as people don’t always do things for the so called right reasons; yet we often find ourselves in circumstances and situations that bring out the passion in us resulting in our greatest achievements.

Well I am getting ready to start my day of leisure filled with many hours of being shamefully lazy, with unrestricted couch warming and channel surfing.  I am not trying to give you the impression that I don’t feel the need to be constructive or plugged into the world in a meaningful way.  Look I have come to realize that taking life to serious can only lead to one thing, predictable boredom, complicated by physical ailments, treatable by a never ending list of prescription drugs.

I know that we are all important to ourselves but in reality we play a very small role in the ongoing saga of human life, unless we somehow become larger than life itself.  So I write to tell you about my life and the small role I played. I am leaving my unique foot print in the sand as my narrative proving for all time that I in fact lived and mattered.

The first eleven years of my life were spent growing up in the Jeffries