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One Wild Night with My Friend Ray

April 24, 2019

Mourning the loss of my former partner and friend Detective Reinaldo Perez (Ret.). Ray is the second partner/friend that's passed in the last six weeks and I'm just sickened by this. Ray and I were Cadets and Officers together. I was even a Groomsman in his wedding.

For many years, we were partners on morning watch(graveyards), where we made many great arrests together. As I reflect my times with Ray, I think of a 30 minute pursuit we were in, which was his first as the driving officer. We came across two East Coast Crips, who had done a carjacking of a Mercedes and then did numerous street robberies in Pacific and West LA Divisions of LAPD. Needless to say, when we tried to stop them, they fled. We pursued them through city streets and the freeway, reaching speeds of up to approximately 130 mph. On that night, we were driving a new Chevy Caprice, which had a special police package that used the corvette motor. Those things could fly and without it, the bad guys would have certainly got away. Ultimately, we came upon a curve in the roadway (Manchester/Pershing) that was flooded out with sprinkler water. The bad guys hit that at approximately 100 mph and ended up crashing into five parked cars, coming to rest sideways across the two lane roadway. We had slowed to approximately 90 mph and when we came around the curve there was nowhere to go because the stolen vehicle was blocking the roadway. Ray drove us up on the wide center median, where we began spinning in 360 degree circles, taking out numerous small trees along the way. As many pursuits go, the bad guys weren't seriously hurt and they fled on foot. Upon completing our imitation of a spinning top, we gave chase and caught the bad guys, who had run into a dead end area. The most funny part of this was that when we returned to the termination scene, Sammy Lee was there on his bicycle. Sammy lived nearby and had seen the crashes/termination.
That was certainly a night where Ray and I earned our money for the many risks we had taken. I often wonder(ed) why God didn't allow harm to fall upon us that night and why such a great guy like Ray had to go through the pain he had for the last 13 years, while he was battling his illness. I'm happy that Ray is no longer in pain. However, I'm gonna miss joking around with my friend and talking about the fun times we had. I hope Ray is in Heaven having even more fun than we got to that fateful night! Goodbye my friend, you'll certainly be missed!

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