Rosario On Vick

Ruben Rosario has perhaps the best testimonial I've yet seen for Sergeant Jerry Vick, the Saint Paul officer killed in the line of duty last week.

Rosario interviews the prostitutes whose local industry Vick monitored.

The calls streamed in and the tears flowed easily Friday at the St. Paul office of Breaking Free, a place as much gripped by shock and sorrow over the slaying of Sgt. Gerald Vick as any other in the city.

"He gave me hope," one caller sobbed.

"He acknowledged me as a human being, a woman," another said.

The two calls came from jail. They came from women readily labeled and dismissed as hookers or whores — two words the 16-year police veteran considered offensive and had erased from his heart and mind.

"You can understand the measure, the impact of this man, when the people he arrested are calling to express their sorrow," Vednita Carter, Breaking Free's director, said as she welcomed more mourners into the group's two-story home on University Avenue. "He cared. He understood the difference between prostitution and prostituted women. I don't think there will be another like him."

Calls from jail. I don't suspect officers on the street crime detail get many of those.

"To me, it was as if Jesus himself was taken away from us," Doris Johnson, a group case manager, said during an afternoon meeting to plan a memorial and candlelight vigil for the fallen officer. "In a sense, he was angelic."

Vick dedicated the past three years to rescuing women and locking up pimps — perhaps the most unheralded, seediest and least glamorous line of police work. It is a frustrating job that historically had been considered a low police priority, except for the occasional passionate lone wolf.

That view changed somewhat locally with the discovery and dismantling six years ago of a Minneapolis-based juvenile prostitution ring, the largest ever prosecuted by the federal government....I can say that he surely did save my life," said Jola Zeller, 20, of White Bear Lake. Zeller, a recovered crack- and meth-addicted former runaway, entered prostitution at 16. She hooked up with a smooth-talking but abusive St. Paul pimp who worked her "24/7."

Vick put the guy away for a long time; read Rosario's piece for the details.

Posted by Mitch at May 12, 2005 05:45 AM | TrackBack