In the Hands of Fate

Someone told me once that the two hardest things a man had to do was, one, find a job and then, two, leave that job.

He was talking about those passages of life that included a young person’s starting point and an old person’s retirement.

Walking away after years of doing the same thing creates an emptiness that’s difficult to fill.

That’s what’s happening with Jerry Beck. He’s walking away from a 32-year career with the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, not because he’s reached retirement age but because of injuries. He has to leave, and that makes it even harder.

He’s the story of a good cop shot down by fate.

Beck is 56. I saw him the day he turned in his badge. He was having a beer that afternoon at a downtown bar, wearing street clothes, a big, floppy hat and a gold earring in each ear.

There was also a black patch over his left eye. The earrings were symbols of a new life, a shedding of the uniform he’d worn. The patch? That was something else.

Beck’s career had ended because he’d slipped on a wet floor three years ago, hit his head and began losing his vision.

The earrings were a touch of tomorrow, the patch a reminder of the past.

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The fall had detached a retina in his left eye and destroyed its vision. Because of his partial blindness and two herniated discs in his back, two physicians told him to retire.

It wasn’t the way he wanted to leave. His father had been a cop and his own two sons are cops. The family tradition is strong.

For 21 years Beck had been a homicide detective. He’d gone at the job with the tenacity of a charging lion, angry at the “bullies” in society who took innocent lives. After about 500 cases, his conviction rate hovered at an astounding 80%.

He had pursued the Hillside Strangler and the Night Stalker, both of whom left bloody trails of human debris in their wake.

In 1993 he found the two men he knew had set the Malibu fire that killed three people and destroyed 350 homes. Uncertain of the evidence, the D.A.’s office refused to act against them, and no one was ever charged. But so convinced was then-Sheriff Sherman Block that Beck had the right men, he was awarded a departmental commendation.

But for Beck, solving crimes always meant more than winning praise. “Each victim of a murder was mine,” he said as we sat across from each other. “I owed them.”

Even with only one eye, he went on paying the debt, never allowing horror to intrude on his compassion. An example of that came in 1992. He had to tell a mother in South-Central that her son had been murdered. With five children of his own, he understood her grief.

“He said it in a gentle way,” the mother, Diane Chapman, remembered. She repeated his words slowly, “I want to say how very sorry I am at the death of your boy. . . .”

It was a standard he’d set for himself that had never wavered.

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But fate wouldn’t leave Jerry Beck alone.

Two years after that first fall, his visual perception hampered by a blind left eye, Beck fell again. It detached the retina in his right eye and aggravated the injury to his back.

For nine weeks he was totally blind. “I was terrified,” he says. “I began losing a sense of identity because I couldn’t see myself. Who I was began disappearing.”

After a third operation, the sight in his right eye was mostly restored. But with only partial vision, Beck knew it was time to go. He couldn’t do the job he’d sworn to do. He couldn’t go after the bullies anymore with full capacity.

Leaving was hard in a lot of ways, not the least of which was an abandonment of his desire to prove that there were good cops in Los Angeles too.

In an age when a code of silence protects bad cops, Beck always stood with the guys who wouldn’t let evil go unpunished. He tells his youngest son, still in the training stage as a policeman, to refuse to do that which he knows is wrong and to speak up when he sees it being done by a fellow cop.

“I tell him, ‘If your oath’s no good, who are you? You swear before God! Speak up!’ ”

Beck retired with commendations from President Clinton, Gov. Davis, the D.A.’s office and the county Board of Supervisors. On the other hand, the Sheriff’s Department charged him $16 to keep his badge and $78 to get it encased in plastic.

“One day you’re there,” Beck says with a philosophical shrug, “and one day you’re not.”

Fate treated him poorly. But, characteristically, he understands.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com