Unable to break away from the past

After reading Kevin Cook's compelling reconstruction of the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City in 1964, I was powerfully reminded of an unsettling experience from my former probation caseload when interviewing Donal (not his real name) when he reported to the probation office during his time under supervision.

At the time, Donal had a long-standing alcohol dependency problem. He was struggling to remain sober long enough to be considered for a referral to a bespoke residential unit which had agreed to enrol him, and whose programme of specialist intervention services seemed most appropriate given the chronic nature of his condition.

I visited the rehabilitation unit with Donal after much negotiation and many frustrating setbacks. His grainy hard-drinking persona, sometimes offset by sensible sobriety, often manifested itself in almost comic incoherent inebriation when appointments at the office simply ground to a halt before they could proceed! This meant that interviewing him was a considerable and inventively creative casework challenge.

On one occasion, he was admitted via a street drinker initiative in Central London to a wet house. On my arrival, I met his newly appointed keyworker in what seemed like a scene from a Hogarthian print, with Donal astride a row of intoxicated clients, loudly declaiming to all who would listen, his woes and wails from recent days.

I was distinctly impressed by the sheer stubbornness with which he would argue his corner. I also recognised that the broken attachments of past familial conflict and the mournful hint of parental neglect made the likelihood of his early death, if his unaddressed alcohol consumption continued, sadly inevitable.

The details of the interview with Donal, that remained with me for many a long year, were occasioned by events the previous evening when he had been in the company of a close relative and friends at an address near to the probation office.

I had expected that he would report (albeit at the time that was a movable feast!). Greater professional discretion and caseworker flexibility allowed the supervising probation officer scope to determine the margins of acceptability when a client did not report at the appointed time. During a day that I had set aside for general reporting, I had around 20 client/probationers due to report during the course of the day.

A muffled sound from the waiting room suggested that Donal had arrived. He often shouted my name at the receptionist in an overfamiliar, but generally good-natured manner, and I prepared to greet him. I was shocked to witness just how distressed he was and although his unkempt presentation did not usually trouble me, he looked very much in a state of dishevelment and was pointing at blood stains on his clothing.

I settled him into my office (at the time I worked in a probation office in which each officer had an individual room), and sought to reassure him. After many minutes he became measurably more coherent (although still intoxicated), the shock of the night’s events, introduced a rare clarity into our discussion. 'Mike, I have to tell you, I have to tell you...’.

I awaited with bated breath sensing that some tragic misfortune was about to be disclosed. ‘It was ****. He's been killed!’. Who I enquired, and ‘how’? ‘It was an argument ...it got out of hand…he was stabbed and wasn't breathing…we all scattered and now **** is dead!’. Donal slumped into a drunken torpor in the chair, and I was left shaken and unsure if what he was telling me was that he was the assailant, or that he had been present when this alleged offence had occurred.

It was a little while later that he threaded together some more intelligible insights and I was informed that one of his close relatives was now 'on the run' from the police. The victim had died and police would be interviewing Donal in due course. After this meeting, I sensed the tenuous grip that Donal had on his commitment to remain alcohol-free was now seriously undermined to the extent that he then drifted into another bout of street drinking excess (his period on probation supervision had by then stuttered to its messy statutory conclusion).

When I passed the wet house later on, I glanced at the darkened windows and gloomy façade, musing whether Donal might be in a place of safety. Not so it seemed, ‘Donal, he died a while ago, did no one tell you?’, a colleague told me.

After reeling from this sad news, a mellow memory came to me of Donal laughing to himself - he did have such an infectious laugh. The day I visited him in the wet house I described his movements, and conversations with others, as like 'orchestral manoeuvres in the dark'.