Fanone drifted in and out of consciousness as Albright drove to the emergency room. The security guard at the entrance told them they couldn’t go in without masks on. Albright pushed the guard aside, dragging his partner by the shoulders. At the intake counter, as a staffer was asking for his insurance information, Fanone collapsed on the floor.
The ER was jammed with a motley array of injured cops and rioters and COVID-19 patients. On the stretcher next to Fanone’s lay a rioter whose cheeks had been pierced by a rubber bullet at close range: it had gone in one side of his face and out the other. The doctors asked Fanone if he’d ever had heart problems, because his body was flooded with troponin, a chemical indicating cardiac distress. He’d had a heart attack, they told him.
From his hospital bed, he watched the news. On CNN, someone was questioning whether the police had used sufficient force to repel the rioters, asking why they hadn’t arrested more people on the scene. Outraged, Fanone looked up CNN, called the number that came up on his phone and told the woman who answered that Mike Fanone with the metropolitan police department needed to talk right away to that jerk on the air who was insulting the good name of every police officer.
“Sir,” she said, “this is the front desk.”
He burned to set the record straight, and he soon got his chance. A photo went viral in the days after the riot: Fanone in his helmet and tactical vest, face distorted in a furious battle grimace, the lone cop in a sea of rioters, Thin Blue Line flag waving ironically over his head. His ex-wife, the mother of his three youngest daughters, proudly posted his name on social media, and suddenly everyone seemed to have his number.
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(Fanone turned down a request to pose nude in Playgirl.)
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Fanone had questions about the investigation into the assault he suffered. MPD detective Yari Babich had been assigned to the case, but Fanone learned Babich had posted a bunch of nasty comments on social media about Fanone’s media tour—calling him an egomaniac, a celebrity wannabe, unprofessional, a buffoon. Fanone complained to the department but says he was told Babich was entitled to his opinion. (In response to a detailed list of written questions, the MPD declined to comment on this or other aspects of this story. TIME was unable to immediately reach Babich for comment.) He kept complaining, and eventually Babich was taken off the case, according to law-enforcement officials familiar with the matter. But cops gossip like hens, and Fanone knew that if one guy was talking this way he probably wasn’t the only one.
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He was a good cop—one of the best. Fanone was born in the District and raised in Alexandria, Va., his father a lawyer, his mother a social worker. They divorced when he was 8. His dad was a partner at a big firm, but Fanone hated the stuffy status-grubbing of fancy-pants D.C. He spent his free time with his mother’s working-class family in rural Maryland, boating, fishing, crabbing, hunting and watching John Wayne movies. “Michael was a cowboy from the time he was 3 years old,” says his mother Terry Fanone.
Attempts to smuggle the self-styled backwoods boy into the professional class were unsuccessful. He spent a year at Georgetown Prep, the private school whose alumni include two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, but was asked not to return. When his parents sent him to boarding school in Maine instead, he saved his pocket money and bought a bus ticket back home. After his parents kicked him out, he got a job working construction and eventually completed his high-school diploma at Ballou, a nearly all-Black public school in southeast D.C. ...
At some point in his 30s, Fanone realized there was more to life than the job. His mentor, someone he thought of as a living legend, retired, and there were no parades—the department just carried on without him. Fanone stopped volunteering for overtime and re-established contact with the teenage daughter he barely knew. He got married, had three more daughters, got divorced.