At around 2:30 in the morning, on a cold November night in 1998, D.C. police Officer Howard Wade was working vice off South Capitol Street, in what was then the badlands of Capitol Hill. He was in plain clothes, in an unmarked police car, with three other cops.
They noticed a guy walk up the sidewalk and reach down for what they initially thought was a stick. When he walked into the road, Wade saw the glint of the streetlight on the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.
The cops unholstered their weapons and put them on their laps. The gunman approached the car. When he looked away, Wade jumped out and said: “Police. Freeze!”
The man fired but hit a car parked nearby. Wade returned fire. The gunman ran down New Jersey Avenue. He stopped and blasted again; the cops shot back. Wade realized he was standing in the middle of an intersection and ran for cover. The man fired again.
“I then began to feel a warm sensation in my right shoulder,” Wade wrote in a statement for police. “I placed my left hand inside my jacket and noticed it was covered in blood.”
Wade, 43, is a D.C. native. He survived the city’s foster care system. He survived a tour of duty during Desert Storm. “I didn’t get shot until I came home,” he tells me.
Wade chased the gunman toward M Street until he saw the flashing lights of scout cars. He broke off the chase, holstered his weapon and headed back to the scene. He saw another guy hiding under a car. With his good arm, Wade yanked him out. It turned out to be the gunman’s accomplice. He gave up the shooter, who got 36 years for assault with intent to kill.
Officer Howard Wade would eventually get the runaround from the Metropolitan Police Department.
That night surgeons at George Washington Hospital took several pellets from his right shoulder. Months later the Police and Fire Clinic referred him to surgeons who removed another pellet. Doctors saw more bullets but decided not to remove them. But they did give him the X-rays.
In the last decade, Wade has worked arson and vice and drugs. On detail with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, he helped nab a serial arsonist. Over time, the pellets from the 1998 gunfight moved.
In February, a drunk driver hit Wade. At the police clinic, he told doctors of severe shoulder pain. New X-rays showed one pellet had lodged in his shoulder socket. Police doctors scheduled him for immediate surgery.
At which point Paul Quander, director of medical services, said he needed 30 days to review the case. He wanted Wade to prove the pellet was from the 1998 shooting. For a month, Wade suffered. The police department has yet to approve the surgery.
“The message it sends to officers is ‘Don’t get hurt.’ ” Wade says. “The department will step back. It doesn’t seem they want to take care of you.” And police brass wonder why good cops continue to leave.
