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Sunday, February 15, 2009
A Cobb County cop dies, 21 years later
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Note: Former Cobb County police officer Freddie Norman died this weekend, 21 years after an encounter with a drunk driver. Below is a sketch, from 1998, of what life handed him:
Freddie Norman was a cop a few years back, and he knows not to trust a reporter with a quote. He typed his answer with the index finger of his right hand. Slowly.
“My….”
Ten years ago, he was Officer Norman-to-the-Rescue with blue lights flashing, a 24-year-old bundle of muscle and energy wrapped in a Cobb County uniform, on his way to a domestic call.
That particular Sunday night was cool but dry, and early leaves rustled with a yellow-green promise of an April rain. He was rolling down Pat Mell Road, through the Sandtown Road intersection, when a drunk 16-year-old ran a red light and plowed into the driver’s door of the patrol car.
“…..wife annnnn….” Backspace. “My wife and all…”
Freddie was comatose, or nearly so, when they brought him home to Austell seven months later. Nothing moved but the little finger of his right hand and a toe. His eyes were mostly empty and stared unfocused at a point down and to the side.
Billie Galbreath wasn’t sure what, if anything, was happening in her son’s head. But a doctor had told her that comatose people don’t have a sense of humor. So one day she cut out strips of paper, wrote some simple commands, and put them in Freddie’s line of sight.
Wiggle your pinkie. The pinkie moved, which meant he could read.
Wiggle your toe. He did.
Pick your boogers. The right corner of Freddie’s mouth stretched. “We wondered if that was his smile, ” his mother said. She’d found her son in a bit of inelegant humor.
“….three my children…..”
His injury was to the brain stem —- which meant not an absence of feeling, but a lack of muscle control. Freddie Norman was facing life as a Corvette mounted on cinderblocks. The V-8 was running, the radio thumped with rock ‘n’ roll, but there was nowhere to go, and no way to get there.
Still, time will move on. And over 10 years, Freddie Norman has achieved the outline of a normal life. He was a married man with two young kids when it happened. He and his wife quietly divorced. Freddie remarried in 1994, and now has three kids: Kim is 15, an age that has set him worrying just like any other father. Christi is 13. Hope is almost 2. She’s lovely, but her diapers do stink.
“….are also…” Another backspace. “….are always….”
Since Ronald Reagan was president, Freddie Norman has graduated from an alphabet board to a Pentium chip. His laptop is nearly e-mail ready. A wiggle of his pinkie has come to mean “yes.” And “no” is a rubbing of the right thumb and forefinger. It’s the same motion you make to signify the world’s smallest phonograph playing “My Heart Bleeds for You.”
“…..in..” Backspace. “…..on….”
The wheelchair ramp is weathered and worn at his mother’s small house, where Freddie lives. It’s a blue-collar neighborhood off Thornton Road, the kind of place where self-pity doesn’t sell. Too many people here have seen too many hard knocks.
The house was alive this day with the routine sound of chores. The dryer rasped, the washer answered. “The Maury Povich Show” blared a Mother’s Day program with a tap-dancing granny.
Billie Galbreath said the county has done well by her son. Worker’s comp paid for an addition to the house for Freddie, and two nurses come each day to keep his body toned. Her husband’s stroke six years ago has complicated life. He’s in the room next to Freddie, and Mrs. Galbreath, 59, now knows nearly enough medicine to start her own practice. That’s not whining —- just a fact.
Some weeks ago, Mrs. Galbreath stood with her son when the county made Freddie Norman the first recipient of its Blue Star award for officers injured in the line of duty. It’s a lovely medal of gold and royal blue ribbon.
“…..my minnnn….” Backspace. “…..my mind.”
“My wife and all three my children are always on my mind.”
Before I left, I asked Freddie if he’d ever heard from the young man who’d sent him down this path. A letter? A phone call? Freddie, who will turn 35 next month, replied with the world’s smallest phonograph, playing “My Heart Bleeds for You.”
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Gov. Sonny Perdue and an urge to clean house
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the seventh season of his eight-year tenure as governor, Sonny Perdue has decided to reorganize two of state government’s largest bureaucracies — the Department of Human Resources, which offers succor to the disadvantaged, and Georgia’s sad tangle of transportation agencies.
Together, they make up only 12 percent of the state budget and 17 percent of its payroll. But the federal dollars they control make them far more important.
In an age when getting there or getting help has become a dire need for many Georgians, the hazard of making a misstep while rearranging lines of command has rarely been greater.
No one argues that the streamlining is unnecessary. Both bureaucracies seem magnetically attracted to the word “dysfunctional.”
But timing is a concern. Jimmy Carter was the last governor to put DHR on the couch. Yet he did so at the outset of his single term as governor, not at the two-minute warning.
Style, too, is a worry. The remaking of DHR has followed a traditional, relatively public route, with a task force or two to hold hearings that allowed all those concerned a say in the matter.
However, the attempt to gut the constitutionally created state Department of Transportation and the construction of a new State Transportation Authority has been conducted in almost complete secrecy.
And the 2009 session of the Legislature is at the halfway mark.
A schematic chart, outlining the proposed new flow of power and money, leaked out last week, forcing Perdue’s partners — House Speaker Glenn Richardson and Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle — to acknowledge that something large is in the works.
The governor has run hot and cold on the issue of “governance” — his phrasing for whether the state’s transportation bureaucracy is up to handling the money entrusted to it.
Perdue raised the competency issue last year, when the Legislature first debated — and rejected — a sales tax for transportation. But last June, the governor appeared to reconcile with the DOT board, celebrating with a press conference in which he recognized the DOT as “the quarterback of this team.”
A report concluded that Georgia’s failure to spend enough money to combat traffic congestion had cost jobs — and Perdue promised a massive state transportation plan by January.
But now we are back to “governance.” Perdue appears ready to sack his own quarterback. “In transportation, the only diagnosis has been a lack of money and the only prescription has been to spend more of it,” said Perdue spokesman Chris Schrimpf. “The governor believes transportation must be transformed [into] a system that can take funding and provide value.”
Two proposals for a transportation sales tax, one regional and another statewide, sit before the Legislature. Both could be swamped by legislation from the governor to change the way billions of dollars are guided toward projects. Some argue that this is a partial motive for Perdue.
The leaked chart indicates that Democrats, necessary to the approval of either sales tax measure, would be shut out of decision-making.
But geography rather than partisanship may pose a larger hurdle for Perdue. As dysfunctional — there’s that word again — as the current 13-member DOT board is, power is divided among 13 congressional districts. Every section of the state a voice.
Perdue’s plan would concentrate transportation policy in the hands of the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker — with the governor holding the edge.
Neither metro Atlanta nor rural Georgia would be assured of a seat at the table.
As a GOP candidate in 2002, Perdue condemned Gov. Roy Barnes, the incumbent Democrat, for his push to create a transportation super-agency. But Perdue’s version, though much larger than Barnes dreamed, shouldn’t be characterized as a personal power grab, the Republican governor’s supporters say.
With reform of the state’s transportation system coming so late in his administration, Perdue would be able to take little advantage of any new authority granted him. In other words, the governor’s lack of emphasis on the topic of Georgia’s traffic woes has made him a more disinterested and thus more trustworthy actor.
