Tales From the Laurel Police Department
Winter 2025
This installment of “We Had a Guy” is dedicated to Lt. Mike Bleything, who passed away on October 6, 2024. Mike was with the department from 1974 to 1994 and retired as a lieutenant, but I’ll always know him as a Sergeant.
There is a short list of officers I will always remember whose humor outranked everyone else. Mike is at the top of that list. Very early in my career I learned from his example to not take myself or the job too seriously. Hence the lighter side of some of these “Had a Guy” articles. In fact, if you’ll forgive me for the repeats, some of his episodes stand repeating in this issue.
This continuing series is an uncomplicated string of personal war stories from my time at a small municipal police department between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., told without a lot of extravagant details; just the facts, ma’am. Other cops will appreciate the bare-bones setups of my individual anecdotes. But I do try to explain some of the procedures for the general public who has little understanding of why we do some of the things we do.
The men and women I worked with are the finest you will find in any police agency anywhere. Some have since retired or moved on to other agencies, and some are still there fighting the good fight. Hopefully, this bit of sucking up will make up for any inconsistencies in my memory of the events in which some of these great guys made an appearance. They will no doubt recognize their own first names and possibly the fictitious names of some of our less-than-law-abiding customers.
So grab yourself a cup of java or crack open a beer and get comfortable. You’re in a room full of cops talking shop. And the attitudes, sometimes smart-ass, sometimes despairing, that go with it. In our town, on my shift, this was policing in the last decades of the 20th century.
In 1984, the days when police chases were fun, we had a banger of a chase one night. Actually, it was Prince George’s County PD’s chase but when you throw a good chase everyone shows up. The whole story appears in the upcoming 4th reprinting of Brass Buttons & Gun Leather, A History of the Laurel Police Department, but I’ll stick with Mike’s contribution here. PG County was chasing a motorhome—yes, a Class C Motorhome—into our jurisdiction on Rt. 198 and I fell in at the back. At that point there were only a few county cars and then me and PFC Bruce. Sgt. Bleything got into it soon, too, but he had one of our dispatchers riding along that night. Dispatchers hold the title Police Communications Specialist, and that night PCS Fred was hanging on as Mike slipped into the growing line of police cars chasing this motorhome through town. Fred says he looked over and there was Mike, steering with one hand, elbow on the open windowsill, holding a cigarette calm as could be.
By the time I retired you couldn’t chase anyone outside the city limits, or at least you’d better have a real good reason. But in ’84 this chase was epic. Speeds weren’t great because, after all, it was a motorhome, but we ran this guy out to Anne Arundel County, down the Baltimore-Washington Parkway to Beltsville, up to Howard County, and over to Montgomery County. We went the wrong way on I-95 at one point. And the county even started shooting at the thing when it turned up Rt. 198 on the wrong side toward I-95. The unusual thing, except for the motorhome part, was this guy came back through Laurel three different times during the chase. Sgt. Mike must have seen the pattern because he stopped at the 7-11 at 7th & Gorman to buy a pack of smokes and then got back in the chase. By that time, we had a tail of cruisers maybe a mile long from every jurisdiction we’d been through. Like souvenirs.
Bruce and I were always about number two and three in the line and the world was behind us. They eventually got the guy stopped at Rt. 29 and Rt. 198, but you’ll have to read how in Brass Buttons.
Fred says at the time they couldn’t tell anyone he was in Mike’s car because ride-alongs had to be approved by a lieutenant and his was unauthorized. It didn’t stop either of them becoming lieutenants later. The best stories are untold, until later.
Paperwork is a vanishing art form now with computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and in-car terminals. But all our calls originated with the Complaint Report, a half-page size form in triplicate filled out by the dispatcher for every call we handled. At the end of the night you filled in a brief summation of what action you took as a result of the call. For example, you’d handle a burglary and write a full Offense Report, but on the Complaint Report you’d write, “See Offense Report.” Even minor, mundane calls like a burglar alarm you’d write, “Building checked OK.”
One night Mike handled an alarm going off at Ming Garden Chinese Restaurant between the boulevards at Rt. 198 and found the back door unlocked. Routine stuff—you walk through the place and make sure no one’s broken in and then have the owner come lock it up. The next morning Mike’s CR for the open door read, “Wok through made.”
When smoking inside a building wasn’t a capital crime, our police station had a vague yellow tinge to it. Especially Communications, because it was occupied 24/7. You could get a pack-a-day dose of nicotine just licking the window. Looking back, it’s hard to believe I never took up smoking, but I had enough second-hand smoke to keep me off it. One morning during shift change, and I’ll guess it was a Sunday morning because both the oncoming and off-going squads were hanging in the squad room shooting the breeze and smoking up the place with no hurry to get on the street, our chief dispatcher, CPCS Paul Johnston was hanging out with the guys.
The squad room was furnished in ‘70s business motif with a waiting room-style vinyl couch, yellow with a brushed square aluminum frame. Not that the decor matters but Paul was reading the morning newspaper on the couch. Now, Paul (Spanky) had thick glasses so whatever that tells you about his eyesight, he was holding the newspaper wide open in front of him, and he couldn’t see the rest of the guys. It could’ve been anyone but I’m sticking with Mike because if it made people laugh Mike was all over it, Mike reached over with his cigarette lighter and lit the bottom edge of Spanky’s newspaper on fire. The result was, well, not immediate but certainly worth the few seconds it took for him to notice.
Paul’s laugh was worth it, too. He’d get to laughing so hard sometimes his face would turn red with tears streaming down. Up front in Communications, Jimmy Collins would ask him, “Spank, are you okay? You look like you’re havin’ a heart attack.” And Jimmy would yell out “CPR!” and start doing chest compressions on Spanky sitting in his chair and he’d laugh even harder. Good times.
We had a guy breaking into parked cars at the commuter parking lot at the edge of town one day. I was a corporal, and my shift sergeant called me over to the lot where they’d stopped a guy who was walking among the cars when the sergeant first got there. Sgt. Mike takes me aside and says, “There’s a car over there with a busted back window and a hammer on the back seat. I told this guy we’ve had a camera set up in those woods next to the lot because we’ve been having so many cars broken into here. Go in the woods and wait a minute like you’re checking the camera and then tell me on the radio we’ve got him on tape.” Cool idea! Someday I’m gonna be a sergeant, too.
I head into the trees and after a suitable pause I call Mike on the radio, “Yup. Looks like he used a hammer, right?”
Hammer Boy’s sitting on the curb and hears me on the radio and just hangs his head and says, “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it...” In legal parlance we call that a res gestae statement or “spontaneous utterance” and the best part is its 100% admissible in court. Genius idea. And just think how much money Mike saved the City by not having to actually buy a camera to put in the woods.
But then suddenly the emotional trauma of being caught red-handed is too much for Hammer Boy who, it turns out, suffers from epilepsy. He throws a seizure and we have to pack him off in an ambulance and get a warrant to charge him later. Oops.
Not every police report ends with the initial description of the basic events. When there’s a probability of additional supplementary reports the typical closing line of the report narrative is, “Investigation to continue.” I hope these anecdotes haven’t offended too many readers of this venture from The Laurel History Boys. And hopefully there will be more to come. Thanks for your time.
Investigation to continue...
Rick McGill grew up in Laurel and worked at the Laurel Police Department from 1977 to 2001. He authored two history books: Brass Buttons & Gun Leather, A History of the Laurel Police Department (soon to be in its 4th printing), and History of the North Tract, An Anne Arundel Time Capsule. In 2001 he retired to Montana and worked as a military security contractor for Blackwater Worldwide making 12 deployments to Iraq and Pakistan from 2004 to 2010. He is now a Reserve Deputy Sheriff in Montana.
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