Danny Carey could hardly believe they had shot him. He could hardly even believe they were policemen. He just lay there, bleeding everywhere, with this strange feeling in his legs, as if they were being pumped up with air or something, thinking he must be dying and waiting for someone to do something – call an ambulance or fetch a doctor or just tell him what the hell was going on.
Even now – five years later – he finds it hard to believe that it happened and that he must really spend the rest of his life dead from the chest down, completely paralysed from his second thorasic vertebrae, the one that was splintered by the policemen’s bullet. But more than that, the thing he finds hardest of all to accept is that the men who did it to him have walked away without punishment, without so much as the faintest hint of a stain on their record.
It was only last week that Carey finally gave up trying to get the policemen brought to book. The Director of Public Prosecutions said long ago that he did not want to charge them. Scotland Yard said just as long ago that they did not want to discipline them. So Carey sued them and last week, in the High Court, Mr Justice Waller said he, too, could find no fault with what the police had done.
Now, Carey, who will be 31 this October, spends one day after another sitting in his chrome wheelchair, watching television and listening to the radio in his council maisonette in a thicket of tower blocks in Plaistow. The world ignores him, and he returns the favour.
While other unarmed victims of police shootings, like Steven Waldorf and Cherry Groce, have been wreathed in public sympathy, Carey has been forgotten, because unlike other victims, he was breaking the law at the point when he was shot.
Danny Carey was never much of a villain. He has only ever been to jail once: he got six months for trying to burgle an antiques shop by drunkenly smashing in its window in front of several hundred witnesses who happened to be coming out of a cinema across the road at the time. He got caught once stealing from a record shop. But he was no professional criminal – just another unemployed East Ender, picking up work now and again on building sites, drinking a bit, betting a bit, watching his life go by.
He had a girlfriend, Janet, who he was planning to marry. It was her brother, Alf Ficken, who suggested an easy way to come up with the money for a honeymoon. “We was just talking in the pub. Someone said this post office was an easy place. So I thought it would be easy money. But it weren’t.”
Ficken was some 17 years older than Carey and he had been in trouble in the past for burglary and for using explosives to blow open a safe. Carey agreed to go with him to take a look at the post office at 614 Seven Sisters Road.
So it was that early one Thursday morning, on June 7 1984, Carey and Ficken found themselves sauntering in what they hoped was an inconspicuous fashion up and down the pavement outside the post office. They saw a frail black woman in her 50s come and set up the shop. A little later, they saw a second woman who came to join her behind the counter before they opened the post office door to the public. They could see no security and no problems.It seemed a simple job. But from the start, it all went wrong.
Carey and Ficken – anxious to cover every angle – spent the next week watching their target, turning up every morning to check the movements of the two women, noting down times, polishing their plan. But their care was their downfall. Early in the next week, on Monday June 11, one of the women noticed them and began to wonder. The next day, she saw them again and called the police. When Carey and Ficken turned up for their final reconnaissance on the Wednesday morning, they had an invisible audience.
There were two armed detectives from the Area Robbery Squad in an unmarked car, a surveillance photographer down the road in another car and nine other plain clothes men at different points along Seven Sisters Road, all watching, all unobserved by Carey and Ficken. Now, the police, too, polished their plan.
It was in the early hours of the next morning, Thursday June 14, that the two men went to work. Things carried on going wrong.
They propped up a car jack against the back door of the post office and wound it up until they burst the lower hinge. The noise of splintering wood woke one of the neighbours who switched on a bedroom light and started peering out of the window. The noise of the second hinge had the neighbour up for the next 20 minutes trying to work out what was happening.
Inside, they found themselves in a kitchen with a door which went through to the post office. Ficken decided to drill a tiny spy hole in the door so that they could see the women counter clerks when they arrived, but he made a mess of it and knocked a small chunk of wood out of the door and gave up. The two men settled down to wait.
“We talked a bit and rested a bit,” said Carey. “I was thinking about what we were going to do. I didn’t think there’d be no trouble. We was just going to get the first woman, the black woman, handcuff her and get the keys to the safe. We’d be away before the other woman showed up. We didn’t have no weapons or nothing. She wasn’t going to give us no trouble – with two of us and all. But I was feeling pretty nervous.”
They expected the woman clerk to arrive at 8.30. She always had done before. But it was only eight o’clock when the lights suddenly came on and they realised that the action was starting. What they did not realise was that the woman had turned up early because the police had asked her to and that at this very moment on the other side of the door with its bungled spy hole, she was not alone.
Detective Inspector Alan McLean of the Number Three Area Robbery Squad had called in a dozen men at six o’clock that morning for a briefing at Walthamstow Police Station. He told them that two men were going to try to rob the post office, that he did not know who they were or whether they would be armed, and that they would tackle them by splitting into groups so that they could hide at different points around the post office and catch the robbers in a pincer movement as they arrived to commit their crime.
Four of McLean’s men were given guns – .64 Smith and Wesson revolvers and 12 rounds of .38 ammunition each. Two of the detectives who were given guns were sergeants, Michael Fry and Fred May, both veterans of the Robbery Squad. As other officers hid around the target – over a grocer’s shop across the road, in a flat upstairs, out the back – Fry and May walked through the post office with the nervous clerk, quite unaware that the robbers were already inside the building. She turned on the lights.
“Where’s this door here go?” asked Fry.
“There’s a kitchen,” said the clerk. Fry reached for the handle. It was two minutes past eight.
Inside the kitchen, Danny Carey saw the door open, saw Alf Ficken look, saw him pause, wondered why he didn’t go through to get the woman. “He seemed to be stopping, trying to shut the door. I heard a bang. I seen him falling down. There was another bang and something went past my face. It more or less touched me. I don’t know, I must have realised they was gun shots. I just wanted to get out of there. I half turned to head for the door, took maybe one step and there was a third bang.
“I didn’t feel no pain. I went down. As I fell, I grazed both arms and that hurt but there was no pain from the bullet. I could feel my legs kind of puffing up. Alf was shouting in pain, shouting for an ambulance. I couldn’t feel nothing. They kept asking me what my name was, but I couldn’t really answer. There was one of them said ‘He can’t be hurt that bad’.
Then the ambulance came, and they were taken away with Ficken moaning “Why did they shoot me? Why?”
Five years later, Carey still relives those few seconds. He swears that he and Ficken were never given a chance to surrender and that they were shot without warning or reason. The two detectives – Fry and May – say that is entirely untrue. They say that Ficken launched himself through the door at Fry and grabbed him round the throat while Carey stood behind him shouting “Kill the cunt” and that Ficken reached down for his belt in a way which made them think he was going for a gun.
The two detectives say that they both shouted the required warning – “Armed police!” – before Fry shot Ficken in self-defence. They say Carey than reached for a bag, that they shouted “Freeze!” and “Leave it” and that they had to shoot him, too, because he ignored them and they feared he was going to pull a gun out of the bag. They agree that both men were, in fact, unarmed.
Ficken soon recovered from his wound and was jailed for five years for his attempt to rob the post office. Carey was told he would be paralysed for life and it was decided that this was sufficient punishment and so he was not charged. He has never put his life back together.
He never married Janet. He has never found work. He hardly goes out. “I used to go down the pub, but all you see is a view of arses and backs. I suppose I could try swimming, but I wouldn’t want everyone looking. I got the telly and the radio and that. You just get used to it. I can go round the shop if I want to. The one thing I had was suing them.”
In court, Carey’s lawyers said that the police story made no sense. Why would Ficken and Carey reach for guns which they knew they did not have? The angles at which the bullets had entered the two men’s bodies did not fit the police account, they said. The woman clerk did not hear any warnings being shouted. But two other police officers swore that they had heard Carey shouting “Kill the cunt” and that their colleagues had definitely shouted their warnings. A man in a neighbouring house said he believed he had heard warning shouts. The Judge said Ficken and Carey were lying and dismissed the suit.
The result is that Carey will receive no compensation. His life will continue to be bound by his maisonette and the £92 a week he receives from social security. The council have installed a little hand-operated lift so that he can get upstairs, and they have built a ramp out of his back door into his garden, a thin strip of concrete which his dogs use as a toilet. And he has his wheel chair.
“When I die, they want the chair back. They’ll have a job. I’ll get buried in it. They’ll have to fucking dig it up. But it’s not the money. I sued because I wanted them done. I hoped I’d get some money, too. But mostly I wanted them done. But that’s it now. It’s finished. Nothing I can do. It’s just fucked up my life. Hasn’t it?”
ENDS
