Freshmen sniffle in the hall, clustered shoulder-to-shoulder outside a dorm room. Inside, a young woman sobs on her bed, too limp and weak to sit up. Friend after friend tries to calm her, but she just wails. She went to a party. Someone gave her a drink that tasted strange. The ambulance is on its way.
Her roommate stands nearby, eyes glassy.
“I don’t know what to do,” the roommate says, her voice catching. “I watched her all night. I watched her.”
IU Police Officer Brad Begeske takes notes in between all of the tears. It’s just past 1 a.m. on his night shift — six hours left.
He asks the sick freshman what she remembers about the party, who gave her the drink, anything. But, as she gasps for air, she can hardly speak.
“I don’t want this to happen to me,” she says. “Help me. I want this gone.”
Begeske looks at the young woman, trying to make eye contact. He needs to assess her condition.
“What’s today’s date?” he asks. “Can you tell me who the president of America is?”
She can’t answer.
***
On patrol, officer Begeske witnesses a side of IU that parents rarely see: the wages of overindulgence, appetites leading to trouble, the many ways students can harm each other and themselves. All of it is real, and all of it is raw.
This Saturday in September, Begeske and the other campus cops begin their shifts at 11 p.m. They gather in the squad room at the IU Police Department station on 17th Street.
One officer leans back in his seat, eyes closed, singing “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers. A sergeant’s voice, calling out the numbers of their patrol cars, cuts through a mesh of laughter and conversation.
“352...53...184...92...”
“92 is totaled,” one officer says, interrupting. They’re short on cars tonight.
“All right,” the sergeant says, “you can take 53.”
Begeske leans against a long desk. He avoids the mountain of paperwork awaiting his attention.
“I’ll take 339,” he says. The sergeant tosses the keys across the room, and they land in Begeske’s palm with a ?satisfying clink.
Before everyone scatters, the police radio sputters. Possible gunshots at Forest Quad.
The chatter stops. Everyone tenses.
“That’s you,” another sergeant says, nodding toward Begeske. “Keep your head down.”
***
Begeske climbs into his cruiser, a 2013 white Dodge Charger, and takes off. As he heads toward Forest, the speedometer hits 60.
A few seconds later, the radio crackles again. The possible shots fired amounted to nothing, and he isn’t needed at the scene anymore.
The tension evaporates, and Begeske eases up on the gas to patrol the perimeter of campus. He makes his first stop of the night when he sees a blue Chevy Malibu with darkened headlights. When he approaches, the driver explains she’d been in an accident and her lights are broken. He lets her go with a warning.
In the field, Begeske isn’t Brad Begeske. He’s badge No. 28, or just 28, except for when his colleagues joke around and call him “B-rad.” When this happens, he sighs.
“No one’s called me that since high school,” he says.
High school wasn’t long ago — Begeske’s only 25. After growing up in Calumet City, Ill., he applied to IU, earned a criminal justice degree and joined the campus police force soon after. His dad was a cop, so he wanted to be one, too. The job promised something different every day.
Tonight, driving through campus, he notices familiar scenes. Drunken students walk with their arms flung over one another’s shoulders, trying not to fall over. Young women in miniskirts totter toward greek parties in heels they don’t seem to know how to wear yet. A young couple clings to each other as they amble, lopsided, down the middle of the street.
Everywhere Begeske drives, his Charger draws wary looks. When he pulls up to a noisy Phi Delta Theta party, he lowers his voice.
“Watch everyone scramble,” he says.
And when they see the Charger, they do.
On his way to a call in Teter Quad, Begeske drives by another party, this one at a two-story red house. Students pack the porch, holding red cups, and a booming bass drowns out song ?lyrics.
Begeske cocks his head.
“We’re probably going to be there later.”
***
He climbs the stairs to the third floor of Teter, the dorm he called home as an undergrad. He’s responding to a call of a student who’s had too much to drink and is now stationed in a bathroom, throwing up. Again, an ambulance is on the way.
“I can do blood, guts, all of that,” Begeske says. “But I hate vomit.”
In the bathrooms, he studies a shape slumped against the toilet.
“A little too much?” Begeske asks.
“A little too much,” the shape ?mumbles.
“Hopefully it was something good.”
“Jack Daniel’s.”
“That’ll do it.”
Soon the emergency medical techs show up, slipping their hands into mint green gloves and pulling out a breathalyzer. The freshman blows a 0.13 percent.
Begeske writes an illegal consumption ticket and heads back to his car, where he pumps a pocket-sized bottle of hand sanitizer.
“Typical Saturday night call.”
***
Midnight. Begeske stops at the Village Pantry for a Red Bull. Some nights he eats at the IU Health Bloomington Hospital’s food court. It’s open late, and he insists it’s better for him than fast food. Wherever he goes, he sits where he can see the door. It’s a cop thing, he says. All the guys in the department do it.
He gets two nights off a week, and one of those is devoted to Sunday football. He doesn’t visit home as often as his family would like.
When he gets a chance to call his mom, she always ends the conversation one of two ways.
“I love you,” or “Be careful.”
***
At Foster Quad, where the sick freshman won’t stop crying, her roommate meets Begeske outside. Even before he steps out of the cruiser, she’s standing beside his door. She tells him she thinks her friend was given roofies at a party on the northwest side of campus. She closes her eyes and rests her face in her fingers.
“I’m so scared,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Calling us was the right thing to do,” Begekse says.
Post-party distress calls don’t faze him. It’s not that he doesn’t care, but after a few years on patrol, he’s used to it. Sexual assaults are harder, but the toughest cases involve children, because they remind Begeske of his two younger sisters and his little brother.
Begeske and the roommate ride the elevator to the eighth floor. When the sick freshman sees the uniformed officer at her door, she starts crying again. A friend holds her up from behind, his fingers interlaced with hers as he rocks her gently from side to side.
“Please,” her roommate says, trembling now. “You’re going to be okay. You’re safe here.”
No one can remember anything about the party or the guy who gave the freshman the drink that her roommate said turned her into a different person. One floormate who was there remembers bits and pieces: ?Average height. Brown hair. Maybe 175 pounds.
When the freshman speaks, her voice is thin.
“I’m cold.”
She doesn’t have the strength to put on a sweatshirt, so her roommate guides her limbs into the sleeves of a Colts pullover. Other officers arrive, followed by the EMTs, who transfer her to a stretcher. As the elevator doors close, she’s still wailing.
Begeske and the other cops aren’t finished. Down the hall, another student who went to the same party is also sick. Two of her friends are carrying her to her room, the young woman’s feet dragging across the carpet. Her head lolls.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she repeats. She’s not fine. In a few minutes, she’ll be headed to the emergency room ?as well.
The officers are investigating the new case when Begeske is notified that, on the floor below, a third young woman is displaying similar symptoms. She, too, was at the party.
Begeske turns to the roommate of the student whose distress first brought the police to Foster. Can she help them pin down the location of the house? Her brow furrows.
“I don’t know the name of the street,” she says, frustrated. “But you could see it from the stadium.”
Begeske takes a shot in the dark.
“Was it a red house?” he asks.
She looks up, ?remembering.
“Yeah,” she says. “It was a red house.”
***
Begeske heads for the house, other officers trailing in their Chargers. He knocks sharply on the front door, eight times.
The porch, crowded before, is empty now. The crimson wood at Begeske’s feet is soaked with alcohol. A trash bag, fastened to the porch railing with duct tape, overflows with Natural Light cans.
Other cops stand behind Begeske as he waits for someone to answer his knocks. When a resident opens the door, Begeske glimpses a messy kitchen, counters decorated with half-empty handles of liquor. A faint light reveals footprints from where partygoers tracked sticky mess inside.
The house is almost deserted now. Begeske ushers three of the roommates who rent the house back onto the porch. The students sit knee-to-knee on a ratty couch, tight-lipped and eyes down. A girl leans against one of the young men’s shoulders.
The officers inform the roommates that three young women who attended their party are now at the hospital. They tell them that allegations of date-rape drugs have been circulating. The roommates swear again and again that there are no date-rape drugs in the house and that, as far as they know, no one was drugged at their party.
“It’ll be easier for you guys if you cooperate and tell us where any drugs are,” one of the officers says. One roommate mumbles something about weed in a closet downstairs. Another mentions the desk in his room.
This time, Begeske pulls on mint green gloves and heads inside. He’s looking for marijuana, roofies — anything. When he returns, he’s confiscated two plastic sandwich bags of marijuana. He nods to another officer.
“Hey, can you help me get the rest of the alcohol out of the kitchen?”
The officers find no date-rape drugs at the house, ending the investigation. They cite two of the roommates for underage drinking and the other for serving alcohol to minors.
Begeske tells the three guys to pour all of the liquor onto the lawn.
“Dude, this one’s full,” one of them says wearily, pulling a handle of Jagermeister out of a white plastic bag. He unscrews the top, walks over to the edge of the porch and watches as every dollar of his liquor is wasted.
***
When the officers leave the red house, it’s almost ?3 a.m.
“We’re going to head to the ER,” Begeske says. He wants to check on the freshman from Foster who couldn’t ?stop crying.
He lets out a long sigh. The Bears will play tomorrow, and he’s going to get less sleep than usual.
At the hospital, he makes his way past several stretchers of other young women swaddled in white blankets in the hall. All of them are passed out, drunk.
He gives the nurse the name of the freshman and asks to see her.
It was determined at a later date that the young woman had been to the ER but wasn’t administered a blood test.
The nurse types for a few seconds and studies her computer screen.
“It looks like she’s already been released.”
***
Only a few hours left on his shift, Begeske spies someone stumbling across a lawn on Union Street, struggling to carry a grill. When Begeske approaches, the young man admits he stole it from a ?nearby house.
Begeske handcuffs the thief and asks him to identify himself. The young man fumbles. He can’t remember how to spell his own middle name. He tells the officer he should at least be permitted to return the grill before he goes to jail.
“Sir?” he asks as Begeske helps him into the backseat of the Charger.
“Yes?”
“What happens to me now?”
“What happens to you now is you go to jail.”
Sitting behind Begeske, the thief worries about the handcuffs.
“Do these cuffs have any nickel in them?” he says. “I’m allergic to nickel.”
Once he’s released from the confines of the cold metal bracelets at the jail, he examines his wrists for any marks.
From the holding cell, he makes Begeske laugh.
“I’ve been going to the gym,” he tells another officer patting him down. “Can you tell? Can you feel my ?muscles?”
***
Past 5 a.m. now, Begeske heads back to the station to tackle his paperwork. He writes more now than he ever did in college.
Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be in bed before the sun’s too high.
Begeske’s life is not a cop show. As much as he’d like for every loose end to be tied up by the end of the night, it almost never happens. He won’t know if the Malibu driver fixes her headlights. He won’t see the grill thief be released from the holding cell. And he’ll never know what happened to the freshmen girls who cried all night in Foster.
It’s nearly impossible to follow up on every call, he says. There isn’t time.
Each shift, from 11 at night to 7 in the morning, there is ?always more.
