Early Sunday morning, in the midst of a huge storm, the police came to them.
The thunder woke up Szilvia, and she heard a weird, loud groan and turned to shush Louis, who she figured was once again being some sort of goofy. She sees that he’s on his stomach shaking, sweating up a storm and drooling all over himself, not responding to her and still making the weird groan. So she called 911 (“for the first time in my life,” she later told The Daily Beast. “I’m a shy person”) and told the operator her husband’s having a heart attack.
She’s still on the line when the EMTs arrived, standing at the open front door of their apartment with Marco in her arms and a drop of blood on her shirt from a stress-induced nosebleed. The first responders saw her and then Louis, all 6 feet and 200 pounds of him, lurching in his underwear and walk away, telling the Greenburgh Police Officers en route to step on it.
Two officers get there and see Louis standing against a wall, eyes open but not responding to them. They approach, shine a light in his eyes, and just as he comes to and realizes they’re there, “I’m landing on my back and hitting my head at the same time.
“They had my arms pinned and their knees to my chest and they’re still shining the light in my eyes, and I’m just coming to and then they turn me around and squeeze my elbows together behind my back, and one of them has a knee in my back, and my legs go numb. I tell them I can’t breathe but the knee’s still there. I hear something crack and they crisscross my hands and cuff them and pull me up by the back and my chest starts killing me.
“They’re not saying anything to me, just dragging me out the door and Marco’s on the couch watching and someone’s saying to my wife ‘Don’t sugarcoat it, honey, we know he beat you up.’ And then I’m outside, in my $#@!ing underwear, in the $#@!ing snow, before all my neighbors.”
“Now, they’re talking to me: ‘We know you beat your wife.’”
“And I’m thinking: ‘Are you $#@!ing kidding me’?”
The EMTs get outside and an officer comes with them and cuffs Louis inside the ambulance.
“This cop is telling me: ‘Yeah you beat your wife up. Is that the kind of man you are?’’
“I’m crying. I mean, I’ve never laid a hand on my wife. I had a great day. We had dinner and I played Call of Duty and fell asleep on the couch. Went into our bed and held my wife and fell back asleep. Wake up and there are the police taking me down—boom!—and telling me I beat my wife.
“I’m licking my lips and someone tells me to $#@!ing stop so I do and I feel nauseous. Then tells me not to throw up, or it’s going to a big problem. They put a bag over my mouth.
“I’m crying. Is this who I am? Last thing I knew, I was falling asleep.
“I remember one of them saying we have a possible fifty-fifty-one or whatever and it seemed so odd. Later I realized that meant they were reporting they had a crazy or deranged person.
“So we get to the White Plains Hospital and I’m cuffed to the gurney, screaming the whole time that my ribs are killing me and that I can’t breathe. The cop from my house is there, trying to play the good-guy role and telling me, ‘Honestly, you know you really did beat up your wife tonight. You beat your wife good.’
“This doctor comes in and asks me questions and hears the way I’m staggering in my speech and right away wants to see if I had a seizure.
“Later, they put all the wiring in my head, and they told me I’d had a seizure. My first one. In fact, I had all the signs of one, bro, that the EMTs should have recognized. My wife didn’t say that when she called 911, because she’s not a doctor.
“Then they found I had four fractured vertebrae. I was in so much pain from my back and then on so much pain medication that I didn’t realize, and the doctors didn’t find until days later, that I’d also torn the tendon between my chest and my ribs.
That was long after “the cop, the same one who kept telling me I’d beaten my wife, finally took the cuffs off me.
“He said, ‘Sorry buddy. You’ll be OK.’ And then he left.”
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