At the Hearing

by Mike Newall

It was another preliminary hearing for the murder of a Philadelphia police officer. It was last Thursday in Courtroom 306 at the Criminal Justice Center, and it was the fifth of these hearings in recent years. A ritual now.

This time the defendant was Rasheed Scruggs, a 33-year-old father of four and suspected crack dealer with eight previous arrests. The police officer was John Pawlowski, a 25-year-old who left behind a wife pregnant with their first child when Scruggs allegedly shot him down on a Friday night in February near the Olney Transportation Center.

Thirty minutes before the hearing, dozens of stiff-backed, grim-faced cops lined the marble hallway leading to the courtroom. Inside, there were more cops than seats. They talked in quiet, angry voices.

Scruggs' supporters, all women, sat in a pew behind the defendant's table, as Scruggs waited in a holding cell. The defendant's sister, Bayyenah Abdul-Aziz, sat closest to the table, staring ahead, emotionless.

Across the aisle, six pews were reserved for the Pawlowski family. Pawlowski's widow, Kim, his father, John, a retired police lieutenant, and his older brother, Robert, a Philadelphia Police corporal, huddled in a nearby conference room with Assistant District Attorney Edward McCann.

At 12:20 p.m., McCann, a composed man with black parted hair and glasses, made his way through the crowd and took his seat at the prosecutor's table. A large cardboard box of files rested in front of him. McCann's been with the District Attorney's Office for 20 years. As chief of the Homicide Unit, he's been involved in all of the recent cop killer cases. There's been a "crossing over the norms," he said about the cop killings in an interview after the hearing. "But to try and come up with one reason or another why this is happening, trivializes it, I think," he said.

"There are too many reasons," he said.

In preparing for the hearing, McCann sought to protect the Pawlowski family from any unnecessary anguish. There would be no medical examiner testimony or crime scene photos. Witness testimony would be heard, but proceedings would be brief and respectful.

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At 12:25 p.m., Kim Pawlowski, blushed, red-eyed and six months pregnant, led a long line of friends and family into the gallery. She walked on the arm of her late husband's father, then sat in the first row, rocking and clutching a hanky to her chest.

A court officer opened a door near the defendant's table. The gallery quieted and you heard the taps of Scruggs' metallic walker and then you saw him: tall, thin, bearded, dressed in a tan jacket, cream shirt, jeans with embroidered patches and black Converse sneakers.

"Is that him?" cried Kim, shaking her head. She began to sob.

Scruggs sat and stretched out his leg, which received a bullet in the shoot-out after he allegedly shot Pawlowski.

"Damn," he said.

The Honorable Patrick Dugan presided.

McCann called the prosecution's first witness, Emmanuel Cesar, the hack cab driver Scruggs apparently tried to rob the night of the shooting. Cesar wore a white embroidered suit jacket. He took off his sunglasses and hung them from the open collar of his black shirt. He told how Scruggs slammed him against a newsstand and demanded money.

Then he pointed to Scruggs for the record. Scruggs looked bored.

Next, the prosecution called Jean Paul, a hack driver who witnessed some of the exchange between Cesar and Scruggs. Dressed in a beat-up sweater, Paul spoke in a Jamaican accent. He said he heard Scruggs threaten Cesar.

"I'm going to 'F' shoot you," he remembered Scruggs telling Cesar, "and I'm going to 'F' shoot the police."

"Did he say 'F'?" asked Assistant District Attorney Jacqueline Coelho. "Or are you just uncomfortable saying the words?"

"I can not say the words he said," replied Paul.

Officer Stephen Mancuso took the stand. He had heard the call over the radio about a man with a weapon at Broad and Olney. When he arrived, he saw through the window of his cruiser Officer Pawlowski and his partner, Officer Mark Klein, walking towards Scruggs, their hands on their holsters.

Then he saw a muzzle flash from Scruggs' jacket pocket.

"I saw it all at once," he said. "I saw John tense up and fall to the ground." 

After a shoot-out, in which they wounded Scruggs, Mancuso and Klein placed Pawlowski in the back of a cruiser. Mancuso rode in the back with Pawlowski to the hospital. Mancuso is young and stoutly built, and though he testified in a calm, restrained voice, he glared at Scruggs as he spoke and scratched his left fingers into the wood of the witness stand. When he realized he was doing this, he flicked away the dust, straightened himself and continued to glare at Scuggs. Scruggs looked away.

Officer Mark Klein spoke last. He told of the fateful moment, when he and Pawlowski, guns not yet drawn, approached Scruggs, repeatedly telling him to show his hands.

"He was backing up," Klein recalled. "About 10 to 15 feet away, fading back ... he looked at John, looked at me and then he looked back at John."

Then he fired, and John Pawlowski became another police officer to die on the streets of Philadelphia.

A court date has been set for April 16.