You can get everything off YouTube.

That is not a defense.

But it is, in its own strange way, an explanation — the kind of explanation that makes a certain amount of sense right up until the moment it doesn’t, which is approximately the moment a sheriff’s deputy walks up to your window and notices that your Ford Explorer has red and blue lights in the front windshield, a police interceptor badge on the bumper, a siren under the hood, a PA system wired to the speaker, a set of emergency strobes mounted behind the rear license plate, and a set of antennas on the roof that you also put there yourself.

Terry had done all of it himself.

The wiring.

The lights.

The switches on the center console.

The sticker on the license plate that he had carved out with a putty knife to make the Colorado mountains look better.

He had learned every step of the process from the internet.

YouTube for the wiring.

Amazon for the parts.

And now he was sitting on the shoulder of a road in Colorado explaining himself to a man with a badge and a body camera, and the explanation was not going well.

It was not going well at all.

The original call had nothing to do with Terry.

It had nothing to do with fake police cars or Amazon purchases or a retired LA firefighter with a very specific hobby.

It started, as so many of these stories start, with money.

Twenty dollars.

A company had done work for a man.

The man had written a check.

The check had bounced.

Now there was an additional fee — twenty dollars, for the inconvenience of the bad check — and the company wanted it paid, and the man was saying it was their fault, and a deputy named Chandler had been dispatched to facilitate.

This is what bad check calls look like.

Not dramatic.

Not dangerous.

Just: two adults who cannot agree on a number, and a cop in the middle trying to get one of them to pay the other one so everyone can go home.

“These calls are usually, I’ll be honest with you, kind of annoying,” Deputy Chandler said.

He wasn’t wrong.

The bill was $258.14.

The check had been written for $258.14 and had bounced on insufficient funds.

There was a $20 returned check fee on top of that.

The total owed was $278.14.

The man — Chandler just wanted him to come down and pay it out.

Twenty bucks.

Not a felony.

Not a crisis.

Just twenty dollars and a signature and everybody moves on.

That was the plan.

The plan changed the moment the debtor walked in, looked around, and announced that he was an investigator with the Department of Justice.

The badge came out almost immediately.

Not because anyone asked for it.

Because the man — call him David — wanted the deputy to know who he was dealing with.

He was not just some guy who wrote a bad check.

He was, he said, a federal investigator.

He had been in law enforcement for fifty-one years.

He worked for the Department of Justice.

He worked for pretty much all of it, actually.

Chandler looked at him.

“You have any ID and credentials?”

David said he wasn’t allowed to carry ID.

This is the kind of statement that lands differently depending on who is hearing it.

To a civilian, it might sound plausible — secret government work, classified clearances, all of that.

To a deputy who has spent years working alongside federal law enforcement, it sounds like exactly what it is.

“You’re not allowed to carry an ID?”

“Nope.”

Chandler kept his face neutral.

This is a skill.

It takes practice.

The ability to hear something completely implausible and continue the conversation as if you are still deciding what to think — not because you are still deciding, but because you want more information before you show your hand.

“Off to a bad start,” Chandler would say later, “if you’re trying to convince a cop that you’re in law enforcement.”

He finished the transaction — the check writer showed up, paid the $300 he owed in cash, got his change, got his receipt — and then Chandler told the company representative he’d be back in a moment.

He needed to talk to the man with the badge and no ID.

The badge was the thing.

It was impressive-looking.

Gold.

Two American flag symbols on the side, one on each flank.

It said Department of Justice on the face of it, and it looked, at first glance, like something official.

But Chandler had been around long enough to know when a style of badge was introduced.

And the style of this particular badge — the flags, the design, the specific way it was put together — had not been around since 1978.

David said he had carried it since 1978.

“Wow,” Chandler said.

He wasn’t impressed.

He was cataloguing.

“The problem with that statement,” he said later, “is I’ve been a cop long enough to remember when that style of badge came out. I remember because I wasn’t a huge fan of it. And it’s definitely not been around as many years as this guy is saying.”

He kept his face neutral.

He said the badge was very cool.

He asked to see it again.

He got a better look.

“Is this law enforcement?”

“No,” David said, momentarily. “Department of Justice.”

Then he seemed to realize what he had said and corrected course.

“Oh, okay,” Chandler said.

He let it sit there.

“I was just curious.”

The conversation had a rhythm to it.

Chandler would ask a question.

David would give an answer that raised three more questions.

Chandler would note the new questions and ask one of them.

David would give an answer that was somehow more implausible than the last one.

What agency under the Department of Justice do you work for?

“Pretty much all of them.”

Name one.

“Foreign investigations.”

That’s not the name of an agency.

Who is your supervisor?

“Elliot.”

Just Elliot?

“That’s all I know him as.”

Can I have his last name?

“Not allowed.”

Not allowed to give his last name, can’t carry an ID, badge that’s been around for fifteen fewer years than claimed, no documentation of any kind — but yes, he did have a document.

He produced it from somewhere.

A paper, handwritten or typed, that said — according to David — that he had full arrest powers.

That he had the ability to carry a concealed weapon.

Given to him by his boss.

Chandler looked at it.

“Can I see that?” he said.

He looked at it carefully, the way a man looks at something when he is trying to figure out if he can make one at home.

He probably could have.

The gun was in a shoulder holster.

Under his shirt.

David was armed.

This is the detail that changed the category of the problem.

Until that moment, the situation was: elderly man making implausible claims about federal employment, possibly confused, possibly someone who just wanted to impress a cop and lost track of how far the story had gone.

That version of events — the harmless version, the slightly sad version — was still possible.

But a man claiming to be law enforcement who cannot produce any identification, who is carrying a concealed firearm, who has a badge he cannot explain, who is presenting a handwritten document as proof of federal authority — that man is detained.

“I hate to tell you,” Chandler said, “but it’s an emergency.”

He said it pleasantly.

He was still being pleasant.

“It’s going to be a personal emergency for you.”

David seemed to understand that something had shifted.

“I don’t know if you’re aware,” Chandler continued, “but if you present a badge and say you’re law enforcement and you’re not, that’s a felony.”

David adjusted his story.

He wasn’t really law enforcement, he said.

He just worked for law enforcement.

He was more of a factfinder.

He was going to Paraguay on the 25th.

He couldn’t take ID to foreign countries.

He mediated coups.

“That sounds like something the CIA would do,” Chandler said.

David did not deny this.

Chandler removed the firearm from the shoulder holster.

He did it carefully.

He did it without incident.

And then he called the Northport police department to speak with Assistant Chief Chris Morales, who David had named as the one person in any law enforcement agency anywhere who would be able to confirm his identity.

The call to Northport went the way these calls go.

The FBI was contacted separately.

Their response, when it came back, was two words.

“Fake as —”

Chandler finished the sentence in his head.

He already knew.

David was placed under arrest on the side of the road where this had all started — a bad check call, twenty dollars, a company that wanted its fee.

He had a walker.

The deputy asked if he needed it.

He did.

The handcuffs went on in the front, not the back, because of his age and his health.

The arresting charge: impersonating a law enforcement officer.

And the enhancement: carrying a firearm in the commission of a felony.

“I don’t think I’m taking an old man in cuffs,” one of the officers said later, reflecting on it.

He was not being cruel.

He was being honest about the particular weight of the image — an elderly man with a walker, handcuffed in front of a squad car, because he had wanted, for reasons that no one was entirely able to determine, to be seen as someone important.

“This just started as this old man wanting to be a special boy,” the officer said.

It was not a kind assessment.

But it was accurate.

David had charged into a routine bad check call with a badge, a story, a gun, and a handwritten piece of paper, and none of it had lasted thirty minutes.

After extensive research, no record of a case being brought against David for these charges could be found.

Maybe he really was a federal officer.

But probably not.

Forty miles away, give or take, a different story was developing.

A vehicle had been spotted on Interstate 25.

It was flashing red and blue lights at other drivers.

It looked like a police car, except for the rims.

Deputy Hernandez pulled it over.

The driver was Terry.

Terry was a flight attendant for American Airlines.

He had been a flight attendant for twenty-six years.

Before that, he had been a firefighter and paramedic with the Los Angeles Fire Department, medically retired in 2013.

He was a big man.

Friendly.

Cooperative.

Extremely nervous.

His car was a Ford Explorer ST — the sport trim, the performance model, twin turbo 3.6, moves when you ask it to.

It also had, as Hernandez would discover over the next several minutes, more aftermarket police equipment than some actual patrol vehicles.

Red and blue lights in the front windshield.

Emergency strobes behind the rear license plate.

A PA system wired to an external speaker.

A siren.

A set of antennas on the roof.

A switch panel on the center console with multiple toggles, most of which Terry would claim did nothing.

A police interceptor badge on the lower left of the bumper.

And Colorado license plates that Terry had personally modified — buying a sticker on Amazon, carving it out with a putty knife — to make the mountains look better.

This was also illegal.

“I guarantee you it’s illegal in Colorado,” Hernandez said, looking at the plates.

He said it the way people say things they find genuinely impressive despite themselves.

“It looks awesome. But.”

Terry nodded.

He already knew he was in trouble.

He had said so, almost as soon as the deputy approached.

“I know I’m in trouble,” he said.

Hernandez had asked what he meant by that.

Terry clarified.

He meant the lights.

He meant the car.

He meant all of it.

The lights had come from Amazon.

The wiring instructions had come from YouTube.

Terry had done everything himself — pulled the panels, run the wires, connected the switches, mounted the strobes.

He had done it carefully and competently, the way a man does things when he has spent years in emergency services and understands, at a practical level, how equipment works and where it needs to go.

The Explorer looked good.

It looked so good that another driver on I-25 had seen the red and blue lights flashing in the rear windshield and called the police.

Not because they thought something was wrong.

Because they thought the car was a cop car.

Which was, in a sense, the entire point.

“So they think I’m a cop,” Terry said, when Hernandez asked about the contraption on the dashboard.

He said it without apparent calculation.

He said it the way people say true things when the pretense has run out of room.

Hernandez kept his expression neutral.

“All righty,” he said.

He asked Terry if he would be willing to let him look in the car.

Terry said of course.

This is the other category — not the man who lies and stonewalls and invents a supervisor named Elliot who can’t be reached.

Terry was cooperative from the first second.

He turned the lights on when asked.

He showed Hernandez how the PA worked.

He explained the siren.

He talked Hernandez through the switch panel.

He told him where to find the dash cam footage that he had already planned to pull before the stop.

He was, in the language that cops use when they are being precise about something, forthcoming.

He was also, in the language that everyone else uses, caught.

The other officer arrived.

Sergeant Frost.

Nice guy, by all accounts.

He chatted with Terry about the airline, about the merger with US Air in 2013, about the general decline of American as a carrier since the acquisition.

They talked about Spirit Airlines.

They talked about the lights.

They talked about whether the police interceptor badge had come with the car.

Terry said it had.

Hernandez did not believe this.

“I’ve never seen a police car that’s like the ST model Explorer,” he said later, “with the souped-up engine and all the extras. Unless maybe some chief or police commissioner ordered it, maybe. But I’m willing to bet he bought the police interceptor badge and put it on himself.”

He was right.

Terry had bought it on Amazon.

He had also, as the conversation continued, admitted to something specific.

He had used the lights.

Not just installed them.

Not just driven around with them dark.

He had been on I-25 doing eighty miles an hour when a Mustang came up behind him doing a hundred and twenty.

He had flipped the lights on.

He had flipped them off.

Just once, he said.

Just to slow the guy down.

“That’s not your job,” Officer Leos said, when he arrived to take the formal statement.

He said it twice.

He said it without particular emphasis.

He said it the way people say things that are obviously true but still need to be said out loud.

“I know,” Terry said.

He knew.

He had always known.

That was, in a strange way, the most honest moment of the entire stop — a man who understood perfectly well that what he was doing was not his job, who had done it anyway, who was now sitting on the shoulder of a Colorado road explaining himself to three law enforcement officers while his rigged-up Explorer sat behind him with its lights off and its evidence intact on the dash cam he had remembered to mention.

The charge was felony impersonating a police officer.

That was the initial charge.

It did not stay that charge.

At some point in the legal process — in the negotiation that happens after arrest and before judgment, in the space where lawyers and prosecutors and judges assess the actual harm and the actual intent and the actual record of the person involved — the felony was exchanged.

Terry pleaded guilty to illegal use of red and blue lights.

He was sentenced to 120 days in jail.

One hundred and twenty days.

Not for the wiring.

Not for the Amazon purchases.

Not for the switch panel or the siren or the antennas or the license plate modifications.

For the moment on I-25 when a Mustang came up fast and Terry reached down to the console and flipped a switch.

One switch.

One moment.

One hundred and twenty days.

There is a particular American phenomenon that these two men represent, and it is worth naming.

It is not criminal.

It is not, at its core, even particularly unusual.

It is the specific human desire to matter in a way that other people can see.

David, the old man with the badge and the walker, had spent fifty-one years telling anyone who would listen that he was connected to the federal government, that he knew people, that he was part of something larger than himself.

Whether that was ever true — whether there had been some period in his life when some version of that story was accurate — is unknowable.

What is knowable is that on the day of the bad check call, he had walked into a room with a cop and produced a badge and told a story, and the story had not lasted.

Terry had done something different.

Terry had not claimed to be anything.

He had just built a car that looked like something.

He had spent his retirement — after twenty-six years in the air, after years of running toward fires and crashes in Compton — building an Explorer that anyone who drove past it on the highway would glance at and think: cop.

He was not pretending to be a cop.

He was building a car that did the pretending for him.

This is a distinction the law does not particularly care about.

But it is a distinction worth understanding.

Because the Amazon lights and the YouTube wiring tutorials and the putty knife and the police interceptor badge and the switch panel on the center console — all of it points to a man who put an enormous amount of time and skill and money into a project that had no official purpose.

He was a flight attendant who used to be a firefighter.

He missed the lights.

He missed the feeling of being the vehicle that other cars moved out of the way for.

He missed mattering in traffic in a way that you can see.

“It’s kind of like a show car,” he told the deputies.

They looked at the car.

They looked at him.

“Show car,” one of them said.

“All right.”

It was not all right.

But the word choice was honest.

A show car.

Something built to be seen.

Something built to look like it belongs in a category it doesn’t belong in.

The Amazon lights were evidence.

They were entered as evidence when the Explorer was towed.

They sat in whatever evidence locker the county used, tagged and photographed, waiting for the case to work its way through the system.

The lights appeared three times in this story.

The first time: seen by a driver on I-25 who looked in their rearview mirror and saw red and blue and thought cop.

The second time: demonstrated for the deputies, switched on at their request, illuminating the side of the Colorado road in the colors that are federally reserved for emergency vehicles.

The third time: in the courtroom, in the plea, in the specific and precise language of the charge that replaced the felony — illegal use of red and blue lights.

Not the siren.

Not the badge.

Not the switch panel or the antennas or the license plate.

The lights.

The Amazon lights that Terry had bought and wired himself, following a YouTube tutorial, producing something that looked so convincing that real police officers had to ask him to demonstrate it before they fully understood what they were looking at.

One hundred and twenty days.

That is what the lights cost.

The cop who arrested the old man with the walker said something worth carrying.

He said there are two kinds of people.

There are the real bad guys.

The ones who steal from grandmothers.

The ones who destroy lives without caring whose they are.

The ones who are out there actually trying to hurt people.

And then there are people who make a mistake.

Not a calculated, premeditated, I-know-exactly-what-I’m-doing mistake.

Just a mistake.

A decision that seemed, at the time, smaller than it turned out to be.

He put David in that second category.

He was not sure it was the right call.

Impersonating law enforcement is not a traffic ticket.

Carrying a firearm while doing it is worse.

But the man had a walker.

He was old.

 

 

And whatever the reason — confusion, ego, loneliness, a lifetime of wanting to matter in a particular way — he had walked into a twenty-dollar dispute with a gold badge and a story, and the story had not survived thirty minutes of a deputy asking calm, reasonable questions.

Terry, for his part, had never claimed to be anything.

He had just driven a very convincing car.

He had just flipped a switch on I-25 when a Mustang was going too fast.

He had just done something that was not his job.

Both men ended up in handcuffs.

Both men had spent money and time and effort building something that looked like authority without being it.

One had bought a badge.

One had bought lights.

Both had found what they were looking for on Amazon.

And both had discovered, on the same general stretch of American road, that the thing about looking like law enforcement is this:

Law enforcement is also looking at you.

It is looking very carefully.

And it asks good questions.

And it has body cameras.

And it will, eventually, ask you to turn the lights on.

The lights were always the thing.

The lights were what started it and what ended it and what sat in an evidence locker in Colorado waiting for a sentencing date.

One hundred and twenty days for the lights.

Everything else was just the YouTube tutorial.

Everything else was just the putty knife and the sticker and the switch panel and the story that didn’t hold up.

Everything else was just a man who wanted, for one long moment on Interstate 25, to matter in traffic in a way that he could see.

The Mustang slowed down.

And then the blue and red went dark.

And Terry kept driving.

Right up until he didn’t.