The Vigilantes

[FIVE]

While Amanda Law had been in her first week of recovery, under the shrink’s orders simply to rest at home and to reconsider taking the anti-anxiety meds that he’d prescribed and that she’d steadfastly refused-“I don’t need to be popping Prozacs and I damn sure don’t need them turning my mind to putty so I just sit there and drool all over myself ”-her type A personality had her brain working overtime.

Dealing mentally with the abduction and the attempt at extortion had been bad enough. But then came the knowledge that the bastards who’d kidnapped her had made a regular habit of committing sexual assaults and, worse, their leader had just killed one teenage Honduran girl-an illegal immigrant whom he’d forced into prostitution.

Naturally, logically, all that had caused her to consider her own mortality-How close had he been to killing again? He certainly threatened me-and then that of Matt.

And in the process of working through what-if scenarios-What happens if we continue seeing each other? What happens if we get married and move into that vine-covered cottage with the white picket fence that Matt loves to mention? And then what happens if he stays on with the department?-she’d come up with, as her father the cop had taught her to do, a worst-case scenario.

Amanda explained all this-and more-to Matt in great detail. And then handed him the absolute worst case as it had manifested itself to her: as an obituary.

Amanda had written the obit as if she were Mickey O’Hara, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who was well respected by both police rank and file and brass. Over the years, Matt and the wiry Irishman ten years his senior had even become fairly close friends.

Amanda had gotten a great deal of the details for the obit from searches on the Internet, mostly from the Bulletin’s online archive of articles, many of which had been articles written by O’Hara. The rest of the details had been provided by Matt’s sister. Amy Payne had never liked that her brother was a cop, and had been more than happy to fill in any gaps for her old college dorm suitemate.

Payne thought that Amanda had done a helluva job putting together the obit. He hadn’t been able to shake it from his mind, which was no surprise, considering the subject:

The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line: KILLED IN THE LINE OF DUTY

Homicide Sergeant Matthew M. Payne, 31, Faithfully Served Family and Philly-and Paid the Ultimate Price

By Michael J. O’Hara

Staff Writer, The Philadelphia Bulletin

Photographs Courtesy of the Family and Michael J. O’Hara

PHILADELPHIA-The City of Brotherly Love grieves today at the loss of one of its finest citizens and police officers. Sergeant Matthew Mark Payne, a nine-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Department and well known as the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line, was gunned down last week in a Kensington alleyway as he dragged out a fellow officer who’d been wounded in an ambush.

Payne’s heroic act amid a barrage of bullets sealed, right up until his last breath, his long-held reputation as a brave, loyal, and honorable officer and gentleman.

Friends and family say that part of what made Payne such an outstanding civil servant, one that personified the department’s motto of Honor, Integrity, Sacrifice, was that he didn’t have to do it.

He chose to do so.

A Family That Served-and Sacrificed

When, almost a decade ago, Payne graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, he could have followed practically any professional path other than law enforcement.

He’d enjoyed a privileged background, brought up in upscale Wallingford, in all the comfort that a Main Line life afforded. After attending prep school at Episcopal Academy, then completing his studies at U of P, he was expected to pursue a law degree and, perhaps, join his adoptive father’s law practice, the prestigious firm of Mawson, Payne, Stockton, McAdoo amp; Lester.

Instead, Matt Payne chose something else: He decided that he should defend his country.

He signed recruitment papers with the United States Marine Corps, only to discover that a minor condition with his vision barred him from joining the Corps.

Determined to serve in some other capacity, Payne joined the Philadelphia Police Department.

Again, he didn’t have to. If anything, Matt Payne had a pass. But, again, he chose to.

A pass, because his biological father, Sergeant John F. X. Moffitt, known as Jack, was killed in the line of duty, too-shot dead while responding to a silent burglar alarm at a gasoline station. And Jack Moffitt’s brother, Captain Richard C. “Dutch” Moffitt, commanding officer of the department’s elite Highway Patrol, had been killed as well while trying to stop a robbery at the Waikiki Diner on Roosevelt Avenue.

Payne’s decision to join the police department came only months after his Uncle Dutch was killed. Many believed he joined in order to avenge the deaths of his father and uncle, and to prove that the condition that kept him out of the Corps would not keep him from being a good cop.

“Frankly, all that scared the hell out of us,” said Dennis V. “Denny” Coughlin, who recently retired as first deputy commissioner of police, but who was a chief inspector at the time Payne joined the department.

Coughlin had been best friends with Jack Moffitt at his death, and took upon himself the sad duty of delivering the tragic news to Matt’s mother-then pregnant with Matt-that she’d been widowed.

“I can confess now that when Matty came to the department,” a visibly upset Coughlin added, “I tried to protect him. I sure as hell didn’t want to have to knock on his mother’s door with the news that now Jack’s son had been killed on the job, too. Unfortunately, that duty fell last week to First Deputy Commissioner of Police Peter Wohl.”

New Cop, Hero Cop

After graduating from the Police Academy, there was no question that Matt Payne was becoming both a good cop and a respected one.

“But no matter how hard we tried throughout his career,” said Peter Wohl, to whom Payne was first assigned as an administrative assistant when Wohl ran Special Operations, “Matt wound up in the thick of things, bullets flying. That said, all his shootings were found to be righteous ones.”

Before Payne had even put in six months on the job, he had already drawn his pistol. It had happened when he was off duty and had come across a van that fit the description of the one used by the criminal the newspapers had labeled the Northwest Serial Rapist. When the driver tried to run him down, Payne shot him in the head. A young woman, trussed up and naked in the back of the vehicle, was saved from becoming the rapist’s next victim. And headlines hailed Matt Payne as a hero.

The next incident happened during an operation that this writer covered.

Matt Payne had been assigned to provide protection for me in an alleyway that was supposed to be a safe distance from where tactical teams were staging to arrest a gang who had committed murder while robbing Goldblatt’s Department Store.

“We thought that in having Matt sit on Mick,” Wohl explained, “we could keep Mick out of our way and at the same time keep Matt far from any gunplay.”

They were wrong.

As this writer reported then, one of the men the cops were trying to arrest came into the alleyway and began shooting. Matt Payne, his forehead grazed by a bullet, returned fire and killed the shooter.

The following day, on the front page of the Bulletin, the photograph I took of a bloodied Matt Payne holding his pistol and standing over the dead shooter appeared with this writer’s firsthand account of Payne’s heroic actions.

The photograph’s headline read: “Officer M. M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

A Shining-but Brief-Career

Promotion followed, but so, too, did more gunfire.

Payne became romantically involved with a young woman named Susan Reynolds and then discovered that a sorority sister of hers had become caught up with a terrorist named Bryan Chenowith, who was the target of a nationwide manhunt by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In an attempt to trap Chenowith, Payne asked Reynolds to lure her friend to a diner in hopes that the fugitive would follow and the FBI’s special agent in charge in Philadelphia could nab him. However, the fugitive brought with him a. 30-caliber carbine rifle and shot up the parking lot.

Susan Reynolds took a bullet to the head and died in Payne’s arms.

Later, Matt Payne quietly admitted to a very few that the experience haunted him beyond anything he’d ever known.

Payne dealt with it as best he could, mostly by losing himself in his work. And that he did well.

When he was promoted to sergeant and transferred to the Homicide Unit, Matt Payne was given Badge Number 471, which previously had been worn by Sergeant John “Jack” F. X. Moffitt, his father.

Other dramatic incidents occurred-too many to be included here-but one of the most recent was among the most memorable, when the Wyatt Earp of the Main Line again found himself involved in a foot chase-and a shoot-out-with a murderer.

Payne happened to be at Temple University Hospital when Jesus Jimenez, a nineteen-year-old gang member, snuck into the hospital’s third-floor Burn Unit and executed a patient.

When Jimenez fled the floor, Payne pursued him out onto the streets, ultimately wounding Jimenez in the thigh before he got away.

Jimenez, it turned out, belonged to a group led by Juan Paulo Delgado, a Texican, age twenty-one. And the assassination in the hospital was only a part of Delgado’s reign of terror-one that stretched from the streets of Philadelphia to the dirt trails of the Texas-Mexico border.

When Delgado abducted Dr. Amanda Law for ransom, Payne, Detective Anthony Harris, and Sergeant Jim Byrth of the legendary Texas Rangers law-enforcement agency were already hunting him. Thery were accompanied by a confidential informant.

Acting on a tip from the informant, the group tracked Delgado to a dilapidated row house on Hancock Street in Kensington. The policemen confronted the occupants-Jimenez, Delgado, and their associate Omar Quintanilla-in an exchange that eventually left Delgado and Quintanilla dead. Payne and his associates rescued Dr. Law, who was found in the kitchen, her head covered by a pillowcase, her ankles and wrists bound by duct tape to a chair, and the arrests of the members of Delgado’s gang quickly followed.

And so now we come to today: One final time we declare Matt Payne a hero.

This courageous, dedicated son of Philadelphia gave the city his all in last week’s gun battle and selfless act in which he put down a pair of vicious criminals and saved a fellow officer.

May he rest in peace.

“We know that Matt will always be a hero to the decent and law-abiding citizens of Philadelphia,” said his deeply grieving wife, Dr. Amanda Law Payne, as she held their toddler daughter on her hip and as their twin sons clung to her legs following a memorial service that overflowed with attendees. “But first and foremost, he was our family’s hero. While we must move forward, our children and I shall never ever forget that.”

Matthew Mark Payne is survived by his loving wife of five years, Mrs. Amanda Law Payne; his sons, Brewster Cortland Payne III and John Francis Xavier Moffitt Payne, age four; his daughter, Mandy Law Payne, age two; his sister, Dr. Amelia Payne; his parents, Mr. and Mrs. B. C. Payne II; and numerous other relatives and friends.

The family requests that, in lieu of flowers, memorials be made in Matthew Mark Payne’s name to the Widow amp; Orphan Fund at the Fraternal Order of Police, Lodge #5, 1336 Spring Garden Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123.

Matt remembered slowly folding the sheets of paper, then handing it back to her.

She smiled weakly as tears welled, then trickled down her rosy cheeks.

Softly, she said, “Life is short, baby. Maybe too short.”