This is what life looks like after seeing 1,000 bodies as an N.J. homicide detective – NJ.com
In 19 years as a homicide detective, Mike DeMaio estimates he’s seen about 1,000 dead bodies, people killed in a variety of ways and in various forms of decomposition.
About 1,000 people who were alive one minute and not the next, people whose lives took a violent turn in the most unforgiving, and sometimes capricious, way.
With that number of bodies comes the hundreds upon hundreds of times he broke the news to families, interviewed witnesses, interrogated suspects, and gathered and followed evidence.
For 19 years, he got up every morning to do it again, knowing the new day could be someone’s last, or the worst ever for their family.
He left his house every day, not knowing when he would return, and went to bed every night not knowing if he would get a full night sleep. Murder never rests, be it through domestic violence, nightclub fights or gang warfare for drug territory.
But of all the things DeMaio has seen, there is one thing, especially, he can’t unsee.
It was a thumb print, a deep indentation on a child’s neck.
“That one, I’ll never forget,” DeMaio said. “I kept thinking, what was that baby thinking as she fought for her life. What was going through that poor kid’s head.”
The girl was Kelly Reilly, 5, who was drowned with her sister, Meghan, 6, by their father, Thomas Reilly. Meghan had graduated from kindergarten that morning in June 2007. Both girls were wearing their soccer team shirts and were waiting for their mother to take them to a birthday party. A happy day, gone incomprehensibly mad.
“We found him hanging in the attic,” DeMaio said. “He should have done that first.
“That was a tough one. I thought, how could that happen? How could a father do that to his children?”
DeMaio retired in May. This was the first summer of city violence he sat out in two decades.
“I don’t miss it,” he said. “I miss the guys, but I’d had enough.”
He went out as a deputy chief of detectives for Essex County and the commanding officer of the homicide task force. The Essex homicide unit handles Newark, which on typical years, has more murders than Camden, Paterson and Jersey City combined.
In the living room of DeMaio’s home, impeccably renovated over time with his own two hands, are pictures of his family through the years. All celebrations and smiles.
In one corner, there is his Newark police rookie picture and his retirement plaque, the only evidence of DeMaio’s day-to-day life. Among the pictures is a framed multi-colored expression.
It says, “The sign of a beautiful person is that they see beauty in others.”
One thousand bodies equal 1,000 killers. How do you see beauty after all that?
“Twenty years in homicide,” DeMaio said. “Yeah, it does something to you.”
The worst of it were the images, especially in the murders of children and teens.
“Sometimes I’d picture a murder scene at night, and my kids were in it,” he said. “Like it was one of them lying there dead. The kid murders were the worst. You have to deal with those demons.”
He never saw a counselor.
“That would be weak,” he said, the very typical police or military response.
Instead, it was his faith and his wife, Carol, who walked him through the rough times.
“When you see a body, especially a child, you have to believe their soul has been released to God,” he said. “You have to believe they are in God’s hands.”
In the physical world, he has relied on his wife.
“I know it’s cliche but for us it’s really true,” he said. “She is my best friend. She put up with it for a lot of years.”
Carol DeMaio comes from a police family. Her father is a retired Newark cop. Her brother is still on the force.
“Believe me, I heard all the stories,” she said of the problems that follow some police home. Drinking. Abuse. Cheating. Divorce. “I never worried a minute about Michael that way. He’s very grounded. He’s a family man. These kids couldn’t have had a better father.”
She does say, though, that the job consumed him.
“He used to golf and he stopped that,” she said.
He was also an avid hunter.
“I gave it up,” he said. “I’ve seen enough killing.”
For two decades, the killing kept coming.
“This goes back to Cain and Abel,” DeMaio said.
Some cases were closed quickly. Some never were. Because of those, DeMaio never took a day off.
“He was always on the phone,” she said. “We’d go to Hersey Park, he’s on the phone. At Disney, he’s on the phone. I’d say, Michael, put down the phone. Your family is here.”
Mike DeMaio admits to it.
“Sometimes, I just wasn’t present in my own life,” he said. “My mind was always back on the job, thinking about the case.”
Another aspect of seeing what DeMaio saw in his daily life left him vulnerable to “catastrophic thinking” linked to post-traumatic stress disorder.
“You get overprotective and overbearing,” he said. “One of my boys would get hurt in football, and I’d say, ‘Maybe you should quit before you get paralyzed.’
“When my daughter got her driver’s license, I brought her pictures of drunk driving accidents. Not just once, a bunch of times. I said, ‘Look, this is what can happen.’ When she went out, I would be on top of her. ‘Where are you going? Who are you going with? What time are you coming home?’ I was relentless. I was driving everyone nuts. And it created tension with my wife. She’d say, ‘Take it easy, will you? Leave the kids alone.'”
Carol DeMaio said at first she would say, “Are you nuts? Showing this to our kids. But later I went along with it,” she said. “In the world he was in, naturally he always thought the worst.”
The first time Mike DeMaio returned to that world was last month, being interviewed for this column. His first year in homicide was 1998, a dozen years before the Essex task force was formed. Behind the wheel of his SUV, driving into the hard streets of Newark, is not a pleasant trip down memory lane.
“Broadway Homes,” he said as he passed the site in North Newark. “We did a lot of jobs in there. Lot of drugs, lot of turf war.”
On another block.
“Chicken shack robbery. A guy was killed.”
On another block.
“We had a guy dumped on the street in broad daylight. How does nobody see a guy dumped on the street.”
On another block.
“The suspect got shot. We tracked his blood like we were tracking a deer.”
This was less than a half-mile into the city.
“I could go through the city and say, I had a job here, I had a job there,” he said. “Countless jobs.”
He stopped outside Central Avenue High School where rival drug gangs had a running gun battle. One man was killed, and another seriously injured.
“They were using 7.62s (assault rifles),” he said. “We had shell casings for a block and a half. It was crazy. And I remember thinking, ‘We’re outgunned.'”
All those jobs all had two things in common, DeMaio said. The shock and despair of the family and the assault on the human belief that life is precious.
“A human life was taken. That is the ultimate crime,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it was a drug dealer or a gang guy. His mother didn’t give birth to a drug dealer or gang guy. My job was to find out who killed him, who took that human life.
“When we would go in to notify the families, the first thing the mother or grandmother always said was, ‘Please, find out who did this.’ You’d feel responsible.”
With all he saw, all those bodies, DeMaio said he never got jaded and lost sight of people’s loss.
“Being a homicide cop is the pinnacle of police work,” he said. “It’s got to be in you. When you see all this senseless death, you work to set things right. You do it for the families. You imagine what it would be like if you were them. You have to want to set things right. If you don’t, you don’t belong in the business.”
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