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49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)

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It’s easy to get bored at a “classic” office job, so every now and then it’s good to explore what work can be like for folks who have to be “out there.” There is a reason that detective and police dramas are a staple of TV, since they really do sometimes have to deal with situations that most of us would consider once in a lifetime.
We’ve gathered some of the most creepy, weird and unusual experiences police officers have had. Be warned, some of these stories are very dark. So get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote the most interesting and be sure to share your thoughts in the comments section down below.

#1

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
I responded to a report of an unresponsive infant. When I arrived, all the family members were standing around casually in the front yard pointing into the house. I found the baby in the back room laying on her back on a bare mattress. I started CPR, but realised the baby was probably already deceased. We rushed her out to the arriving ambulance hoping they had a way to bring her back. I learned she was the mother's second suspicious SIDS death, and I had her other children removed from her care. The difficult part was when I left the scene and went to the ER to see what came of the situation. As I walked in and asked where she was, an ER nurse walked over to me and handed me the deceased baby swaddled in a blanket and told me to wait for someone to show me to the morgue. So I'm standing there in the ER in uniform holding what everyone thinks is a live infant, but rather, an infant corpse, and several people stop by wanting to see her and commenting on how cute it is to see an officer holding a baby. I just smiled, but it k****d me inside. I was ushered back to the morgue after what felt liked an eternity, and told I had to wait with the baby until the medical examiner arrived. They took the blankets off and laid her on a stainless steel gurney and left me alone with her again. I lounged around the morgue for about an hour waiting. By the time I got home several hours after the end of my shift (because this call came out 15 minutes before the end of my 10 hour shift) I layed down on my bed and cried for a long time. My young daughter was in daycare, and my wife at work. I really needed to hold both of them, so the house felt incredibly empty. My daughter was only slightly older than the infant, and when I was looking at her earlier, I kept seeing my own daughter. I didn't get any sleep at all before going back in for the next shift later that night.
59points

#2

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Got a call for a missing child, got to the home to find the mother highly distressed, and not sure what to do. I called in everyone to first search the home and property. I decided to search the backyard since it was a large wooded lot with no visible fence. After about 10 minutes I found the boy, he was caught on an old chain link fence in the woods that was blocked by a bunch of trees, so you couldn't see it from the house. He had basically gotten strangled to death on the fence, he must have been climbing on it, fell, and got his hooded sweatshirt caught on it.

The worst part for me was having to call it in on the radio, knowing the mother might hear it inside from one of the other officers radio.
40points

#3

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Working 3rd shift on Halloween night, I'm out by one of our smaller lakes just outside the city limits (kids love to go out and drink) which is surrounded by some very nice houses. Going through the neighborhood each of the roads ends at a small two lane road that surrounds the lake. I'm slowing to the stop sign and already starting to look to my right to make the turn when my headlights start tracing the rock wall that surrounds the lake I catch something out of the corner of my eye in one of the large trees that dots the walk path.

I back up to see what it was and I see a guy hanging. At first I thought it was a Halloween decoration (the neighborhood is REALLY into decorating for every holiday) so I stop, get out and as soon as my flashlight hits him I realize - nope, no decoration - he dead.

As I'm standing there getting ready to call it in, I notice a gaggle of kids coming down the street trick or treating (s**t) As soon as they see my car they start heading my way faster so I book it back up the block to meet the parent walking with them and tell her she needs to take the long way around the block the other way - she can see it on my face I'm not kidding.

Turns out he was a 20 year old that was devastated about his girlfriend breaking up with him and she lived in the last house on that block where she would see him the next morning when she looked out her window.
34points

#4

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Grandmother's story. Retired homicide detective. Couple call police because they are missing their baby. Grandmother and partner show up to investigate the house. It's just the husband, wife, newborn and dog that reportedly live there. Husband is angry and wife is visibly shook; understandable, they are missing their child. My grandmother's partner find bits of blood near crib, as well as more blood near the dog house outside. After pressing the couple, mainly the wife, they come to find out that in a fit of rage from not getting any sleep from the baby crying, husband picks the newborn up and smacks him against the wall repeatedly until the baby stops crying. They didn't know what to do so they fed the now bludgeoned baby to their German shepherd. My grandma has seen some s**t.
32points

#5

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Not a cop myself but my dad is and I asked him this one time.
He told me it was when he went to this one house because a woman had called and said that men were breaking into the house.
He gets there and he said it was immediately very clear that the woman was not exactly all together mentally. He said she kept mumbling things and was very jumpy and skittish, not to mention that every single wall of her house apparently had at least 6 or 7 crosses on it, if not more.
He calms her down, checks around the house for any signs of entry or just anything weird and there's absolutely nothing that would indicate that anyone had been trying to or had been successful in breaking in. He said she followed him around the entire time and would point to things, like a doorknob or window latches, and say "Oh that's not where I left it!! That's how they got in!!!"
He said the whole thing was fairly eerie, considering he was at this woman's house in the middle of the night, surrounded by crosses and listening to her mumble on about random s**t.
To make her feel better, he did a sweep of the whole house to see if there was anyone else in side, which there wasn't.
He said the one thing that made it creepy for him was the fact that every few minutes she'd say something like "Oh they're here again," or "He's right behind us, I can feel it".
30points

#6

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
My Father-in-law is sitting beside me so I asked him; he is a retired sheriff and was a deputy before that. He was the first responder to an accident. A truckload of farm workers were coming back from the fields. The truck went over a hump in an interception and a little girl in the back of the truck flew out and landed head first on the pavement. My FIL held her as she moaned and eventually died in his arms. He says he still hears her sounds in his head all these years later.
29points

#7

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Man this was probably 2010, 2011... I was really new. Call came I'm as an "unknown problem", basically the 911 was so f****d up, even dispatch didn't know what to call it. Turned it this guy had just m******d his step father and then walked to his grand parents house to k**l them as well. He stabbed his grandmother through the eye with a Rambo style bowey knife, one that had the compass in the pommel of the handle.

He missed her brain by about an eighth of an inch, so she did not die. Instead she came running out of the house when we got there, knife sticking out of her f*****g eye, and the compass was spinning around because she was moving. My brain literally went "that's not real" and I went past her, along with several other cops, before the sergeant was like "what in the actual f**k are you guys doing?"

She survived. We caught the guy in a stroke of pure luck. Elderly woman with a massive hunting knife for an eye, definitely the creepiest thing I can remember seeing.
29points

#8

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
My uncle was a sergeant and had to be called several times out to a house for domestic a***e. This older guy had some young 18 year old he would pay for the guy to swallow certain objects like paper clips and human hair. The kid would poop it out into a bag and the older guy would sift through the feces like a god d**n treasure hunt for the items. He would then put them in an envelope and file them...


Edit: the domestic a***e had nothing to do with the p*o treasure hunt. I don't think it's illegal, just super creepy.
28points

#9

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Got a call that someone wasnt answering their Phone or the doorbell. We got to the house and noticed that every window was blinded by either curtains or pieces of paper. We rang the doorbell and yelled through the letterbox but there was no answer. We opened the door and got inside. In the house it looked like someone just had lunch. There was bread on the table and juice or milk in the glasses. Childrens toys scattered all around. Then I saw a note that gave me the chills. It was a s*****e note. As the door was locked from the inside, the person had to be in the house. We checked room by room and my heartbeat was at 300% when I checked the bathroom. Preparing myself for slit wrists or throats I opened the door slowly, but there was nothing. Finally one more room left which was the attic. We walked slowly up the stairs and we found the resident there, hanging from a beam. I will never forget the adrenaline I had, the scene in the livingroom or the resident I found.
28points

#10

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Got a report of a missing husband. He told his wife and family of 6 children that he was going to get his tires changed, but never returned, and this was 12 hours ago. They had purchased another house in a neighboring community, and the relationship with the wife was under pressure, so the wife assumed he was staying at the other house, and claimed he would never k**l himself.

The strange thing about this report though was that he emptied his personal bank account into his wife's this morning as well. The wife explained this off saying that they recently had a fight about finances, and he agreed that he was bad at money and maybe they should just have a joint account that she controls.

On a hunch, I asked his 14 year old boy if there were any areas in the mountains nearby that his father enjoyed going, and the son identified a road about 10 miles away. It was nearing midnight, but I decided to drive to the top of this old and abandoned forest service road. As I drove through the snow and started to climb the road, I felt a gut feeling that I would 100% find this guy up there either thinking about or already acted out a s*****e. The snow-laid gravel road had some sign of travel, but no real indication of how fresh the vehicle tracks could be. As I reached the top of the road after an hour of travel I was honestly surprised that I did not find his black truck.

I spent the drive back down thinking about "gut-feelings" and how they are unreliable, but that I somehow felt different about this one. As I traveled up the road, I did notice over a dozen smaller roads branching off, but they were not mapped, and I had already spent too much time on a single occurrence in a busy city with too few police officers. Nonetheless, I decided to check a single of these secondary roads, and about 3/4's of the way down I picked a road at random to check, and sure enough my headlights lit up the back end of a black truck about 100 yards past the first corner. Even if I hadn't memorized the licence plate beforehand, I wouldn't have had to run it - it was clearly his. I radioed that I had found the truck, parked my vehicle, and traveled the 20 feet to his truck with my heart beating like I was doing it at a sprint rather than a normal walk.

What I found inside was a mess of brains and blood caused by a self-inflicted shotgun wound under the chin. I'll save you from the description.

There was just something about that gut-feeling while traveling this abandoned and quiet mountain road, followed by a sense of being tricked by the gut-feeling, then finding out it was true by discovering such a gruesome scene, having to wait 3 hours next to his truck waiting for body removal, and then to end it all by having to go to the family who was expecting good news to deliver to them the worst news possible, that makes me feel creeped out to this day.
25points

#11

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Not a cop but my dads friend is and got totally hammered at our house a few days ago and told us about one of his first rough calls was a little girl who had came to school with hair missing from her head and apparently her dad a****d her and ripped it from her head (who knows how and why) and so police got involved and when the parents didn't come to school they went to the house and found the mom so badly bloodied and with both eyes so swollen she couldn't see out of them. Her daughter couldn't even recognize her. Dad had apparently not wanted her to go to school because he knew teachers would get suspicious but mom sent her anyways. He woke up in the morning and found out she had sent her and just went apeshit on her. Dad had locked himself in his room upstairs.F****r jumped out the window and made it pretty far, until he ran in to a K-9 unit and tried to make a run for it and the K9 tore his legs to shreds. Never been so happy to hear the a*****e got what he deserved. Not a happy ending for the girl though.

Update: wow this blew up a bit. My little sister goes to school with the girl and there was assembly's at school to raise awareness for domestic and child a***e. She is still in care of her mom and it turns out she's pretty normal. It's just that her dad and devolved in to deep alcoholism and is pleading guilty for several different charges.
25points

#12

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
We responded to a burglary alarm at a mortuary and found that one of the rear doors was left open. Policy now dictates that the entire building needs to be cleared (searched) to confirm that it was a false alarm (which most are). It's the middle of the night and totally dark. We use flashlights and never turn on lights. We walk into one of the rooms and see a body on a table. It appeared that it was waiting to be processed (possibly embalmed) by the mortician. It smelled like a mildly decomposing body. Suddenly I see a shadow to my right and I shine my light there and find nothing out of the ordinary. I immediately smell a really strong whiff of perfume blow by me. The search was completed more expiditiously than normal after that...nothing was found.
23points

#13

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Not a cop, but a correctional officer in Texas. One time a guy slit the forearm side of his elbows (where it bends). He laid there in a big puddle of his own blood. I was one of the responders that day.

I'll never forget it. As soon as you entered the cell, the smell just hit you. Blood has a strong metallic smell, which I never realized before. He'd been laying there awhile, so the blood had coagulated which again, I did not expect. As we lifted the barely conscious guy out of the blood, the blood fell off his body in chunks, like Jello.

It was pretty disturbing because I didn't expect any of it nor was I able to mentally prepare for it. We're not really medically trained, so all of it was completely surprising to me.
22points

#14

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Not a cop but want to thank the cop who was so kind to me yesterday after I found a deceased person during a wellness check.

The officer was very understanding and patient while I got all my s**t together long enough to help take care of the situation.

This was a moment I was thankful not to feel alone or afraid in. Thank you, cop, for being so nice to me.
22points

#15

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
So one day I get a call that there was someone in an old woman's house. So I head over to the house. Old woman meets me out front of her house and tells me someone turned her tv off.

I think to myself oh ok poor lady lives by herself. I go in the house and sure enough her tv is off I search her house for anyone; nothing . So I go back out to talk to her and she is freaking out how someone is in her house. So I tell her I'll go search again I go in the house again and announce myself xxxxxxx police department come out with your hands on your head and keep them there.

Nothing, at this point she's crying saying if no one is in the house why did my tv turn off?!?

I tell her let's go inside and see if we can figure it out.

I spend the next 15 or so minutes trying to figure the tv situation out.

I then realize no lights are on in the house, I had been using my flashlight the whole time and never realized it!!!

Power went out.
22points

#16

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
My cousin is a cop and he responded to a call on Valentine's Day night. A 12 year old girl called in to say her mother had blown her brains out in the living room. I guess her and her brother were getting ready for dinner and the mom just shot herself.
He said the creepy thing about it was dinner all set up, drinks on the table and suddenly she shot herself. Kids were sitting outside when he arrived, to this day I can't imagine Valentine's Day for them. But I know that is something that stuck with him seeing that.
21points

#17

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
I once went to a two fatality car crash. The cars had collided head on in a 55mph zone.

One of the drivers had left the house s******l, and it was surmised that he picked a car out at random and went straight into it.

I had spoken with that man several weeks prior and seeing his skeleton in the burned up car was a little creepy.

I won't describe the rest of the scene, but the worst part of it is...

This was Christmas Day. Not a merry Christmas at all.
21points

#18

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
I know I'm late to the thread, but this is probably one of the more interesting (for lack of a better word) stories I have to share. Please don't continue if you don't want gruesome details.

I was an MP in the Army many years ago, and I believe it was 2005 when this happened. Shortly after our shift started we were called to secure a crime scene in one of the on-post housing areas for lower enlisted folks. When we arrived on scene we were given a very vague overview of what occurred by the first respondents and CID investigators present. A 19 year old infantryman, fresh off deployment, brutally stabbed his young wife to death. I think she was maybe 17 or 18 years old. Too d**n young either way.

We were obviously given very little information because the investigation had just started, but while securing the scene from the exterior we were able to see the aftermath of everything that had happened through the windows and opened doors, and what we were able to see was straight out of a horror film.

The back door of the house was left open and one of the first things you noticed on approach was a bunch of tiny bloody paw prints on the back porch. Looking further into the house you could see dark blood stains on the carpet that looked like a body had been dragged across the floor, again with tiny bloody paw prints scattering the scene. (Turns out they had a tiny dog that ended up roaming through the aftermath scattering the tracks around.)

Going to the front of the house and looking through the kitchen window is where we saw the real bad stuff. The body had already been removed by the time we were able to get this view, but you could tell where she finally died. There was a giant pool of blood on the floor with what I could only call a "halo" of kitchen knives in a circle around where her head was. Blood was absolutely everywhere. On the fridge was a note scrawled in blood that said "Satan said she deserved it"...I absolutely s**t you not.

Several days of securing that scene later they finally officially closed it down and boarded up the home. The body was being held at the post morgue and we ended up needing to put a guard in the morgue to secure the body until the formal autopsy could be completed. I was the lucky son of a b***h that pulled body duty when the autopsy occurred. I was asked to sit in on the procedure and it was easily the most horrifically graphic thing i have ever, and hopefully will ever, witness.

This poor girl was destroyed. Her husband stabbed her something like 50-60 times. The first thing you noticed was the meat cleaver stuck in her neck. They just left it there. Just above the cleaver her lower jaw was basically gone. I couldn't tell you how it was removed, but her tongue was just resting on her neck. The second thing you noticed was the absolutely *perfect* pentagram that was carved into her chest. Ill never forget how perfect that circle was, and how the angles of the star looked like they were made with a protractor. This s***o *took his time* to do this to her. The third thing I noticed was her hand. It looked as if she had put her hand up in front of her face to block a strike and caught the cleaver across the palm. Three of her four fingers were dangling from a flap of skin barely still hanging on. This all seemed too much but it got worse.

As the medical personnel continued to catalog the damage, they noted what I think was the absolute worst of it all. I apologize again for the detail. They ended up pulling out a 14" long knife sharpener out of her v****a. The hilt of which wasn't even visible from the exterior of the body. He had inserted this into her and then they believe he had literally kicked it into her. They believe she had already been dead by the point this happened. I don't know how, but that was somehow almost relieving to hear at that point.

The week or so securing that scene was creepy for sure, but the several hours of time spent in that autopsy made me question humanity, and really changed my perspective on life as a whole. Two combat tours in Iraq, and this was probably the worst thing I had experienced during my time. It's actually really odd putting it in to words for the first time so many years later.

Didn't intend for this to be so long. Sorry for that.
21points

#19

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Ex-cop.

I worked in a H**h Tech Task force agency conducting computer forensics investigations. Lots of child p**n. LOTS. Anyways, we were doing a multi-agency search warrant sweep in large metro area in California. We serve a search warrant for distributing/possessing CP at a residence in a semi-decent area, and the suspect fit the prototypical hollywood 'child m*lestor' look.

He lived with his disabled wife, no kids, and she had mobility issues (mostly stayed down stairs, and had not been upstairs for years). We go upstairs, and this guy has a legitimate m**********n-station set up in one of the bedrooms that had an outside padlock on it.

It was dark, the windows were covered, and he had baby dolls with their a******s cut out all over the room and some of their mouths cut out for impromptu baby s*x doll. Some of the heads were removed and scattered on the floor. This guy had serious issues.
19points

#20

49 Police Officers Share The Most Horrifying Things They’ve Witnessed On Duty (Trigger Warning)
Do paramedics count? I responded to a call from a father who needed help applying medicinal cream to his 13 year old daughters v****a to heal her STD. He said he tried to do it himself but it was "swollen shut".... I just brought her to the hospital.
19points
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