100 Interviews

#56. MICHAEL ROSENBLUTH - “Someone who has had a lot of reconstructive surgery.”

Photo courtesy of katu.com

When officer Michael Rosenbluth was in the hospital, two Haitian aides came into his room to pray over his injured body.

They wanted to touch his hands as they spoke to God, they said, because Michael was a miracle.

The story of what happened to Michael, who goes by “Rosey,” in July of 2006 garnered some media attention in South Florida, where I grew up. That’s how I first heard about him. Rosey was “that cop that was hit by a car so hard he went over the highway overpass.” He dangled there, near death.

Around the same time, Rosey and my father were becoming friends. I heard the story about the cop in the news, and then my dad told me it was Rosey. For years, I kept Rosey in the back of my mind. His story broke my heart and fascinated me. I wanted to interview him, but always felt too awkward to approach him about what’s probably the worst moment of his life. He was my dad’s friend and he’d suffered a lot. It felt intrusive. When he heard about 100 Interviews, Rosey told my dad he’d be interested in telling his story in full for the first time. 

Rosey grew up in Queens, NY and became a cop at the insistence of his police officer older brother. “Fire trucks and cop cars always attracted me,” he says. “And I guess it was better than what I was doing.” He doesn’t elaborate, but from what I gather, it wasn’t exactly productive.

He retired in New York at age 42 and moved to Florida with his then-wife and two kids, where he started working again as a police officer on the night shift in Pompano.

Four years later, he had just finished a 10:30 p.m. until 6:30 a.m. shift with his fellow officer and friend, Shannon Belanger, when, driving onto the highway, they noticed an accident in the left lane by a 100 ft.-high overpass. It had just happened and the people waved both cop cars over. They needed help.

“We could have just went right by them, but we didn’t,” Rosey says. “We stopped and did the right thing.” Later, he says about cops, “I feel like if you have it in your blood, then you have it in your blood to help people.”

Even though they were off-duty, Rosey and Shannon pulled up to block off zooming traffic from the fresh accident scene. Shannon went up to help the people and Rosey started setting up road flares. Initially, he just tossed them into the roadway because he was afraid to get too close to the cars zipping by.

It was then Rosey realized where they were. A year earlier, a Ft. Lauderdale police officer had died on that same overpass. He’d misjudged the height of the drop and jumped it to avoid a perp he thought had a gun. He’d fallen to his death. As Rosey stood in the left lane, the height freaked him out too. It was 7:20 a.m., rush hour and the speed limit was around 65 mph.

“It’s a difference when you’re up in the air especially with cars buzzing by you,” Rosey says. He worried drivers wouldn’t see the lights of his cop car or the flares in time to swerve. “A lot of the time, people are on autopilot, when they get on the highway,” he says.

His anxiety was briefly quelled when a big Road Ranger truck pulled up about fifty feet behind Rosey’s cop car. With the truck behind him, Rosey felt safe enough to step out further into the lane, turn his back on traffic, and instead of tossing them, start propping the road flares up on their wire legs. He says this was probably his big mistake.

He stops talking for a moment. “Honestly,” he says. “I got a knot in my stomach right now talking about it. My chest is a little bit tight, and my stomach is in a knot. But I’m trying to talk about it.”

My father, sitting off to the side, says he feels like Rosey is just recounting the details of what happened, like it happened to someone else. I think my dad’s being too critical and I want to let Rosey off the hook a bit if he’s really so anxious so I say, as a journalist, I know that policemen aren’t the best at answering personal questions.

Rosey says, “Well, I’ve also learned never to trust a reporter.” Touche.

At the scene, Rosey heard a noise behind him. When he turned, a small two-seater Honda convertible was coming at him sideways on the passenger side, between the tire and the windshield.

Everything went into slow motion. Rosey waited for impact and then pushed up, trying to pop himself over the hood. The Honda hit him on his left side, crashing them both into his patrol car. Then, the car spun and hit the wall of the overpass, smashed. In seconds, Rosey was over the wall, clinging to the concrete under his armpit so he didn’t drop. His body hung in mid-air.

“Next thing I realize, I’m on the wrong side of the wall,” He says. Below him, there was a canal and a roadway. If he fell, he’d land on cement. If he let go, he would die.

The whole incident had taken 30 seconds. It happened so fast, that Rosey wondered if it was real. He looked up into the sunrise. The sky was misting and the pavement was wet. He went into shock.

The Road Ranger, a 53-year-old named Cesar Cintron, started blowing his horn. Rosey thinks the sky was breaking through the clouds, creating a white light.

“I saw my parents who were dead 30 years, and I pictured them standing on the grave site, right next to each other, with my headstone that says ‘Rosenbluth’ on it,” he says. “I don’t know if I imagined it,” he adds, cautiously.

“I don’t think it matters if you imagined it, truthfully,” I say.

“That’s how I’ve started thinking about it,” he replies.

“It was real if it really happened to you,” I say. Rosey says he feels like it’s a cliche — the “white light” experience before death.

“The next thing I know this other deputy is coming over the wall and yelling at me, ‘Rosey, I gotcha! I gotcha!’,” he says.

Shannon, 24 years old and about 6’1 and 180 lbs., wedged his hand in between Rosey’s belt. Rosey wasn’t sure. Rosey was 5’10 and 290 lbs. If he let go, Sean would go over the wall with him. “You need to start screaming for help, man! They said scream for help!”

He doesn’t remember saying this, but later, Shannon pointed out his use of “they.” Rosey thinks he was referring to his deceased parents. Or maybe, he says, he was just really out of it.

Cesar ran over and locked Rosey’s arm over the wall. Rosey was wearing bicycle shorts and one of the people in the initial accident grabbed him by his left leg and yanked him over the wall. Rosey screamed. “My hip is broken!” He tumbled over and laid on the wet ground, cars flying past and his bloody body shaking.

“I remember I’m laying on the floor in the left lane, they’re just whizzing by,” he says. He heard the woman driving, who had minor injuries, scream, “I didn’t even see him!” Later, her only repercussion was a ticket for careless driving. The 36-year-old woman had just finished a twelve hour shift as a nurse. She hadn’t been paying attention to the road. (She also never apologized to Rosey. He thinks she was too embarrassed, or was told not to by a lawyer.)

Rosey’s body went numb. For a while, Shannon later told him, he was yelling directions to everyone else from his place on the ground.

Next thing he knew, he was in an ambulance, screaming in pain. The numbness of his shock was wearing off. He was losing blood.

At the hospital, there were almost a hundred cops waiting. Rosey remembers telling his colonel, as he was being wheeled in, “Take care of Shannon. Shannon saved my life.”

He also told them to go get his 15-year-old son who was sleeping at Rosey’s apartment. His daughter, living in Kentucky, randomly called him while he was in the ER. When his ex-wife picked up, she knew immediately something was wrong.

At the hospital’s ICU, surgeons put a bolt through Rosey’s leg and a blood clot filter in his artery. Seven ribs on his right side were broken. Doctors cut Rosey’s stomach from bellybutton to hip and used five metal plates to repair the front of his crushed pelvis. During an X-ray, he counted twenty-two screws inside his body. The cap of the femur on his left leg had gone up through his pelvis, hard. Shards of pelvic bone should have shattered his organs, but somehow, they did not.

Before he could have a second surgery, Rosey got a blood infection and was moved to Rider Trauma Center. He was on a lot of morphine, and he remembers hallucinating that scorpions were crawling on the ceiling and that the tube in his throat was an alien.

Ten days went by in a daze as Rosey pushed his morphine pump over 92 times. His leg swelled up with fluid. He had another surgery three weeks later.

“I remember them trying to stand me up with the walker, and I remember being in so much pain that I just fell back on the bed,” he says. “They had to give me a shot of morphine while I was laying on the bed with my legs hanging off.”

His physical therapist told him they needed to start setting goals. Rosey told him he wanted to walk again. He’d also just finished motorcycle school. “I want to ride my motorcycle,” he told the therapist.

The therapist wasn’t on board. “Short-term goals,” he said. “I don’t see you walking normally again.”

Rosey was determined to get back on his bike. He started off lying on his bed with his foot on a piece of wood with wheels on it. He’d move his leg and put weight on his ankle, slowly gaining strength. It hurt a lot.

He stayed in the hospital for two months, and in rehabilitation at a place called Health South for three weeks. He left the hospital in a wheelchair, and for the first time since he was hit, he was on his own.

“I didn’t have any police escort home, nothing like that,” he says when I ask. I’m surprised.

When he got home, the equipment he needed hadn’t been delivered and none of his furniture was comfortable to sit on in his damaged condition. He stayed in his bed, which he couldn’t reach without a step stool. An aide came over for four hours a day to help him.

That first day, the aide never showed. Rosey was alone, in pain and incapacitated in his apartment.

“I actually called Health South, I was crying, like, ‘I gotta come back. I got nobody to help me,’” he says. He didn’t go back. When the aide wasn’t enough, his friends and his children helped. “Some days are better than others but I always have pain,” he says.

For example, one day, Rosey woke up and the pain was so bad, he rolled off his bed to the floor and laid there for an hour and a half. No one was home. He couldn’t reach his medication on the dresser or his telephone. When his daughter came home, he took a handful of Oxycodone and limped out to the car. She drove him to the hospital. He stayed four days, just for pain management.

A year later, Rosey attempted to ride a bicycle and couldn’t get his leg over without his son’s help. Slowly, he was able to ride the bike in his front yard, which, he says, felt like a big accomplishment. He couldn’t drive a car for about six months.

The battle hasn’t been all physical. Rosey never went back to work after the accident. He had two years to recover, but he’ll never be back to where he was.

“I really wanted to get back to work. I was trying to do push-ups and sit-ups and running to the best of my ability, which it wasn’t pretty,” he says. When the time came, Rosey knew he was in no shape to continue being a police officer. “I couldn’t feel safe protecting myself, or protecting somebody else,” he says.

Being a police officer was Rosey’s passion. Without it, he went into a depression.

“Giving back that badge?,” he says. “I just felt like the rug got pulled out from under me.”

He also had nightmares where he never propped himself on the hood and the car actually ran him over.

“I couldn’t close my eyes,” he says. “As soon as I started falling asleep, I’d jump up. Every time I would go to close my eyes, I would just panic. I remember when I looked out the window, there was a building right next to me, a part of the hospital, and, from where I was, I could see the roof. I actually had to keep the blinds closed, because every time I looked at the roof I’d picture myself hanging off of it.”

He saw a therapist for a while, but he says he never felt like it helped much.

Shannon and the Road Ranger received awards for saving Rosey’s life, and Rosey says that was the last time the media covered what happened to him. He’s had a lot of trouble getting the Broward Sheriff’s Offices attention or help, now that he no longer works there, even though he was injured in the line of duty.

Rosey received a personal injury settlement, one-third of which was used for medical bills. Rosey says that’s a Florida thing; in New York, an officer injured in the line of duty would never have to pay his own medical bills. He’s still involved in disputes with workman’s comp whenever he needs a procedure. Broward Country Risk Management handled everything, and Rosey almost never heard from the Broward County Sheriff’s Office again. “I felt kind of abandoned,” he says. “You’re out of sight, out of mind, you know.”

The police officers union didn’t help at all. The Employee Assistance Program didn’t help. The Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA) was also MIA. Rosey later attended a PBA meeting and told them, “I was in the hospital for three months. I never saw one of you guys come to the hospital and say, ‘How are you doing, do you need anything? I never saw a flower. Nobody contacted my family. I was on my own. You guys didn’t do nothing for me.”

Workman’s comp has a pace management company, Rosey says. It means there’s a higher authority telling them what to authorize or not authorize. The company’s job isn’t to care about the officers, he says: it’s to save the county money.

“You have somebody scrutinizing the doctor on whether you really need this or not,” Rosey says.  For example, it took eight months to approve the hip replacement Rosey had in January. Sometimes his attorney has to get on the phone and get him the procedures he needs.

Rosey’s condition is likely always going to need medical attention. He started a monthly support group for other officers who have trouble with workman’s comp. The opinion there is that there needs to be a liaison between the officers and the county, someone to make sure the injured officers, having suffered while serving their community, get what they need.

It’s been five years since he was hit, and this interview probably only covers 1/16th of Rosey’s story. He tells me people are always saying, “This is the guy that got hit! This is the guy that was hanging off the bridge.” It’s a weird, bleak sort of notoriety.

“Next thing I know people want me to tell the story, and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t wanna tell it no more,’” he says. “I can’t get over it. You keep on living it over and over again.”