A Tale of Two Police Officers: Part Two

By Michael Gold

A young idiot threw a firework at Officer Jeffrey Muendel’s head on July 4, 2022, and it changed Muendel’s life forever.

The explosion caused significant skeletal, sensory and neurological damage.

“It was some sort of mortar,” Muendel, now retired, explained to me, as I did research on what life is like for village police officers in Westchester County. “The explosion was so big, so bright that I couldn’t see or hear anything after the explosion.”

He wrote in a follow-up e-mail that he had to get multiple medical procedures to mitigate or manage the damage from the injuries he sustained.

“I was talking to two pregnant women,” Muendel recalled. “He (the perpetrator) points right in my direction. He threw a firework into a crowd of people on purpose. The mortar hit me right in the face.”

Fortunately, “the pregnant women and their babies were fine.”

The job of a village police officer is generally service-oriented, but Muendel’s experience in Sleepy Hollow over 13 years reminded me of something I heard about Army life – long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

In 2016, a man burglarized a home, sexually assaulted a home healthcare aide for the man living there and hit her wheelchair-bound patient in the head.

“He was high on PCP,” Muendel said.

The perpetrator grabbed the aide. When the patient tried to stop him, the man hit him, and knocked him into his oxygen tank, which caused his brain to bleed.

The patient died months later from complications.

Muendel and another officer arrived at the scene. The perpetrator “bit a chunk of my wrist and fractured the bridge of the other officer’s nose.”

Muendel’s wrist has a thick, angry-looking scar on it.

The day I spoke to him, Muendel told me he had received a death threat that morning, from a mentally ill or psychiatrically disturbed man he had tried to help in the past. During the text message the man sent to Muendel’s phone, he threatened to kill him, his family and himself. Muendel reported the incident to his local police department. They called Sleepy Hollow police to inform them.

“I’ve known him since he was 15, 16 years old,” Muendel said. “His father was a drug addict. He burned his grandmother with an iron and tried to kick me down the stairs” when Muendel arrived on the call.

“We arrested him for domestic violence. I tried to get him some help. He took things in a different direction,” Muendel said.  The man was missing some teeth, and Muendel speculated that this could have been caused by heroin or crack usage.

Muendel was always out on the streets of Sleepy Hollow, he said, to build bonds with the community.
“I was always big on doing 10,000 steps on tour,” he wrote, to learn “who is who and what is going on in the community I’m serving. You will never know what is happening or what you are looking for on the streets in the community if you drive around with the windows up, isolated inside your patrol vehicle.

“I would walk the streets; I’d go to restaurants and shops and meet people. I talked to the owner of the pizzeria. I talked to kids on the street. I asked them, ‘What’s going on with your life?’”

Muendel found out who was pregnant, whose brother overdosed, whose child wasn’t doing so well in school. He felt as if he had a master’s degree in social work in learning about all these problems.

Talking with people in the community “goes a long way,” he said. “The relationships and bonds you form with people helps more than any other aspect of public service. Helping the community is what it’s all about.”

The information gleaned from the neighborhood helped Muendel solve many cases, from arson and assault to vandalism.

“The streets don’t talk, but they whisper. You’ve got to listen.”

His ability to relate to the community helped him defuse many situations, such as the time he walked up to a group of about 40 people who were hanging out in the street one night after a local bar closed.

To get everybody to go home, Muendel came up with a novel solution. He challenged one person in the group to a race.

“I raced a kid in the 40-yard dash to get a bunch of drunk kids to go home,” he said.

Muendel figured he could win the race fairly easily, and he did.

“The kid was heavy and drunk,” he said.

Among his other duties, he’s rescued dogs, and handed out COVID test kits during the pandemic.

Even the man who texted the death threat stated in the same text that he was grateful for Muendel’s efforts to help.

“He said I’m the only one who gave him a fair shake.”

Pleasantville-based writer Michael Gold has had articles published in the New York Daily News, the Albany Times Union, the Hartford Courant, The Palm Beach Post and other newspapers, and The Hardy Society Journal, a British literary journal.