By ANNA BRYSON
USFSP Student Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – Officer Nick Fasanella’s first call of the day brought him to a sweaty, barefoot man trying to break into an apartment by beating on the door with a wooden plank.
Wide-eyed and twitching, the man said it was his apartment. He had locked himself out and had been trying to get back in for more than three hours.
The FBI, the CDC, the CIA and the DEA had been following him for the past three years, he said, and they had broken into his attic the night before.
For Fasanella, the scenario was not unusual. The wide-eyed man appeared to be under the influence of methamphetamine, he said.
The officer took away the sweaty man’s plank but determined there was nothing else to do. It was the man’s apartment, and he did not appear to be a threat to himself or others.
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When he was a boy in Mississippi, Fasanella thought he might become a teacher. For a time at college there, he was in ROTC and majored in history before deciding to go into police work.
Fasanella, 28, moved to Florida from Mississippi in December 2016 for his significant other – a dumb decision, he said. But it ended up being a good decision because he has grown to love Florida, where salaries for police officers are higher.
The district Fasanella patrols includes some of the city’s toughest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods. He said he encounters at least one death per week there.
Fasanella said he has never had to fire his weapon during his three years as a police officer, but he sympathizes with officers who do shoot – and sometimes land in controversy.
“In that split second between life and death, you don’t know what (suspects) are holding, what’s going to happen,” he said.
Patrolling a gritty district like his makes the days go by quickly, Fasanella said, and there are plenty of opportunities to help people.
After leaving the wide-eyed man, Fasanella chatted with customers at his favorite coffee shop, then helped a woman jump-start her car, which he noticed while driving by.
“When I’m not busy, I love to help people when I can,” he said. “It’s what I’m here for.”
Within two hours, however, dispatchers sent Fasanella and a backup officer back to his first stop of the day, where the situation had escalated.
The drug-addled man had apparently scared employees of the apartment complex with his erratic behavior and rants about the FBI agents in his attic and the helicopters watching him from outside his window.
First, Fasanella got somebody from maintenance to help the man get back into his apartment – a formidable task because the door was badly damaged and the doorknob was missing.
Once inside, the man continued babbling about the FBI in his attic. (The apartment had no attic.)
In the bedroom, Fasanella found a loaded handgun under the bed and confiscated it. He told the man he should go to a hospital to be checked out, but the man balked, trying to shoo the officers away and promising to “sleep it off” at home.
Fasanella took out handcuffs. He told the man that if he didn’t go to the hospital, then he would be involuntarily committed under the Baker Act and held in a psychiatric ward for 72 hours.
That worked. The man agreed to go to the hospital, then from the back seat of Fasanella’s cruiser rambled on about his job as a real estate broker.
Once the man was admitted to St. Anthony’s, Fasanella took the loaded firearm to the police station for safekeeping. Since the weapon was registered in the man’s name, there was no legal way to keep him from regaining possession once he left the hospital, the officer said.
For the rest of his eight-hour shift, Fasanella regaled coworkers with descriptions of the wide-eyed man with FBI agents in his attic.
“It is a sad situation,” he said, “but you have to have a sick sense of humor to get through this job.”