Trauma of Liczbinski killing still haunts neighborhood witnesses

Steve McFaul Jr. still loves Port Richmond.

He was born nearby but brought up there. He started his family - a boy and two girls - in a rowhouse with a shaded, stone front porch a few doors from the corner of Almond and Schiller Streets.

"It's my neighborhood," says McFaul, 34, describing a place where neighbors sweep the sidewalks, watch out for one another, and create an island of calm in an ocean of urban mayhem. "Everybody knows each other."

But he no longer lives in Port Richmond, or even Philadelphia. His Almond and Schiller was lost at 11:31 a.m. on May 3, 2008.

He heard the staccato crack of gunfire, and felt a rush of panic knowing that his 11-year-old daughter was outside. Running out the front door, he saw a police car near the stop sign on Schiller. On the street, next to the car's open door, lay the bloodied body of Sgt. Stephen Liczbinski.

For the next five to 10 minutes, McFaul and about a dozen neighbors attended the dying officer, a heroic scene that left veteran officers in awe.

McFaul cradled Liczbinski - torn by eight close shots from a military assault rifle - and urged him to cling to consciousness while neighbors rushed over with towels to stanch the heavy bleeding. He heard the officer's whispered last words of love to his family.

Liczbinski, 39, did not make it. He died on the streets of Port Richmond, where he and his wife met as teenagers, married, and started a family before moving to the city's Burholme section.

Howard Cain, 33, leader of the trio of bank robbers who killed Liczbinski, was shot to death by police the same day. On Tuesday, a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court jury sentenced Cain's two accomplices, Eric DeShann Floyd, 35, and Levon T. Warner, 41, to life in prison without parole.

Today, one-lane Schiller Street - flanked by solid lines of parked cars and well-kept two story rowhouses - is quiet again. On a summer afternoon, children play a sidewalk game, their voices echoing around the intersection of Almond and Schiller.

On the southeast corner, a bronze sidewalk plaque pays tribute to Liczbinski's service to his city. But the neighbors don't need a memorial to remind them.

"I'm still in shock that it actually happened," McFaul told the jury during the trial of Floyd and Warner. His voice cracking, fighting back tears, he added, "I think about this a lot. We had to move because of that."

Several weeks after the Liczbinski killing, McFaul and his family left Almond Street for Bensalem, Bucks County. "The shooting, yes," he said in a recent interview. "It was a done deal after that."

Television and film depict the physical impact of violent crime with disturbing realism, as well as the emotional scarring of victims' families.

Less noted is the enduring effect on random witnesses like McFaul and his former neighbors at Almond and Schiller.

A recent study found that for civilian witnesses of violent death, the emotional aftershocks can be as severe as for soldiers in combat.

That does not surprise Leland Kent, who oversees the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office unit that provides services to crime victims and witnesses.

The neighbors "basically walked into a war zone," Kent said. "They saw a police officer killed with a military assault rifle."

Assistant District Attorney Mark Gilson, the first prosecutor assigned the Liczbinski case, remembers the still-stunned neighbors 12 days after the killing, when he had to pick one or two who were emotionally able to testify at the preliminary hearing.

"If you did a long-term study of these people, I wouldn't be surprised at any number of them diagnosed as suffering from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]," Gilson said. "These people are victims, too. They saw things that people should never see. They heard things that people should never have to hear."

The police 911 audiotape from that morning - neighbors screaming, sobbing, begging for help - was "the most disturbing thing I ever heard," Gilson said.

After suffering months of anxiety and depression, McFaul said, he sought therapy.

He says that he's fine now, that he can return to Almond and Schiller to visit friends and family. But there is uncertainty in his halting speech as he recalls that warm spring Saturday morning of two years ago.

McFaul is not the only neighbor profoundly affected by the shooting.

"It disturbed me for a while," said Mark Porowicz, who saw the shooting from 30 feet away and heard Liczbinski's desperate cry: "No, no, no!"

Donna Rymal watched the killing from a car width away as she swept the sidewalk in front of her home. As she described that morning to the jury, she sobbed so heavily she had to temporarily leave the witness stand.

"There was so much blood," Rymal said.

Even today, neighbors who were not part of the drama talk somberly about it.

Linda Couch says the neighborhood is fine. Yet tears well up in her eyes as she speaks.

Tony Lewis, whose house is about 50 feet from the scene, recalled the "pop-pop, pop-pop-pop" of gunfire.

Lewis, who has lived there more than 30 years, called the killing "the most horrible thing that ever happened here. I still can't bring myself to park my car near the plaque."

In the American Journal of Psychotherapy last year, Raymond M. Bergner, a psychology professor at Illinois State University, examined how people deal with trauma and who is most likely to develop PTSD.

In a recent interview, he said people who live in stable, quiet neighborhoods such as Almond and Schiller are often most vulnerable to PTSD when something terrible occurs.

"It isn't easy for these people to put in the past the shock they experienced," Bergner said. "It isn't part of their past world, and their world, present-tense, is very different. . . . They now know it is the kind of world where terrible things can happen."

Today, McFaul says, he is uncomfortable when people praise what he and his neighbors did on May 3, 2008. Anyone would have done the same, he says.

But when he testified last month, McFaul was less charitable to himself.

"I'm sorry," McFaul told the jury. "I should have done more. I should have called sooner, used [Liczbinski's] walkie-talkie, but I didn't.

"That keeps going through my head."

The Philadelphia District Attorney's Office provides services to victims and witnesses dealing with the impact of homicides and other violent crimes. They include referrals to neighborhood counseling. Call 215-686-8027 or send an e-mail to DA.Victimservices

@phila.gov.

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