Harry Jaffe, The Examiner
2008-05-07 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

WASHINGTON -

James Haskel has been in the news plenty since last fall, but much of what has been written and said about him is flat-out wrong. Here, for the first time, Haskel speaks at length about his ordeal.

“They said we were members of a motorcycle club,” he tells me Tuesday at police union headquarters. “I don’t even own a motorcycle.”

What we know is that Haskel — a veteran D.C. cop — got into a shootout with a teenage boy who lived in his neighborhood in Southeast D.C. D’Onte Rawlings shot first, according to an exhaustive federal investigation; Haskel fired back in self-defense, Rawlings died of a gunshot wound to the head.

The instinctive reaction, especially by the media, is to paint the kid as an innocent and the cop as the bad guy. He was not in uniform. He was searching for his stolen motorbike and found Rawlings astride it.

The press and the pols went to the kid’s family; few came to Haskel and Anthony Clay, the friend who was with him that evening, also a cop.

James Haskel was cast as a rich guy who grew up in a posh section of Washington Highlands. Not true.

“My father was 57 when I was born,” he tells me. “He was already retired from his job as a mechanic for Metro. We didn’t have much stuff, but I didn’t go out and take things from people.”

He had three sisters and two brothers. “I’m the baby,” he said. The baby is now 45, tall and broad. He begins the interview wary with knitted brow. He doesn’t need to see his name in print.

He went to Draper Elementary, Hart Junior High and Ballou High.

“It’s a far cry from what it is now,” he says. “I had fun going to school. It’s not like what it is now where you worry about getting shot at lunch.”

After graduating he worked as a printer and then took exams to be a cop, a firefighter and a postman. The cops called first and he joined in March 1985. He worked patrol in and around Capitol Hill, worked auto theft for years, wound up as “spotter” in police helicopters. He caught robbers and rapists from the air.

In 23 years on the force, he stayed in Washington Highlands, where he grew up. “I didn’t come home looking for people committing crimes,” he said. But his rookie year he chased down a guy with a gun. People said: “That’s not the police — that’s James.” But he was the police, and still is.

The feds declined to prosecute; Haskel still faces an internal investigation. He wants to be the police again.

“What got me through was my faith in Jesus Christ,” he says. “If I did not believe, only God knows what I would have done.”

What gets him angry, still, is Mayor Adrian Fenty’s initial reaction that seemed to finger him as the bad guy. “I don’t want to sound bitter, because I’m not,” he says, “I just want to know what the mayor would have said if I had been killed.”

More on that in my Friday column.