By Valerie Kalfrin
The Tampa Tribune
TAMPA, Fla. — A .44-caliber Winchester bullet changed John Armao’s life.
A year ago, it ripped through his right cheek and shattered a bone and damaged a muscle in his right shoulder.
Now, it has ended his career as a Tampa police officer.
Armao, 41, accepts this and struggles to digest it at the same time. He is lucky to be alive and fortunate the bullet missed any nerves that could have caused his eye to droop or affected his facial expressions.
A scar stretches from the right corner of his mouth toward his ear. He said it fascinates strangers, who ask, “Hey, what happened to your face?” and his 6-year-old daughter, who wants to know, “Do you shave over there, Daddy?”
The damage to the shoulder isn’t as visible. Physical therapy helped Armao tie his shoes again and become accustomed to shifting his transmission with his left hand. But he can’t lift his right arm over his head. Hardware holds the joint in place, but the muscle that was destroyed can’t be rebuilt, he said.
In April, a doctor told Armao his arm was at “maximum medical improvement,” words the 18-year department veteran dreaded to hear.
Police department policy requires officers on light duty to return to full duty or take a pension within 12 months from the date they are declared at maximum medical improvement.
The doctor “didn’t want to say it’ll never get better, but it’s not enough to go back to work” in patrol, Armao said.
Armao has been on light duty in District 2, in the Busch Gardens area. He helps investigate property crimes by working the phone, interviewing witnesses and victims. He also shows photo arrays for suspect identification and files paperwork with prosecutors. He doesn’t carry a gun.
Although he has started the pension process, he said he hopes to return to the department as a civilian.
“I’m still useful,” he said. “I can still do police work, just not out on the street.”
Another job for Armao is a necessity. He said his pension will give him roughly $3,800 per month, but his impending retirement leaves his family, which includes his wife and another daughter, age 10, without adequate health insurance.
Picturing himself in a 9-to-5 environment is difficult.
“Police work’s all I know how to do. It’s all I’ve ever done,” he said. “I never thought of it as part of my identity, but I guess it is. I’m a cop. … There’s no better feeling than to put a bad guy in jail. It feels good to help these victims, because you’re all they have.”
Armao is the kind of officer others admire and the department hates to lose, said police spokeswoman Andrea Davis. “We’re doing everything we can to find a job for him,” she said.
A police officer in Gulfport before coming to Tampa in 1989, Armao said his career had been “pretty uneventful” until about 6:30 a.m. on May 11, 2007.
He and other officers had accompanied a bail bondsman to 711 N. Castle Court to arrest Kevin Dexter Hunter, 38, a felon sought on charges of weapons possession and aggravated assault.
Hunter was hiding in a closet and came out shooting, then shot himself a few minutes later, police said.
Armao, who ran outside for cover, felt his arm go limp and blood in his mouth. He radioed for help but found it difficult to talk. He remembered thinking, “I can feel my teeth with my tongue, so I know it’s not that bad.”
Mayor Pam Iorio and Police Chief Stephen Hogue visited him at Tampa General Hospital. Hogue honored two neighbors with an award for helping stanch the officer’s bleeding with a towel and praised the officer for declining the neighbors’ offer to hide in their house because Armao didn’t want to put their children in harm’s way.
As he recuperated from surgery, Armao said he thought, “You just got shot in the arm.’ I’ll recover. I’ll be OK. I’ll come back to the street, keep going with my career.
“But that’s not gonna happen,” he said.
Armao still has bullet fragments in his arm. Talking about his experience, he said, is bittersweet because of all the damage done, yet he has so much for which he’s grateful.
“You always hear people say you have to live for today. Then when you almost get killed out there, you think, ‘You know, some of these people are right.’ You put things off. You can’t keep doing that. It might be the day you don’t get to come home.”
The appreciation he has for life and for those around him — whether his family, a sergeant mowing his lawn or co-workers fetching office supplies out of reach – remains with him always.
“One of the hardest things to do is to accept help from people,” he said. “I say thank you all the time, and I don’t know how to make you understand I really mean what I’m saying.”
Copyright 2008 The Tampa Tribune