Kearney, 61, took his old police captain, Walter Rooke, 89, out for one last drive to pay homage to the man who inspired him to become a cop and served as his mentor.
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SPRINGFIELD — Lt. Mossy Kearney is scheduled to report for duty at 4 p.m. on Friday, July 31, 2015.
By midnight, when his shift ends, he'll be done.
For good.
After nearly 36 years as a Springfield cop, Kearney has seen it all, from robberies and domestics to shootings and homicides.
He was the first officer to respond to a grim scene back in 1985, when his brother officers, Alain Beauregard and Michael Schiavina, were killed in the line of duty in the city's Old Hill neighborhood.
"I remember it like it was yesterday," said Kearney, who grew up in Hungry Hill when it was still an Irish stronghold.
Kearney testified in the Al Bruno murder trial down in New York. He was among the first officers to respond to Springfield's South End after Bruno, a mobster in the Genovese crime family, was gunned down while leaving a card game in 2003.
"I saw a lot of things. I saw some things I wish I never saw," Kearney said, crediting his family – his wife and three kids – for keeping him good all these years.
"When work was over, work was over," he said.
It's not easy to walk away from a job that's really more of a vocation, a calling. But for Kearney, who's 61 and in good health, it's time to go. He'd be forced to retire at 65 anyway, so he beat 'em to the punch.
"I'd rather leave on my own terms than stay to the end and be forced out," he said.
As Kearney logged his last week at work, he decided to pay homage to his old captain, Walter Rooke, now 89, the man who ran the "dog watch" shift from midnight to 8 a.m. when Kearney was a rookie. Rooke retired as a deputy chief in the Police Department.
Kearney swung by Rooke's home to pick him up for "one last ride," as Kearney put it – a way to show his respect and admiration for Rooke, his former boss and mentor and the man who inspired Kearney to become a cop.
Rooke, who wore his old dress uniform, got into a new police SUV with Kearney behind the wheel, and the pair went for a spin around the neighborhood. The banter began almost immediately.
"All the cops back in Walter's day wore their hats when they rode around, right Wally?" said Kearney, adjusting his white lieutenant's hat as he drove. "No one took their hats off in the cruiser. That was the old-school way. Now, nobody even wears their hats," Kearney said.
Afterward, Kearney shared his thoughts about Rooke. "He was always an inspiration to me. He's one of the reasons I became a cop," he said, trying his best not to tear up.
But that's the nature of being a police officer, a job that requires you to be Superman and stifle your emotions. You're the person they call when they need help, after all, and you gotta be strong.
Dan Spellacy, the person in charge when Kearney was at the police academy in the late 1970s, said something back then that still resonates with Kearney today.
"When do you become a cop?" Kearney recalls Spellacy, a former deputy chief in the department, asking a class of young recruits. Their answers varied.
"The real time you become a cop is when you get in your first fight, and somebody's kicking the (expletive) out of you, and you stay in the fight," Spellacy told the class. "It don't matter if you win or lose, as long as you stay in the fight."
The cavalry will come.
Kearney's been in that fight since November 1979. He joined the department when cops were armed with six-shooters and technology played second fiddle to old-fashioned policework. The .38-caliber revolvers eventually were replaced by .40-caliber semiautomatics.
"There were no guns on the street. Bad guys didn't have guns back then," said Kearney, a detective for more than 20 years.
"I stayed on the street for 35 years. I never worked inside," said Kearney, who ran the homicide unit for a while and locked into the 4 p.m. to midnight shift for most of his career. "I still like being on the street," he said.
Indeed, that plainclothes cop with the baseball cap investigating the critical shooting on Reed Street earlier this week was Kearney, a fixture at major crime scenes across the city. As a woman wailed and a man refused police orders to keep out of the crime scene, there was Kearney – pad and pen in hand, asking questions, jotting down answers. The epitome of grace under pressure.
"You're there for a bad reason. Something bad happened," he said, explaining the fundamental reason cops are called in the first place. "Everything's based on information. We have science ... forensics ... but everything comes down to information and asking questions," he said.
"It's about helping people. You can make a difference. You can do little things that mean a lot," Kearney said. "There's bad people out there, but there's good people having a bad day. The trick is knowing how to tell the difference."
For about a year now, the nation has been in a state of upheaval about policing, particularly the tactics officers use when dealing with certain suspects. That debate will continue without Kearney, who said the lingering issue played no role in his decision to retire.
"It's more dangerous now (to be a cop) than it ever was. There's more guns, there's more disrespect for the police," he said. "There's a lot less respect for authority, whether you're a cop or a school teacher or any kind of authority figure."
Another persistent problem: reluctant witnesses who stymie criminal investigations.
"That code of silence is a tough nut to crack," Kearney said, leading some people to try and take matters into their own hands. "They just want retribution, they don't want justice," he added.
Looking back on his career, Kearney had many other mentors in addition to Rooke and Spellacy. He ticked off a list of names of ranking officers who provided inspiration and knowledge to younger cops coming up in the department, including Chief Paul Fenton, Deputy Chief Elmer McMahon, Capt. Midge Reilly, and Chief Bull Martin.
"They were the guys you went to when you had a question. They had the wisdom and the years. They taught me how to be a cop," Kearney said.
But as a kid growing up on Hungry Hill, "surrounded by cops and firemen," Kearney said he was inspired to become a police officer because of Walter Rooke, the father of his best friend. "He influenced me to become a cop," he said.
When all is said and done, Kearney hopes to be remembered "as a good cop."
"I was never a guy to count the number of arrests I made. I got more satisfaction in trying to help somebody," he said.
Within a week or so, Kearney will back to work, this time working part-time in a law enforcement-related field. Sixty-one is the new 41, after all.
There are things he'd like to do now that he has some free time. A trip to Ireland may be in the cards. His parents, both native Irish speakers, were raised in County Kerry. His mother, who grew up outside Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula, is still alive, but his father, a native of the Blasket Islands, passed away about nine years ago.
Kearney's also looking forward to spending more time with his family. His wife, Susan, works in the medical field. His daughter, Meredith, 26, is a speech therapist in the eastern part of Massachusetts, and his twin sons, Conor and Liam, 24, are in the military and live out West.
The secret to a long life is knowing when it's time to go, a singer once said. For Kearney, life is more of marathon than a sprint. "You just put one foot in front of the other, and everything else falls into place," he said.
Jesse lederman 
