JACKSON — Captain Barbara Folsom-McNeal is a cop looking for an unknown man. He’s not a suspect. He’s not a witness. He’s another officer, he’s the reason she’s alive, and she’s running out of time to tell him so.
Capt. Barbara Folsom-McNeal spoke about her search for the man who saved her life when she was a child on the May 28 episode of Investigation: Homicide.An Angel
Folsom-McNeal was 11 years old in the early 1980s, standing at a kitchen sink on Willow Street, praying to die.
She doesn’t remember if she was crying. She does remember washing dishes after taking a severe beating from a grief-stricken mother. She remembers her sleeves were rolled up. She remembers asking God to take her.
Then someone started beating on the door.
Folsom-McNeal, now a captain in the Jackson Police Department’s Internal Affairs Division with 24 years on the force, has spent years trying to find the officer who came to her home on that day. She told the hosts of the Investigation: Homicide podcast that remembers him as tall, but she was small. She knows he was white, and using her experience now to reflect on that day, she’s pretty sure he was a veteran JPD officer.
He worked what is now Precinct 2. She doesn’t know his name. She barely remembers his face after four decades. But she remembers exactly what he did: He saw her.
“Only thing I could say — he was an angel,” she said during a recent episode of the Investigation: Homicide podcast. “He was an angel.”
A Google Street View screenshot of the home Capt. Barbara Folsom-McNeal grew up in during the 1980s.Grief changed everything
Folsom-McNeal grew up the oldest of six children in a Jackson home that changed after a devastating family tragedy when she was 8. Her brother was struck by a car in front of their home and never regained consciousness. His heart beat for three days after his mind died, and before his body gave up. Part of their mother died with him.
Her mother’s grief, Folsom-McNeal says carefully, was overwhelming in a way that reshaped their home. She is clear that she does not want her mother remembered harshly. She’s gone now, and Folsom-McNeal has spent years making peace with a complicated love.
“I’m not saying what she did was right,” she said. “But as an adult, I kind of understand that somebody should have stepped in and said she needs some additional help.”
What Folsom-McNeal will say is that by the time she was 11 or 12, she had stopped wanting to be here. She was carrying more than any child should carry. There was grief she couldn’t understand, responsibility for her siblings, and actual physical pain she hid beneath her clothes.
“Come here”
On the night the police came to Willow Street, called by her father after her brother arrived at his home breathless, two officers were at the door, going back and forth with her mother.
A third stood back, watching. Folsom-McNeal, from inside the house, was peeking around a corner, watching him.
“He was allowing them to handle it before he stepped in,” she said. “And he looked at me. He saw me. He was like, ‘Come here.'”
She walked to him. He knelt down. He took both her hands in his.
Her sleeves were still rolled up, and the wounds from that afternoon were exposed. She had spent so long hiding the things that happened to her, but she hadn’t had time to think about it. And he saw her… clearly.
“They had to hold him back,” she said quietly, “because he lost it.”
He carried her to JPD headquarters. He sat her on a desk in a detective’s office. “Look what she did to that baby,” she remembers him saying.
That night, the children were removed from the home.
“I owe him my life,” Folsom-McNeal said. “Because at that time, I really didn’t want to live anymore.”
His legacy
She went on to become the thing he was to her.
In January 2002, she entered the JPD academy. She worked patrol in Precinct 4, became a quality-of-life officer, then a detective, then a sergeant, then a lieutenant. Today she commands the Internal Affairs Division as a captain, and at least once a week she walks into JPD Headquarters, the very building where that officer took her years ago and gave her a reason to live.
Twenty-four years of showing up at doors and looking past the surface of a scene to see who else might be standing in the background, hoping someone notices.
“Did I help somebody?” she asks herself. “Did I do something? Because I got to give back and pay it forward, because this person did it for me.”
She is eligible to retire, and she isn’t ready. But she is aware of the clock ticking not just on her career, but on the search.
She has asked questions through the years. She has stared at old composites at the JPD academy, hoping for a spark of recognition. She has looked up her old home on Google Maps, trying to ignite a memory she could act on. She finally decided after her birthday last week to launch a real search.
The officer, if he is still living, would be in his late 60s or older. He may be long retired. He may not remember the call at all. He may not know that the small girl he carried downtown that night went on to spend the next quarter century doing exactly what he did: walking into hard situations, looking past the noise, finding the next person who needed to be found, the person who needed to be saved.
“I cannot leave my career at this point without knowing him and knowing who he is,” she said. “At least I want to give honor to the person that made it possible for me to be here today.”
Someone knows him
If you worked JPD in the late 1980s, or know someone who did, and you have any information about a tall, white senior officer who worked the Willow Street area in what is now Precinct 2, contact Therese Apel at [email protected] or reach out to Folsom-McNeal directly. Any information helps narrow down who he might be.
Even if he isn’t still alive, Folsom-McNeal says, she just wants his family to know what he did for her, and though she won’t say it in as many words, what her friends and coworkers would say she’s spent every day of the last 24 years doing for others in return.
“And even if he’s no longer with us or anything, at least I could tell if he had some children or somebody that can know what he did for me,” she said.
