GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Mary Ann Collura

An Easy Shift

It was just before 10 p.m., and Steve Farrell in Clifton and Mary Ann Collura in Fair Lawn were nearing the end of their shifts. Another hour or so, and they'd both have been able to go home. The truth was, it had been a quiet night for both of them, a night of false alarms, and few of them, an ambulance call, it had all be strictly routine.

It was the kind of night cops don't mind working.

Mary Ann Collura's purple shadow motorcycle

The truth was Collura hadn't even been scheduled to work that night. The way her family remembers it, Collura had taken advantage of the warm spring weather earlier in the week to indulge in her most recent obsession, her purple Honda Shadow, a beefy motorcycle with a throaty growl. She loved that bike so much, her brother Paul recalled, that she had once ridden all the way to Virginia, later claiming she had made the trip because she wanted to buy a bag of potato chips. She had always appreciated the outdoors, but seemed to appreciate them even more so in the months before her death, perhaps because, less than a year earlier, she had fended off a potentially fatal bout of psarchoidosis, a rare condition that in her case attacked her heart.

In fact, she was planning another trip that weekend with a friend and when the 3-11 shift opened up, she grabbed it. As Dave Boone, a Fair Lawn police officer who doubled as a Baptist minister and prided himself on being an old friend of Collura's recalled, she was called in to work what the cops call "Post Five," supervising and backing up the other officers on the street that night.

It was the perfect role for Collura, the cop all the other cops called "Ma," Boone remembered. Not only was she maternal, Boone said, she was tough. She had earned the respect of every cop on the force and she had done it the hard way, with courage, resolve and a big dose of kindness.

Boone had seen that first hand a few years before Collura's last call.