GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Mary Ann Collura

Last Call

Mary Ann Collura in uniform

Boone got his last dose of Collura's motherly attention about 5 p.m. that night. It still haunts him.

"I actually was supposed to work that night, but a couple of days earlier I had opened a suspicious package and the guy had put mold in the package," Boone recalled. "I'm allergic to mold, it was really affecting my lungs so they sent me to the doctor in the morning...I was fine, but they ordered me to go home because they didn't know what was in the package at the time. So, I'm at home and about five o'clock, she calls frantic.

"What's wrong? I just found out. Are you okay?" Collura had spluttered into the phone. "What can I do for you...do you want me to come up?"

Boone breezily dismissed his friend's concerns. "Mary Ann, you're working," he said.

And that, he says, is what still haunts him.

"Now I wish I had told her to come up."

About 8:30 p.m. that night, Collura was nearing the end of her shift. She had taken a break for dinner, returning home as she often did to the house on Morlot Avenue she shared with her mother. That night, however, her mother was out of town. She decided to telephone her brother to make last minute arrangements before heading out of town herself.

"She had called me...to ask me to watch her dog," a stray she had adopted and named "Ranger", Paul Collura said. "So I was on the phone with her, my youngest son came in and she heard his voice on the phone so she was like, "Let me talk to Adam." I put Adam on the phone...he's got this squeaky little voice and he gives me the phone back and she's laughing, and she's like, 'I love that kid.'

"That's the last time I talked to her," Paul Collura said.

A few minutes later, she headed back out onto the road to finish what she had assumed would be the last hour or so of her shift.

So far, it had been an easy night.