Although, because of insufficiency of evidence, David Senak was not arrested with the others, he had been suspended from the police force on July 31 on the basis of what Robert Paille and others had said about his role in the incident.
“After that,” Senak told me, “I spent a lot of time on Belle Isle”—the city-owned island park in the Detroit River. “Just reading. I had a special peninsula over there. There was a tree on the end of it. I’d just go over there almost every day, and take a couple of books along and read. I was reading a series of books, The Art of Clear Thinking and The Art of Clear Writing, Clear Reading; I like law materials; I read some books on cross-examination. I got involved with novels. Crime and Punishment. I started An American Tragedy again, second time I started it and didn’t finish it. That went on till it got cold. Till one day I came over to the island, and they chopped my peninsula down. This girl used to come out there with me, every once in a while when she had a day off, and we were going out there one day, and we came along and I was looking for my landmark, the tree, and the thing wasn’t there. Couple of hundred feet down there was this big DPW truck, and they had this big tree in the back. It was because of erosion, it was undermining the roots of the tree, and it was going to fall into the water eventually, so they figured they’d just cut it down. I don’t know what kind of tree it was, it was just a shade tree; but it was a nice spot. I was really upset at the time. I wasn’t upset because of the circumstances of my suspension, because every time I saw August I tried to comfort him, in the fact that we were innocent—that’s beside the point—I was despondent because of the fact that I wasn’t on the job. I was no longer in a scout car. And to this day when I see the scout cars, you know, I get upset.”