Mike summoned up all his negotiating skills, but things were not going well with the man and his child. At some point he had to face the fact the man was not going to let go. He changed tactics. He stopped negotiating and began issuing orders. “I told him, ‘My name is Michael. I’m trained to do these rescues. You have to hand your baby to me. We have everything under control. We’ve done this before. You have no choice. Give me your baby.’” The distraught father finally handed his little girl to Mike.

Mike Morra is the kind of cop you rarely see portrayed on television or in the movies. Despite the fact that he has been shot at, had his head opened up and broken his hand while trying to save lives or make arrests, he has never fired his gun during his fifteen years on the job. Mike is a veteran of the Emergency Service Unit (ESU), the NYPD’s SWAT team. Of the twenty-three New York City police officers who died saving people from the collapsing World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001, fourteen were from the ESU.

During Mike’s career, his courage and commitment have been called upon hundreds of times. Everyone who works with him is struck by his unusual ability to remain calm and keep his focus even when his own life is in danger. He worked for twelve hours straight to save seventy people stranded two hundred and fifty feet above the East River when the trams traveling between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island malfunctioned. One of the more dramatic moments came when Mike had to convince a young father to hand him his baby. Mike had two young daughters himself and he knew what was going through the hesitant dad’s mind. “Can you imagine being stranded 250 feet above the East River, it’s pitch dark, and now you have to hand your baby up to a person you don’t know and can barely see?” Mike asked. “I’m not sure I could have done it.”

Mike has had many rewarding moments. He still thinks about an incident in 2000 when he was assigned to the Robbery Task Force. “There was a guy in the neighborhood who’d done over twenty robberies,” he said. “He used knives, guns and mace to hold up cab drivers and rob them. My captain wanted this guy off the street so bad he offered to buy a case of beer for anyone who could catch him.
“One night when we were out on patrol, my partner and I saw a cab drive off. There was a man in the back seat. He looked like he was lunging toward the driver and we thought it might be the guy. We got into our car and chased the cab. As we pulled up, he was stabbing the cab driver in the face. We tore out of our car, pulled open the door and took him out at gunpoint. As they were taking the bleeding cab driver away in the ambulance, he reached his hand out to me. He said, ‘Thank you so much for what you did. I never thought I would see my kids again.’”

“The satisfaction we both got from saving that cab driver and knowing that he would survive and go home to his family – there’s no amount of money in the world that can compare to that sense of accomplishment; the feeling every cop has after an experience like that – that we did something really important, something that helped someone else.”