When was the first time that you lost a friend?
I’ve been to many police funerals. Only 2 have been close friends. I, actually… for my first funeral was when I first started working in Delaware County PD, we were so close to Philadelphia… I think Philadelphia PD was losing 2 or 3 officers per year, so we made a lot of funerals. ‘Cause in that part of the country it’s really, it’s a big deal. You’d have thousands of police officers from all across the country would show up for these funerals. My first loss of my real friend was a guy by the name of Tom Sewell who I went to the academy with in Philadelphia and… after my second year when I left, he stayed on and he became sergeant. So he was a sergeant on the patrol division on I think it was the evening shift he worked. But he ended up getting a call to, I believe it was a train yard, by one of the transportation workers who said that there was a derelict on one of these trains and he wouldn’t get off. So Tom got sent over there plus a paddy wagon with two other officers was sent over there also to assist him, but Tom got there first and he did get the guy to get off the train and it took a little while for backup to get there, so he… he put the individual on his patrol car and started to pat him down for weapons and the guy came off with a butcher knife. And slashed at his face a few times and Tom drew his weapon and they just locked horns, the 2 of them. I think he emptied his weapon into the guy, but the guy got a couple of good knife hits and one of the hits went between… when we wear our vests, of course there’s slots in there (pointing to the side of his rib cage) so it went through the slot and it went through and it pierced his heart and he got internally bleeding through the heart. So when backup finally got there of course, the uh the perp was dead, he’d been shot 6 times. But Tom was airlifted to the hospital, but never made it to the hospital. But that was my first friend. Of course when I found that news out I was working in uh Atascosa County, Texas. And my mother called and she asked me, she said “A transit authority officer was just killed, do you know of anybody by the name of Tom Sewell?” And I said “Oh yeah.” You know. So she sent me down the articles and then a couple of my buddies on the force who were still there sent me some more articles and stuff so I still got all that the packets and everything like that. My second close friend was killed in Atascosa County and again that was probably a year after I left there and moved up this way. Actually I was in Virginia Beach when I came home from work and my wife told me, said, “I’ve got something bad to tell you.” She said, “I got a call from your ex-wife and Mark Stephenson was shot to death.” And she knew a little bit of it, so she gave me the number that she left to call the sheriff’s office and I called a couple of friends over there and found out that not only was Mark killed, but another young deputy was killed and a state highway was killed all in the same family violence episode. We had… there was a guy (hesitation, struggling for words) there that constantly beat his wife and our department constantly made calls to his house. And for whatever reason, we don’t know because the guy shot himself after he killed the 3 officers, he uh he got mad and he called the sheriff’s department and reported another family violence and the 2 deputies responded first and he waited outside in the bushes with a rifle. And when the 2 officers got out of their cars, he shot and killed both of them and when the trooper got there, the trooper come in as back up and he saw that there was 2 officers on the ground so he radioed in what he had and he tried to backup and he backed up right to where the guy was hiding and the trooper was shot in the head and killed also. Then there was two more officers who arrived on the scene that were both shot during… this was before the gunman killed himself. So actually we had 5 officers killed. But Mark was uh my uh like um I was his (hesitation, struggling for words) I was his field training officer, basically. He came out of the jail and he took over a really rough area of the county that… I was covering my area and that rough area because one of our other deputies who was shot and he was out on leave for about a year ‘cause he got shot in the throat. But I taught Mark that area and I taught him basically what he knew out there. So that that hurt me really bad when somebody like that, you know… family man, great family man, ex-Army cop himself. Boy was 6 foot 9, nobody ever messed with him you know. He was big. It, it bothers you for a long time. Matter of fact I wear this pin (points to a small lapel pin) it’s the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, DC, so I’ve got 2 close friends that are on the wall down there. But that’s basically what that is (Chuckles.)