Toll of Violence Haunts Families of Police Officers

On those mornings at dawn when Francine Spada would run the woodsy hills of Elysian Park in training to become a Los Angeles police officer, her husband and daughter would follow her in the family car just to make sure she was safe.

That was 11 years ago; if only it were that easy to keep her safe today.

It was Philip Spada who persuaded his wife to join the LAPD, but now--even though she has risen to become the only woman sergeant in the Foothill Division--he is not sure he would recommend the same course. Not in a country where a record 80,000 officers were assaulted in the line of duty in 1992. Not in a metropolitan area where seven cops have been killed in the past year, with countless others attacked and fired upon.

Police work has always been a dangerous game, but the rate of deaths in greater Los Angeles in the past year is dizzying: Two police officers in Compton shot to death after a traffic stop in February, 1993. A Garden Grove officer killed during a traffic stop two weeks later. An Oxnard officer shot to death last December in pursuit of a gunman who had killed three people. A Manhattan Beach officer shot to death in the presence of his 13-year-old nephew that same month. Then, on Valentine’s Day, two Palos Verdes Estates police officers gunned down while attending--what could seem safer?--a motivational seminar at a Torrance hotel conference room filled with cops in street clothes.

And Saturday night, a Culver City officer was shot in the neck by an armed robbery suspect he was chasing. He was in stable condition Sunday.

If all of this has been daunting for those who go to work on the streets every day, it has also been terrifying for the officers’ families. A husband wakes at 2 a.m., alone in bed, and spends the next minutes wondering and listening for the click of a key in the door. A wife channels her anxiety into a batch of chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. A 6-year-old informs her mother matter-of-factly: “I want you to know I prayed in school today that you would not keel over at work.”

“This is so frightening to families because the violence is coming out of routine kinds of work . . . not the dangerous kinds of assignments where you can anticipate some problems,” said Audrey Honig, director of psychological services for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Many families had come to expect an occasional casualty in a high-risk hostage situation or warrant search, but they were hardly prepared for the level to which this crime-ridden society has sunk. Law enforcement officers have been shot at while eating dinner in their squad cars. They have been shot at while making innocuous notations in their log books. They have been shot at in communities once thought safe--Martin Ganz, 29, was the first Manhattan Beach police officer killed in the line of duty; the shooting deaths of Palos Verdes Estates Capt. Michael Tracy and Sgt. Vernon Thomas Vanderpool were the first in that department’s history.

“These officers are off the streets, at a meeting, at a place that is supposed to be safe,” Kris Mohandie, an LAPD psychologist, said of the morning when David Fukuto, the son of a prominent state court justice, stormed into the Holiday Inn meeting room with a pair of handguns and, according to authorities, started firing. “That’s pretty heavy stuff. It sends a message to the families that the violence could happen anywhere, any time . . . that no place is safe anymore.”

The number of violent assaults against law enforcement officers has risen steadily in the last 15 years. In 1977--the first year the FBI began compiling such statistics--about 49,000 officers nationwide were assaulted, primarily with guns or knives. By 1992, the number had soared to 80,000, according to the most recent FBI figures available.

The number of officers killed--an average of 60 to 70 a year since the late 1980s--would have broken records, too, if not for the advent of bulletproof vests, police experts say; about 400 officers have survived shootings over the last decade because they were wearing protective armor.

After Inglewood Police Sgt. Donald Fry survived a shooting last year, his sister begged him to retire. He had been sitting in his squad car, its engine running, making an entry in his log book, when a stranger appeared out of the darkness, stuck a semiautomatic pistol through the window and shot him in the chest. When paramedics stripped away the vest that saved Fry’s life, they found a gaping bullet hole in his uniform shirt, just inches from his heart.

The night he was shot, Fry was wearing a black armband in honor of the officers who had been killed six days earlier in Compton. Before Fry had fully recovered, Manhattan Beach Officer Ganz was killed and Pomona Officer Roger Mathews was shot and wounded while searching a home for a robbery suspect.

Fry, a 51-year-old widower and 27-year veteran, eventually returned to work, partly for financial reasons. “But it’s more than that,” he said. “This is what I do best. It’s the only thing I know . . . I guess it’s just a part of me.”

That kind of devotion to police work was lost on his family. A bullet inches from the heart was more than they could bear. They wanted him to get out.

“I’m his big sister . . . . I’m afraid for his life,” Mildred Ott said. “I’ve told him a number of times, ‘Don’t push your luck. Get out while you can.’ ”

Whenever an officer comes home with a black band on the badge--a gesture of honor to a colleague killed in the line of duty--families can become unnerved. And the large number of high-profile killings involving Southern California officers in a single year has pushed family members to new levels of anxiety, experts say.

After Tracy was killed in the Torrance hotel, Candice Weber--his cousin and an 11-year LAPD reserve patrol officer--received a hysterical phone call. It was her mother, first informing her of the death, then begging her to give up all connections with police work.

“She said, ‘I want you to stop that immediately . . . . Honey, can’t you stop that please?’ ” Weber said, her own voice breaking. “She was crying hysterically.”

When a comrade is killed, law enforcement officers take solace in peer support. They practice safety strategies and review tactics for backing each other up. But family members are isolated from all that, experts note, left to say goodby in the morning and wonder whether it is for the last time, expected to sit helplessly by and imagine the worst.

They deal with the strain in creative ways. Sgt. Spada and her husband have designed a beeper code system; she beeps in the code at any hour of the day or night and lets him know she is all right.

Some put a foot down where they can. Eagle Rock hairdresser Diana Brown, married for nine years to LAPD veteran Sgt. Steve Brown, says she can handle the prospect of his returning to street duty after three years behind the safety of a desk, but she insists he wear a vest. “Over my dead body will he go without one,” she said.

Shellie Reiners and Tiffany Stephenson, married to Simi Valley Police Department Special Enforcement Detail officers, run the same drill in the mornings as their husbands leave their condominium complex for work. They kiss them goodby and suppress thoughts of the worst with a mantra of sorts: He’s trained to handle himself. He wears a bulletproof vest. You can’t drive yourself crazy.

Then a shooting hurls the thoughts forward again. When Reiners watched the televised funeral of Oxnard Officer James E. O’Brien--shot to death Dec. 2 while chasing an unemployed computer engineer who had killed three people--she imagined herself sitting in black at her dead husband’s graveside, accepting the folded flag from his casket.

It isn’t that difficult for her to envision. Fresh out of the academy, the week the couple were to marry, Craig Reiners and another officer fatally shot a gunman involved in a domestic dispute.

“That woke her up to the reality that there’s a good possibility I’d get involved in a situation that could be life-threatening,” said the 25-year-old Reiners, 2 1/2 years of police work now under his belt. “Before I leave for work, we always make sure we’re not fighting or arguing, and we always leave on good terms.”

Many family members seem torn about how to express their anxieties. Some are like Diana Brown, who believes it’s her duty to make sure in times of crisis that her husband is fed and rested. During the Northridge earthquake’s aftermath, when officers were working round-the-clock shifts, she fixed his lunch and left notes all over the house reminding him to take it.

Other family members become demanding, insisting that spouses check in all the time and prodding them as they leave the house, “Got your vest on? Got your vest on?”

“All they have is this fantasy of what can happen at work,” LAPD’s Mohandie said. “These fantasies can run rampant . . . and create a clinging behavior that causes real tension in a relationship. In extreme cases, the spouse will push the officer to find another line of work.”

The level of violence against officers has led to more alcoholism, more suicides, more broken homes. More law enforcement couples require counseling today than ever before, said Suzie Sawyer, executive director of Concerns of Police Survivors (COPS), a national support group for law enforcement families.

“The reality of the first line-of-duty death really smacks you in the face. Your first response is to get him off the streets, get him to quit,” Sawyer said, recalling the days when her husband was a rookie in Hyattsville, Md., and she was at home with an infant.

“I heard a news report of an officer shot in Hyattsville and that’s all I knew,” she remembered. “It was like my blood turned to ice. I took my baby from the crib and sat in front of the TV praying and cursing at the same time. Praying he was OK; cursing that he became a cop.”

Old habits linger. It has been a year since Lt. Ray Welch, 42, left the streets for an administrative job as head of the Anaheim Police Department’s traffic bureau. Nevertheless, it was his wife’s first reflex to call him Wednesday afternoon when she heard that a Santa Ana officer had been shot and wounded.

The nightmarish thoughts never go away, most family members confess. Success is keeping the lid on them.

At Francine Spada’s Glendale home, where she is sleeping off another long night shift, her daughters awaken her by taking a seat on the edge of the bed. Despite their parents’ efforts to shield them from the horrors of police work, the children know that two officers have died in a storm of gunfire in a Torrance hotel. They know it could have been their mother.

Alexandra, 15, shines her mother’s heavy black patrol shoes and offers to make her a salad to take to work. Katherine, 6, spends more time than usual on the bed. Their father, a reserve officer for 20 years with a love of police work as deep as that of his patrol-sergeant wife, recites his litany of instructions before she goes out again: Be careful out there. Don’t get into any situations you can’t handle. Be safe.

“We don’t dwell on it,” Philip Spada says later. “I wake up sometimes at 2 a.m. and she isn’t home yet and I wonder. But then I turn on the TV for a few minutes and I remind myself, if something had happened I would have heard. I remind myself that I have a job to go to in the morning and I better get some sleep. And I turn the TV off.”

Then the spousal strength, the career devotion, the refusal to succumb to fear, fall away for a moment. For him--the guy who encouraged her to join, the guy who wants as much as she does to see her make lieutenant--it keeps coming back to this:

“I’m selfish. I don’t want anything to affect all the great things we’ve got. Our relationship. The kids. The family life,” he pauses. “I don’t know what the hell we’d do without her.”

Times staff writers Lily Dizon in Orange County and Mack Reed in Ventura County contributed to this story.