Community’s Support Buoys Officer’s Family

The last time Ruth Dean saw her son was at Christmas, at a celebration and family reunion captured on videotape.

But Dean, 69, has yet to watch that footage. It is still too difficult a prospect as she grieves for Clarence Wayne Dean, her eldest child, a motorcycle police officer who fell to his death off a collapsed freeway interchange in the first few minutes after the Northridge earthquake.

“I will eventually watch it,” she said Friday from her home in Ventura, hours after officials reopened the Golden State-Antelope Valley freeway interchange for the first time in six months, naming it for her dead son.

Nowadays, what keeps Dean going are the rest of her children and the senior citizen activities she attends with a neighbor. And she is buoyed by the concern of her son’s fellow Los Angeles Police Department officers, who spearheaded the drive to rename the interchange.

Lawmakers approved the name change earlier this week. A ceremony to formally dedicate the connector roads to Clarence Dean’s memory will be held later this year, near where the officer plummeted 30 feet as he rushed to work in the pre-dawn blackness Jan. 17.

“It’s a very nice gesture,” Ruth Dean said, her voice breaking. “Everyone will remember him more that way.”

The past few months have been trying for Dean as she comes to grips with the death of her son just a little more than a year after the loss of her husband.

To remember Clarence, whom everyone in the family called Wayne, she keeps a photograph of him in uniform in her living room. And she has a cupboard full of drinking glasses he gave her for Christmas during her weeklong stay at his Lancaster home.

“I had mentioned I had wanted some drinking glasses, just four little ones,” she recalled. “He got me a set of 16.”

The gesture was characteristic of a man who friends and relatives say loved to help others. Clarence Dean, 46, joined the force when he was 21 and is survived by his mother, two sisters, a younger brother and two children: Guy, 26, and Traci, 23. He and his third wife were divorced.

For support, his mother relies on a network of other survivors of downed police officers. And two of her other children live close by, including Deborah Barton, 45, who lives just a few miles from her late brother’s home in Lancaster.

Barton said the deaths of her father and brother within such a short period of time have been difficult for the entire family.

“You’re just grieving over one and then something likes this happens,” said Barton, who was on hand for the reopening of the freeway interchange Friday.

Although the memory of her brother still brings tears, Barton clings to the hope that he is now in a place beyond pain or suffering.

“I have to remember he’s in a better place,” she said. “As long as I keep that faith, and truly believe that, it makes it a little easier.”