THE SUNDAY PROFILE : Going That Extra Mile : He’s the cop who first dreamed of DARE, the anti-drug program. But that’s not Pat Connelly’s only passion. He also turns kids (and adults) on to running.

Slowly, Los Angeles Police Officer Pat Connelly begins to tell the true story of how one young life changed millions of others:

I knelt down and I picked this young girl up in my arms. And I am holding her, and her eyes open up and she looks at me and these tears are running out and down into her hair. She’s scared to death.

And she says, “Officer, am I going to die?” I say, “Relax and stay comfortable here, I’m going to stay with you. We have an ambulance coming and you’re going to be OK.” I can tell that she may not make it. I say to her, “I want you to say , ‘Jesus, I love you,’ ” and she did. . . .

Then] her head rocked back and her eyes went back in her head and she died. All the air came out of that young girl’s lungs, and she died in my arms. . . . All I could do was place Teresa on that cold pavement and put my jacket over her.

This tale--the violent aftermath of a 1976 armed robbery--became the catalyst for the international anti-drug program DARE, or Drug Abuse Resistance Education, founded in 1983. As one of its unheralded and most passionate spokesmen, officer Connelly plans to keep telling Teresa’s story, sometimes three or more times a week when school is in session, until he retires early next year.

She was a 17-year-old Canoga Park High School student, and her boyfriend had just held up a Gap store in Van Nuys. Minutes later, Connelly and his partner traced the license plate of the getaway car to an apartment right around the corner. The hood was still hot. Then, the officers heard a gunshot.

Connelly squeezes the story now for maximum shock value:

“Teresa is in Forest Lawn today,” he says, fixing a deadpan stare on a group of fifth- and sixth-graders at Langdon Elementary School in North Hills. “There will be no spring vacation or holidays for her.”

He goes on to tell the students that he learned she had been swept by her boyfriend from a life as a cheerleader and honor student into drug addiction. The two became so desperate to support a $500-a-day heroin habit that they began doing stickups. After the last one, Teresa had told him “no more.” He shot her in the stomach.

“That incident so disturbed me that I started going out to elementary schools in the West Valley and talking to classes on the real dangers of drugs,” Connelly says to the class.

And what started as one off-duty cop using his spare time to reach out and warn kids has turned into a huge program funded by public and private money. Today, more than 18,000 DARE officers around the world speak to more than 25 million students a year, says DARE America Deputy Director Bill Alden. In Los Angeles, 60 DARE officers lecture about 850,000 kids in the city schools.

Although it enjoys widespread popularity and the support of public officials, as well as Arsenio Hall and Nancy Reagan, DARE has its detractors. Among them are drug-abusing parents whose DARE-trained kids have called the cops. And a 1994 study sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, an arm of the federal Justice Department, said DARE may be too big for its own good.

The study cited a lack of personal interaction between students and officers as the main flaw in getting the students to internalize and sustain any long-term help from DARE. Anne Voight, an NIJ spokeswoman, said DARE’s stronghold on government drug education funding may prevent like-minded, and potentially more effective, programs from catching on.

To Connelly, though, DARE’s dramatic growth--$4 million is spent annually on related workbooks and teaching materials alone--has no downside.

“There are so many ways to look at the value of DARE,” he says. “If you take 10 kids out of the criminal justice system is that enough progress?”

Connelly applauds the program’s real founders, former Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and then-Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Harry Handler, for funneling their frustration over the city’s drug problems into an agent for change. Gates came up with the idea of using his officers as anti-drug counselors in the classroom after reading a newspaper article about Connelly’s spiel.

To this day, DARE instructors try to emulate his trademark soft speech and storytelling technique.

“Pat probably shouldn’t have been a policeman,” says Frank Whitman, a close friend of 25 years. “It’s not that he’s not a good officer, but he just should have been a coach, because he’s such a sensitive individual and has a tremendous interest in coaching. He relates to people, especially young people, really well.”

That ability to tap into what it’s like to be young and uncertain probably comes from Connelly’s own difficult childhood. He grew up in Van Nuys with five brothers and three sisters, and went to work as a boy selling newspapers on the street to help support the family.

“It wasn’t a priority to finish high school,” Connelly says. “It was just tough for us to put food on the table. We were poor. All the sons were expected to work.”

He planned to join the U.S. Navy as soon as he was old enough, as his older brothers had. Then, in his early teens at Birmingham High, he discovered a love for running that would help keep him in school until graduation.

“Coach said I wasn’t fast and a very poor sprinter,” Connelly recalls, smiling. “He kind of encouraged me not to go out for track. And then one day I’m standing there and I see these two guys running around the track. And I say, ‘Can I run with those two guys?’ And I ran behind them. I ended up going 11 laps. Coach called me over and said, ‘Pat, you’re going to be a distance runner.’ I said, ‘What’s a distance runner?”’

In the long stretch between a start and finish, Connelly found tranquillity.

*

Since that first day, with the encouragement of his mentor and high school coach Pete Peterson, he has completed more than 20 marathons, including the Boston and L.A. events.

He holds the Los Angeles record for the 50- to 60-year-old age group in the 800 and 1,500 meter events. And he still shows up at the Birmingham High track on Tuesday nights to help kids and adults firm up their running technique. The only thing he asks in return, from those who can afford it, is a donation to the school’s running programs.

His students call him the “pied piper of running.”

“If Pat were paid for all the work he does in the community, his salary would quadruple,” says actor Brian Patrick Clarke, a running student of Connelly’s since 1985. “If every LAPD officer took their job as seriously as Connelly, we wouldn’t have the historical antagonistic relationship we have between police and people.”

To truly grasp Connelly, 57, envision a man who deals in movement--a true believer in the Newtonian principle of motion. Push. Push. Push. It’s all he knows. Whether he is picking up the pace during a morning run or combing the schoolyards of Los Angeles as a police officer, his legs, his Popeye-like arms, and his trusting blue-green eyes are perpetually moving. He seemingly transcends the boundaries of daily life.

Connelly also coaches the L.A. Roadrunners, the official amateur training program for the Los Angeles Marathon, and the Students Run L.A., which prepares high school kids for the same event. He pushes his runners because he wants them to excel, to tap the special “X factor” that exists in all of them.

Marie Patrick, vice president and co-founder of the L.A. Marathon, says Connelly represents a “passion and sincerity” that makes his runners rely on and trust his expertise.

“I think he’s the best,” she says. “There is no one I would rather have working with me, the kids or the Roadrunners. Pat just puts the time in, hours and hours. He loves it.”

Coach Connelly takes on runners of all ages and abilities, from out-of-shape recreational joggers to reconditioned 70-year-olds. His successes--which date from his days as a Pierce College cross-country star, as a cross-country coach at USC and UCLA, and as a qualifier for the 1964 U.S. Olympic trials--have made him a respected training expert throughout the country. Runner’s World magazine honored him with its Golden Shoe Award, and the LAPD inducted him into its Athletic Hall of Fame. Just this week, his self-published book, a running guide called “Go the Distance” was released.

Wherever he can, he promotes running as therapy. “I always thought it was a great stress reducer for police officers,” he says.

Connelly has also received one of the Police Department’s highest honors, the Meritorious Medal, for his contributions to DARE.

Whitman, who was Connelly’s drill instructor at the Los Angeles Police Academy in 1970 and among those who selected him as the first DARE representative, sees his friend as a silently commanding officer.

“It takes a special officer to be in the DARE program,” Whitman says. “And whenever I did DARE training for other officers outside of L.A., I would bring Pat along as a role model of what a DARE officer should be.”

*

Early next year, after 25 years as a police officer, Connelly will retire to long runs on the beach or in the Santa Monica Mountains with one of his two daughters and extra hours at his beloved church, St. Bridgets in Van Nuys, where he has been a member since it opened 1962.

He and wife Joan, his high school sweetheart, plan to relax. First on the Things to Do List, which includes driving across the United States, is a trip to trace his family’s roots in Northern Ireland.

Until he hangs up his badge, though, Connelly will live for more days when, strolling through the Police Academy, he spots former students who are on their way to becoming his colleagues and for more encounters with people for whom the message worked.

“Talk about getting feedback,” Connelly says. “I was in Nordstrom, my favorite place, buying a shirt. This girl looks at me and says, ‘You don’t remember me do you?’ I say, ‘I’m sorry I don’t.’ She says, ‘You were my DARE officer at Canoga Park High School in 1983.’ And then she says, ‘I want you to know that I am still saying no.’

“Isn’t that a great testimony? ‘I want you to know that I am still saying no.”’

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Pat Connelly

Age: 57.

Native: Yes; born in Van Nuys, where he still lives.

Family: He and wife Joan, his high school sweetheart, have two daughters--Christina, 26, and Kerry, 22.

Passions: Helping others improve their lives through running, stopping the use of drugs among young people.

On the hazards of running at night: “In 1976, I ran with the LAPD cross-country relay team from Los Angeles to Montreal. It was midnight in Duluth, Minn., and it was my turn to run. . . . I was running about a six-minute mile pace with a LAPD car 10 feet behind, its red lights flashing. Two drunks came rolling out of a bar and looked up to see the whole strange scene. They thought I was a fleeing criminal and decided to help the police catch me. I shifted gears . . . and put more distance between me and my pursuers. They gave up chase soon enough.”

On why teen-agers sometimes use drugs: “Teen-agers a lot of times turn to drugs because they have the feeling that the whole world is coming down on top of them. . . . Unfortunately, they turn to [drugs] instead of things that can help them. And whenever we can provide a better escape for kids or adults, we should do that.”