Slain Officer Leaves Behind Pregnant Wife

Nearly seven months pregnant and a widow at 28, Kristin Burt lay on the sofa Sunday, stunned, strong, dressed in her dead husband’s T-shirt and letting the memories flow, the memories of a cop’s wife.

How he’d bring his work home with him. His pride at pulling drunk drivers off the road. The way he’d downplay the danger. There had been plenty of that in the short, 15-month career of California Highway Patrolman Don J. Burt--”Baby Donny” and “Bubba” to his parents and sisters.

In January, he collided with another motorist and crashed his patrol car into a tree while pursuing a speeding motorcyclist. In April, he walked away uninjured after another motorist hit him as he sped to help a fellow beat officer close an onramp to traffic.

“It was horrible,” Kristin Burt said of the January incident, recalling how she was called from her job as a hazardous waste specialist for the county of Orange to join him at the hospital.

That time, fellow officers told her he wanted her by his side.

This time, on Saturday night, they told her nothing.

“The first thing they did was put me in a conference room by myself,” she said. “They were whispering in the hall. They were concerned about premature labor. I knew he had already passed away.”

Kristin Burt had kissed her husband just hours before his death. It was for the last time.

During a seemingly routine traffic stop, a motorist pulled a handgun and shot Don Burt to death. He was only 25.

The blond-haired rookie was the son of a CHP sergeant, and Kristin is the daughter of a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s lieutenant and sister of an L.A. County sheriff’s deputy.

The families, unified by their devotion to law enforcement, are now profoundly and irrevocably bound by the highest sacrifice.

“We talked about the possibility of something happening to him, probably as recently as two or three weeks ago,” Kristin said. “It wasn’t something I worried about all the time, but I knew from realism that it could happen. I wasn’t naive to that fact. He talked about work. There were times I didn’t like him to, because I wanted him to leave work at work. But he really loved it a lot. He loved every person he worked with.”

The slain officer’s father, Don R. Burt, 52, knows the score. He’s been with the CHP since 1969. He’s seen the world grow more violent, and has mourned five fellow officers from his own academy class. Still, he couldn’t--and wouldn’t--try to stop his son from fulfilling a dream.

Burt said he wants his kids “to be what they want to be in life. . . . If that’s what he wanted to be, I knew he’d be the best.”

Law officers have a coping mechanism to deal with risk. They leave it up to others to worry for them.

“We know it’s never going to happen to us because we feel we can take care of ourselves,” said the father. “But you worry about your kids. He wasn’t as big as I was and he was a lot nicer than me.”

To 25-year-old Andy Silva--his best friend since seventh grade--Burt was “like a brother” who shared birthdays and scoldings when the pair tried to sneak food onto their high school campus.

Silva, who was the best man at Burt’s wedding, said the pair talked at Burt’s grandfather’s memorial service just last Thursday of the outpouring of love people offered.

“He said that when the time came, he just wished that people would be as kind to him,” said Silva, who drove up from San Diego before dawn Sunday to be with Burt’s family.

“I was proud of him. I always knew something like this could happen, but I always discounted the thought. His father’s been in law enforcement for almost 30 years and never even got in a car accident.”

Don Burt graduated from Perris High School in 1989. He was president of his senior class, and made the varsity soccer, swimming and water polo teams all four years. He went to Whittier College for a year intent on being a high school history teacher, then met Kristin and slowly changed his mind.

It was love at first sight when his wife hired him to work for her at a video store seven years ago. That was Nov. 7, 1989, and Kristin Burt remembers every second of it.

“A friend of mine said, ‘My buddy over there is looking for a job and he pointed to him,’ ” she said. “He had his back to me and I remember thinking, ‘Ooh, mama.’ I remember what he was wearing and I remember how he turned around and smiled at me.”

She interviewed him and by Nov. 18 they were on their first date. It lasted two days. In time, Kristin nicknamed him Ferris Bueller for the movie character who flirted with disaster but always seemed to escape the worst. Until now.

Still preserved from that night is a napkin where the couple wrote down all the things they hoped to do together. “We said we would be together 50 years from that date,” she said.

Kristin’s father, Michael Muravez, is a retired sheriff’s lieutenant and her brother, Scott Muravez, is a sheriff’s deputy. Their influence, and his pride in his own father’s work with the CHP, swayed Burt into joining the agency.

Before he even completed his probation in April, the younger Burt was teaching others to use the computer system at the Santa Ana CHP station. And he had already gone through training to begin training new academy graduates, said his sister, 23-year-old Dani Stackhouse.

“When he first came out of the academy, we kept teasing him,” Stackhouse said. “He just had that cop attitude. He carried his gun wherever he went and he had his little fanny pack. He was talking about taking the sergeant’s exam in five years. Given the chance, he could have done so much.”

Sometimes, the rookie spoke of frightening confrontations he had since graduating from the CHP academy in April 1995. Other times, he talked with satisfaction of making numerous drunk driving arrests in a week and doing something to protect others.

“That’s another reason why he chose the CHP, because it’s more of a helping agency,” said his mother, Jeannie Burt, 50, as she alternately wept and hugged consoling friends and relatives at the family’s Perris home Sunday. “There are people who get in trouble on the road and he wanted to help them.”

The elder Burt lost his father--also named Don--to cancer two weeks ago, and the family all gathered together last Thursday for the memorial service.

It was the last time Don J. Burt’s father, mother and sister saw him.

The eldest sister, Keli Elgin, 30, was flying in from Arkansas late Sunday to join the family and her children, who are visiting for the summer. For her, the death of her brother compounds an already unimaginable grief: Her husband was killed last October in a car crash, leaving their three children--ages 8, 7 and 5--fatherless.

“Every night, he’d put his ear on my Aunt Kristin’s stomach to hear the baby,” 8-year-old Kari Elgin said Sunday as she recounted swimming and joking with her uncle. “It kicked his face seven times once.”

The family is now considering burying the ashes of the two Dons side by side, because grandson and grandfather were very close.

Burt had called his supervisors early Saturday morning to see if he could get the day off, but “he found out they were already short on officers,” his wife said.

“I just wish he’d been able to get the day off like we planned,” Kristin said. “I don’t have a lot of ‘woulda shoulda couldas’ running through my head. I just wanted him to see his baby.”