‘It’s a Big Unknown’ : Officer’s Death a Grim Reminder of the Danger in a Day’s Work

The tattooed chests and flashing hand signs of local gang members cover a long stretch of picture board in the CHP briefing room where Officer Bonnie Lingan readies for her evening swing shift.

As the 34-year-old former middle school teacher heads for her black and white, she pushes through a rear door adorned with the menacing face of a bearded man and the barrel of his gun. “Is Today the Day?” the framed photograph taunts. “Think Officer Safety.”

Lingan works for the CHP’s Westminster region, which borders the turf of rookie CHP Officer Don J. Burt, slain in Fullerton on July 13 on the same swing shift Lingan works.

Day after day, the possibility of a deadly ambush hangs suspended in the consciousness of the state’s highway patrol officers--even as they fill their logbooks with fender benders, speeding tickets, innocuous reports of debris in the roadway and brief accounts of help provided to lost or stranded motorists.

In her seven years on the force, Lingan has never fired her service weapon outside of training. And it’s been ages since she has tightened her grip around the rifle that sits cleaned and clamped near her patrol car radio.

But the image of a motorist’s gun barrel is the “what if” that has her tromping through ice plants on the freeway shoulder to safely approach the passenger side of the cars she pulls over. (“It really ruins the shine on your boots,” she grouses.)

It is the innate reminder that prompts her to walk around the back of her patrol car as soon as darkness falls, rather than cross the path of her own bright beams and flashing lights on her way to the big unknown that sits in the vehicle ahead of her.

“If you walk in front of your own vehicle, you’re fully illuminated,” says Lingan, a lanky 5-foot-9-inch woman whose thin frame is always protected by the bulletproof vest she chooses to wear. “You don’t know who’s up there.”

Lingan works about four calls of freeway violence a week--usually spats between irate motorists that turn physical. And she has seen her share of serious injury accidents, losing a victim once in the midst of CPR. But on a recent shift, her hours are filled with more mundane yet critical tasks.

There are the bits of frayed metal that she clears from the side of the northbound San Diego Freeway after a Cadillac for sale is rammed from behind by a tan Honda in stop-and-go afternoon traffic.

And by night’s end, there is the dusty brown Ford Mustang that Lingan orders towed into storage after she discovers the tearful 29-year-old woman behind the wheel is driving on a twice-suspended license.

It was during just such a routine stop that Burt was slain, as he began to inventory the contents of a BMW he planned to impound. In the trunk, investigators say, Burt discovered a number of phony traveler’s checks. The driver, unrestrained and presumably out of Burt’s sight at least a fraction of a second too long, shot the 25-year-old officer six times before firing a fatal round into his head, police have said.

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By 1:45 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, Lingan and her all-male colleagues are drifting into the briefing room to take their seats at wooden row-desks, their badges covered in black bands to honor the fallen officer.

They ready their gun belts and portable radio rechargers, as one officer laces his boots and banters about a fatal crash that hit at the end of the previous night’s shift.

Sgt. Sterling Sechrist announces the arrest of Burt’s suspected assailant in Houston to a cry of “Outstanding” from the back row; urges his officers to take their cruisers to the carwash before their slain colleague’s funeral on Thursday; and offers a legal update that focuses their thoughts once more on the moment when Burt fell.

Officers now have the authority to impound a vehicle if the driver’s license is suspended or a registration is more than six months outdated, and it’s “a very powerful tool,” Sechrist says.

“The Legislature gave it to us. Let’s use it,” he urges. “But be expecting all kinds of things when you go to tow their car. For a lot of people, that’s a lot worse than giving them a ticket.”

Sechrist runs down the calls that have just trickled in to the dispatch center in Santa Ana--a minor accident, a car on fire, and some unknown material in the road.

“So have at it,” he tells them.

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Lingan’s first call is sitting on the freeway shoulder--a dark blue Cadillac, slightly buckled, and the crumpled Honda that hit it. She talks with the distressed Cadillac owner over the roar of traffic. It’s out of her turf, so she stays just long enough to calm frayed nerves and wait for her beat partner to arrive.

The afternoon unfolds with a series of minor stops. Someone’s lost, and sits poring over a map on the freeway shoulder. A man is out of gas, but when Lingan stops to help she sees the registration on his pickup is expired and gives him a fix-it ticket.

Farther north, Lingan comes across a man strolling on the shoulder and flips a U-turn. The man, clutching a small book, flashes her a big smile and an OK sign. He’s trying to make his way south but doesn’t want to walk the river channel because of the “criminally minded” that frequent it. Lingan directs him instead to a bike path that will keep him out of the way of errant drivers.

“You’re not meeting people under the best of circumstances, but the majority are nonconfrontational,” Lingan says. “To the person stranded on the freeway, you might be the big savior of the day. The positive contacts are more rewarding. But I try not to let my opinions of people in general be colored by my contacts on the freeway.”

As dusk falls, traffic starts to move faster. The radio’s quiet, and Lingan’s routine vigilance kicks into high gear.

She “ramps on and off” often, to “give traffic a break.” Otherwise, uptight drivers spot her squad car and slow to a crawl, creating a natural traffic break. “It’s like they’re back there waiting for the gun to go off,” she jokes, eyeing the cushion of darkness in her rearview mirror.

With the glow of red taillights, it’s easier to spot errant drivers who might be under the influence, and with rush hour long past, it’s time to catch some speeders.

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Lingan makes no arrests on this particular shift--an occurrence more common on the graveyard shift.

Very few of the patrol cars in her district have cages, and when she hauls a suspect to jail on the swing shift, which all officers work solo, she must cuff him and sit him right beside her. If he is ornery, a small red chain comes up from the floor near the seat-belt mechanism and hooks onto the cuffs to further immobilize the suspect.

The road itself offers the most pervasive hazard, she says. Lingan’s roommate from the academy is still in physical therapy after a drunk driver accidentally swerved onto the shoulder and struck her as she helped the driver of a disabled vehicle. One of her colleagues just returned to work after a car hit him on the shoulder, sending him airborne.

The possibility of confrontation is ever-present: Lingan keeps a watchful eye on overpasses since someone dropped a brick on her patrol car from a railroad crossing on the Long Beach Freeway some years back, shattering her windshield with a crack she first mistook for gunfire.

Even speeders must be approached with great care.

“They’re in a hurry, but you don’t know why they’re in a hurry,” she said. “They like to drive fast, they have a date, they’ve committed a crime. It’s a big unknown.”

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The last stop of the night is the brown Ford Mustang, sans tail-lights, a red bandanna taped over one crushed light.

The driver is returning from her court-ordered drunk driving class and knows she should not be behind the wheel, but pleads for Lingan to let a friend come pick up the car. But Lingan says she can’t let the woman leave the car on the shoulder. She calls for a tow truck, first coaxing the woman to give up her keys.

As the truck pulls up, Lingan begins her inventory of the car, the driver sitting slouched on the shoulder. It was at this point in Burt’s stop that things suddenly turned tragic July 13. The assailant shot him and fled in the patrol car, abandoning the vehicle miles down the road.

Officers have speculated that the driver had bolted in the squad car because Burt likely took his keys away, as Lingan did with her driver.

Lingan jots down the results of her brief inventory--designed to protect the CHP from allegations of theft at the tow yard. A weight belt, a Kodak camera, three packs of gum. Nothing of real value, and nothing illegal.

“It’s not Joe Citizen who gets upset when you impound his car that I’m worried about,” Lingan says.

“It’s the person who has their stash in their trunk and doesn’t want you to find it when you take their car. Or the person with some nasty warrants who doesn’t want you to know about them. That’s where it gets dangerous. That person is willing to take more risks.”

* FALLEN OFFICERS: More weapons, strict sentencing laws may be behind rise. A3