Nothing Can Fill the Void for Dylon

He won’t want for much as his childhood unfolds. There’ll be money for new toys, school clothes, a computer . . . all courtesy of the LAPD.

But the thing Dylon Brown wants most of all is the one thing no one--not even the Los Angeles Police Department--can give him back: life with his dad.

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He was in bed last Sunday, deep in dreams in the middle of the night, when the blue uniforms arrived to awaken and usher him into a fraternity that grows larger each year--the children of police officers killed on duty.

His father, Brian Brown, who’d been with the LAPD three years, had been cut down while chasing a car carrying two suspects in the shooting death of a man earlier that night. A hail of bullets had ended the life of the 27-year-old Marine Corps veteran, Purple Heart winner and single father to a 7-year-old.

Capt. Gary Williams delivered the news at the home Dylon shared with his dad and his grandfather . . . who now will be raising his son’s only child.

“The boy had questions,” Williams said. “I tried to answer them, to tell him directly what happened, not beat around the bush. I’m hoping I did it in the right way, the way I’d like it to be done for me. . . . But then I’m not 7 years old.

“How do you answer a kid who wants to know why the bullet hit Dad in the head instead of the leg, because then he’d be coming home tonight?”

Police Commission President Edith Perez encountered Dylon at the hospital later that night . . . after she’d tucked her own 7-year-old into bed and visited the crime scene to examine Brown’s bullet-riddled, blood-spattered squad car.

The corridors at UCLA hospital were lined with blue-uniformed, red-eyed officers, stung by the news of their comrade’s fate. Peering down the row at them was Dylon, a tall, sturdy kid with his father’s striking gaze.

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If there’s one thing the LAPD does well, Williams says, it’s provide help for the families of officers killed in the line of duty.”I guess it’s because we’ve had lots of practice. . . . That little boy will have all the financial support he needs, right down to college tuition.”

If only money were all it took to salve the pain of a fatherless child.

Irma Rios Laguna knows, firsthand, that it takes much more. Her husband, Joe Rios, died six years ago from a head injury in an on-duty crash. He was at home, on his day off, when a seizure ended his life.

“When my daughter Samantha came home from school that day, there were squad cars all over, all these uniforms in our living room,” Laguna recalls. “She walked into the room, looked around and asked, ‘Is my Daddy dead?’ ”

For Samantha--who had just turned 5 the day before--and her little brother Alex, then 3, life was divided into “before” and “after,” beginning with that day.

All their lives, they’d been part of a big, raucous family--the LAPD. Dad’s fellow officers brought their kids to Alex’s and Samantha’s birthday parties; Alex and Samantha went with Dad on police station visits. There were annual picnics, holiday parties. . . .

Then Daddy died, and it all stopped.

“Once they die,” Laguna says, “you’re not in that circle anymore.”

She wants to make it clear that she’s not complaining. The LAPD, through its Family Support program, has been a wonderful resource for her.

Whenever an officer dies, someone from the support group is there to help with everything from baby-sitting to grocery shopping to funeral plans. The department pays for family counseling, and the group of widows meets once a month to work through issues that death imposes--”you’re having financial problems, the kids are not doing well in school . . .

“We cannot take the pain away, but we can give them hope,” Laguna says. “We try to let them know what’s ahead, to walk them through the problems they face.”

But there is precious little for the surviving children, to keep them linked to the parent they lost.

Wouldn’t it be nice, Laguna wonders, if someone from the LAPD would commit to staying involved with the children left behind by dead officers . . . maybe a retiree or a young officer with no kids of his own.

“Something where the child could have that feeling of bonding, of staying connected with the department that their father loved.” Laguna has put her life back together, remarried and recognized that life goes on. But though her children are doing well, she knows they still ache at the unfilled void.

“For my kids--for this little boy--it’s not just now, it’s next year and the next . . . it’s forever.”

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There have been three LAPD officers killed this year alone--Steve Gadja, Filbert Cuesta and, now, Brian Brown--adding four small children to this fraternity of hundreds.

Little is known, Capt. Williams says, of how the trauma affects their lives.”There’s the violence of the deaths, the police officers coming in the middle of the night, the spectacle of these immense funerals. . . . It’s hard to know how that marks a child.”

Indeed, all police officers’ children already carry a special burden--the knowledge that their parent’s job is fraught with peril . . . that an everyday stop for a traffic ticket can turn bloody, in the blink of an eye.

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* Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.