Ex-La Palma Officer Killed in Line of Duty in ‘Safer’ Washington

Police in La Palma mourned Sunday over the death of a former colleague, fatally shot the day before while on duty in the pastoral Washington state city where he had moved to escape the bustle and danger of an increasingly urban Orange County.

Deputy Wally E. Davis, 48, was remembered by colleagues as a Renaissance man who also published Christian murder mysteries, Western novels and cartoons. He leaves behind a pregnant wife and three children from a prior marriage.

Officers found Davis’ body on the porch of a Port Angeles, Wash., home shortly after noon Saturday. He apparently had been shot in the head by a man who had barricaded himself inside with a shotgun. Davis, who had worked about 14 years with the La Palma Police Department, was responding to a domestic disturbance call placed by a neighbor, said Clallum County Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Borte.

In a 25-hour standoff with the gunman, 60 officers fired rounds of tear gas and pepper spray into the house in an attempt to force him out.

The standoff ended Sunday afternoon when Thomas Martin Roberts, 53, surrendered to police. Reports said Roberts had been previously arrested for a violation of a protection order and domestic assault. He was booked on suspicion of first-degree murder of an officer and, if convicted, could face the death penalty.

Davis, 48, moved to Port Angeles five years ago after more than 15 years of service in Orange County, most of them with the La Palma police.

‘We’re in the Twilight Zone,’ Says One Officer

The news shocked members of the tiny La Palma department, which has only 25 sworn officers and still considers Davis one of their own. Employees said the city has never lost an officer in the line of duty. The eternal flame that burns outside their office is dedicated to fallen citizens, not officers, and police consider their community quiet and safe.

To hear officers describe it, La Palma is not unlike the more remote Port Angeles. The former logging town is about 60 miles from Seattle, nestled near mountains on northern Olympic Peninsula. Officers said Davis, who loved the outdoors, moved there because it seemed safer, and Orange County was becoming too busy and hectic.

“Wally used to say that the calls for service up there were the same kinds of calls for service here,” said Karen Morey, a longtime La Palma dispatcher who talked with Davis on the telephone earlier this year. “It was quiet. A nice place to raise his children.”

Morey last spoke with Davis in February, when he called the department. Davis was happy in his job as road deputy, riding in jeeps and on horses. He even sent them pictures of himself, a lanky man with a prim mustache, dressed up as a cowboy or in his officer’s uniform.

“He was perfectly happy,” Morey said. “He was just very content with his life, and very much in love with his new wife.”

Officers described Davis as a simple man with a sharp sense of humor. For about 14 years, he chronicled the department’s foibles in hundreds of cartoons that hung on its walls and circulated from desk to desk. Copies of them are still around the office today.

“It seems like he just left,” Morey said.

“We’re in the twilight zone,” said Officer Wesley Sasano, who worked with Davis. “We wonder what happened and why.”

Sasano opened a binder of Davis’ cartoons, one of which was about him. “He was the kind of person who could see the humor in anything,” he said, pointing to a drawing of himself flailing on top of a thick stream of water. Davis drew the cartoon after Sasano tried to chase a hospital escapee over a high wall.

A small man, Sasano stood on a piece of piping to hoist himself over. The pipe broke, shooting water that nearly launched him into the air.

The cartoons were the “Dilbert” of the Police Department, featuring employees from the chief on down as characters. There was Morey arguing with a superior over a pair of police-uniform pants, officers being flattened by doors and rescuing kittens, and even lanky Davis, sometimes rumpled and harried, but always with a perfectly manicured mustache.

“He would find some humor even in this situation, had he lived,” Sasano said.

Among Davis’ published works were “Suspended Animation” and “Black Dragon,” Christian murder mysteries published by Crossway Books, and “Crime Crushers,” a book of police cartoons published by Fragments West/Valentine Press.