Memorial Honors Tustin Officer Slain 28 Years Ago

Sher Karp turned 10 on Dec. 6, 1972, the day her dad, Tustin Police Officer Waldron Karp, was shot.

She doesn’t really remember her birthday, or all the painful days that followed. What she remembers most is all the times her dad wasn’t there: her high school prom, her driving test, her college graduation.

“There was just something missing,” Sher Karp said. “There still is. You can’t help but wonder what it would have been like.”

One month after the shooting, Karp died at Tustin Community Hospital. It was on Jan. 7, 1973, the day his stepdaughter, Kathy Ahearn, turned 10. “He was the father that I never had. . . . and he was taken away,” Ahearn said.

On Sunday, Ahearn’s birthday and the 27th anniversary of Karp’s death, the Tustin Police Department unveiled a long-awaited memorial in Karp’s honor. He is the only Tustin officer to be killed in the line of duty.

“Wally, we know you’re watching,” Tustin Police Chief Steve Foster said at Sunday’s ceremony. “We apologize for the delay, but we want you to know you’re not forgotten.”

Sher Karp and Ahearn, almost the same age, never lived together or knew each other well because they have different mothers. Yet both share the bond of a father who died too soon.

Sher Karp feels loss every time she sees a father holding his daughter’s hand. Ahearn tries to see the good that came from her tragedy, the people that came into her life. But even as a little girl, she recognized the loss.

In a tape-recorded conversation made shortly after Karp died, Ahearn is talking with her 3-year-old brother about what could have been. The tape ends with a simple, sad comment: “But he died.”

Even in death, though, Karp is still making an impact.

Tustin Police Sgt. Mark Bergquist never knew Karp, yet he spearheaded a $110,000 fund-raising drive for the memorial.

“When I got here, I was a training officer, and I would walk by his picture every day [inside the Tustin Police Department],” Bergquist said. He told all the young recruits, “Don’t ever forget this man, the sacrifice he made and what could happen to you.”

The memorial depicts a life-sized kneeling, grieving Tustin police officer, his left hand on his forehead and a folded American flag tucked under his right arm.

Police officials hope it will be a constant reminder, both of Karp and of the daily risk officers face.

The night Karp was shot, he was responding to a routine call about a prowler.

Karp and other officers heard rustling in the bushes. They yelled at the prowler to come out, but he fired, hitting Karp. An Orange County sheriff’s deputy was also hit in his hands and knee.

Karp’s friend, Leonard Gardner--then a Tustin police watch commander and now the Plumas County sheriff--rushed to the scene as soon as he heard “shots fired” on the radio. Gardner arrived to see Karp lying on the asphalt.

He had been shot in the stomach and arm, but he was conscious, and begged Gardner, “Don’t tell my wife.”

An Orange County sheriff’s deputy shot Karp’s gunman, Gary W. Johnson. Johnson later served seven years in state prison, Gardner said. Johnson was later freed.

The Gardners and Karps were close. They lived on the same street in houses with the same floor plan.

“My wife can tell you I cried in her arms many nights after he was gone,” Gardner said. “He taught me how short life is.”

Karp’s wife, Gerrie Zimmer, mother of Kathy Ahearn, and to whom he had been married only three months, learned a similar lesson. She gave up her job as a beautician, inspired to become an intensive care nurse after the long month she spent at Karp’s hospital bedside.

“There’s a reason for everything in this life,” Zimmer said from her home in Templeton, in Central California. “The Lord put me in the path of Waldron George Karp. He gave me so many things that I related to my children. From him I learned to forge forward and to do the very best.”

Sher Karp moved from Fullerton to Tustin, to feel somehow closer to the father she never really knew. She bought a personalized license plate--1 KARP. Her mother said it is because she was alone, one Karp, on her own.

Now she has a place to visit: his memorial in front of the Tustin Police Department. It is a memorial the community helped build.

“I’m honored that people gave to this,” she said, “and most probably didn’t even know him.”