Read these words, which could have been uttered Tuesday but instead echo from the past, from another day of gratitude and sadness:
“Law enforcement is truly unique. There is no profession in public service that is, at the same time, so essential for a civilized society and so challenging and dangerous for those who answer the calling. And nothing teaches us that hard lesson as does this sad occasion that brings us together here today.”
The day was Aug. 19, 1994. The place was Naval Station Everett. And the speaker was Bob Drewel, then Snohomish County executive. Washington’s governor was there, along with about 3,000 others. Hundreds in the crowd wore police uniforms from agencies in the western United States and Canada.
Tears were shed that day for Sgt. James Kinard of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office. Earlier that awful week, on the night of Aug. 15, 1994, Kinard, 34, was killed by a gunman after he and several deputies responded to a report of a shooting at a Cathcart area home.
There’s no reason here to retell in detail a 15-year-old story, or to recount the more than six-year court process involving a death-penalty case. Charles Finch, convicted of murdering Kinard and another man, died in 2000 after jumping off a Snohomish County Jail balcony.
This column isn’t about process. And it isn’t what I hoped to write after the shocking news from Pierce County of Nov. 29, when Lakewood Police Sgt. Mark Renninger and officers Ronald Owens, Tina Griswold and Greg Richards were assassinated by a released felon at a coffee shop while they were preparing for their shifts.
Four families had their hearts torn out the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
People, that’s what this is about — spouses and children and a horrible empty place at the dinner table.
Kinard was a graduate of Everett High School and the University of Washington, and a 10-year veteran of the sheriff’s office. He was also a son, a brother and a father. And like every law enforcement officer, he put his life on the line for strangers.
Members of Kinard’s family chose not to speak publicly as fresh grief descended on those closest to Renninger, Owens, Griswold, Richards and Marysville’s Timothy Brenton, the Seattle police officer shot to death on Halloween in a drive-by shooting by a suspect believed to be targeting police.
Yet as I followed Tuesday’s memorial events for the Lakewood officers, I kept thinking of the Snohomish County family whose grief is 15 years old.
Many, many years after pictures and stories of the Lakewood officers and the Seattle officer are gone from newspapers and TV screens, those officers — those people — will still be deeply missed and remembered daily. Family stories will be swapped, bringing smiles, even laughs. There will always be warm memories, but also cold, cruel loss.
That loss lives on into the future, as a permanent hole in the family and an empty place at the table. Jim Kinard left a 5-year-old son, now a young man of college age. Think of everything that father and son never got to do together.
Think of all the children of the Lakewood four, not only as children, but as they grow. Think ahead to their graduations, wedding days, all the milestones to come.
Somber images and words from Tuesday’s memorial in Tacoma will become history, just as the story of Sgt. James Kinard is a sad chapter in Snohomish County’s past.
For the families of these officers who protected us, being without the people they loved best is not history.
It’s forever.
Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460, muhlstein@heraldnet.com.
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