Doyel: Officer back on the streets, with a story to tell

ANDERSON – One by one the Colts walked near him, past him. He’s an Anderson police officer working security detail. It’s what NFL players do after practice. They walk near the cop. They walk past him.

Safety Mike Adams stopped. So did long snapper Matt Overton. They saw him, they saw what he was missing, and they had to stop. To thank him.

I saw him too. Saw what he was missing. Asked how it happened. And Anderson K-9 police officer Marty Dulworth, he smiled.

Then he told me a story of life and death, love and loss, bad luck and good luck and maybe something else, something unexplainable, supernatural, spiritual.

See, Marty Dulworth probably should have died the night he lost some of his left leg and most of his blood in the 300 block of Water Street in Pendleton — or later in the back of a blood-red Chevy Silverado doing 115 mph on Martin Luther King Boulevard, somewhere between Pendleton and Anderson, somewhere between life and death.

He’s back on the streets now, this 39-year-old public servant, and he has a story to tell. But first, he has something to say.

“Can you thank those guys for me?” he asks me.

Marty Dulworth wants me to thank Matt Overton and Mike Adams. For stopping. For caring.

* * *

It’s July 26, 2012, not long before midnight, and Dulworth slides his hand toward his left boot, hoping to find the bullet hole near his foot. He plans to plug the hole with his finger, stopping the flow of blood pouring onto Water Street. He reaches for his foot.

Only, there is no foot.

Responding to a call of shots fired and an officer down in nearby Pendleton, Dulworth and his K-9 partner of three years, a Belgian Malinois named Kilo, are ambushed by a man named Kenneth James Bailey. A woman is screaming that her garage door is open, it’s never open, and the man with the gun is hiding in there. It’s dark, it’s chaos, and Marty Dulworth turns to the woman to tell her to get the heck out of there when Kilo alerts to the left.

Fifteen feet away, Bailey steps out from behind a tree and opens fire with a fully automatic AK-47. Twenty rounds spit in Dulworth’s direction, 20 rounds in just a few seconds, and Kilo is hit in the chest. Dulworth is hit in both legs. The round to his right leg, it goes through the muscle and exits the other side. No permanent damage.

The rounds to his left leg, they damn near disintegrate his left ankle and foot.

After the shooting is over, Kilo drapes himself over Dulworth, protecting his partner. Dulworth is trying to find the source of all that blood, and when he realizes the catastrophic damage he has suffered, he lays back and thinks of his fiancée and children.

I hope my family knows how much I love them. Because I’m going to die right here.

What’s that saying? Men plan, and God laughs. Something like that. Well, God was chuckling that night.

Just about took a miracle — but no, Marty Dulworth wasn’t dying that night.

* * *

For four years at Shenandoah High, Dulworth was an all-conference football player. He wrestled and reached semi-state as a senior at 189 pounds. Played baseball. And the day he graduated, he removed his gown and packed his car for the Indianapolis airport. Four hours after graduation, Dulworth was on a plane to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego.

“Being a Marine was my plan since age 8,” he says.

Because his older brother was a Marine. Joe Garrett — same mother, different dad, doesn’t matter — became a cop; so did Marty. Joe bought 14 acres in Anderson and grows much of his own food; Marty bought 11 acres next door, does the same.

Joe’s 16 years older, but they’re brothers. Closer than that even, bonded by the Marines and the police department.

And so it was that the miracle of July 26, 2012 was set into motion. By the closeness of brothers, and by something else, something more.

“I quit believing in coincidence a long time ago,” Joe Garrett was telling me. “I just tell people: God was present that night.”

God, coincidence — whatever it was, on a night when so much went wrong on the 300 block of Water Street, everything after that had to go right for Dulworth to survive. It started with Joe Garrett, off duty but with his police radio uncharacteristically still on, hearing about the domestic violence incident in Pendleton. Garrett headed that way, just in case, when his brother’s voice was on the radio:

K-9-4, I’ve been shot.

Now Garrett is driving 115 mph into Pendleton, heading for the red and blue lights swirling in the sky. He’s bouncing over curbs until he stops in the street near his brother. Marty needs a tourniquet. Nobody has one.

Thank God, Joe lost all that weight.

See, Joe Garrett wasn’t much for wearing belts. But he’d lost 30 pounds recently, and just in the last few weeks he’d started wearing an old leather belt he found deep in his closet. He takes off the belt and gets to work.

“I was a marine in Iraq for 13 months,” Garrett says. “For 11 months, 29 days I was in Fallujah. I’ve put a few tourniquets on people.”

The tourniquet goes on, and now Garrett is lifting Marty into the back of his truck. Turns out, Marty had a friend — his garbage man, Larry Martin — on a ride-along. And now the garbage man was going to play his own role, sitting in the truck bed with Marty, keeping the tourniquet tight, the leg elevated.

Garrett is driving 115 mph toward Anderson, and meets the ambulance heading for Pendleton. The ambulance takes Marty the rest of the way to St. Vincent Anderson Regional Hospital. All told, nine minutes have passed since Marty was shot.

Thank God, it wasn’t 10 minutes.

“The doctor said he had about a minute to live,” Joe Garrett says, “before he would have bled out.”

* * *

Doctors tried to save the ankle and foot, but it wasn’t to be. Metal rods and plates and screws and abdominal muscles had been turned into an ankle and foot, but seven months later — trying to work but unable to walk – Marty told doctors to take off the leg.

Three months and six days later, no physical therapy — just working out on his own — Marty Dulworth was back on the job. Even in a profession of tough guys, this was some kind of morale boost for the Anderson Police Department.

“Something like that, you think it’ll take two or three years to come back, not just physically but mentally,” says Anderson detective Norman Rayford. “He was right back on the street, no hesitation. This is a hard job, but that gives you the motivation to press forward.”

Missing his left leg five inches below the knee, Dulworth can squat 500 pounds, dead-lift 405, bench 325 pounds on an incline. He played in a men’s softball league a few weeks ago and launched two home runs to center.

Rico was watching.

Right, Rico. You remember Dulworth’s K-9 partner from 2012, Kilo. Shot in the chest. Draped his body across Marty in case the gunman came back (Bailey did not; while Dulworth’s backups displayed heroism by flooding the danger zone, Bailey pulled out a handgun and committed suicide).

Well, on the night of July 26, 2012, Kilo had one mission: Protect Marty Dulworth. When other officers approached, Kilo engaged. A veterinarian later determined that Kilo had suffered what would’ve been a fatal wound from the AK-47 — a .762 round into the chest — but with his last breaths he was protecting Dulworth from everyone, and had to be put down.

Dulworth is a police officer, and more than that, he’s a K-9 officer. He has a new partner, a German Shepherd named Rico. At home, Kilo’s cremated remains are in an urn on the dresser. When the family is outside working the farm, Rico is in the yard, lying near Marty and Jessica’s 11-month-old daughter, Marlie Jo, licking her hands or nibbling gently on her toes.

Life goes on for Marty Dulworth. His son, Ryan, is 21. He’ll be a police officer soon. His other daughter, Hayley, just started her senior year at Shenandoah High. She wants to be a nurse.

Marty, he wants to be a cop. He has been for 14 years, and could be for another 20 or more. This is what he knows. It’s what he does. He works third shift, answering some of the most intense calls — K-9 teams handle the worst of the worst — and puts in overtime working Colts camp at Anderson University.

The nightmares ended a few years ago, horrifying replays of July 26, 2012 that ended with Marty screaming himself awake as Jessica holds him, but he thinks about that night every day. And this is what he thinks:

“Every time I step, every time I get out of bed and put on my leg, I think about it,” he says. “It doesn’t get me down. It is what it is. I knew what could happen when I started this job. Does it suck? Yeah. But this is what I do.”

And this is what we do. Same thing Pro Bowl Colts safety Mike Adams did. Same as long snapper Matt Overton. We say this:

Thank you, Officer. Thank you.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel