'Stories by a Dead Cop' paints full portrait of police life

The date was Feb. 9, 1977. A drunk tried to light a cigarette. He ended up setting the old Coronado apartments near Sherman Hill on fire.

Police and firefighters helped as many as they could. Dan Dusenbery was a 26-year-old Des Moines police patrolman. Five died in the fire, including a mother and child trapped on a fire escape. In memoirs he compiled after his retirement in 2010, Dusenbery recalled the scene that haunted him up until his death on Sunday.

"The heat was too intense to get to them," Dusenbery wrote. "But we weren't created to be spectators; and finally a fireman, though he became a burn victim of the fire as well, climbed the short distance and handed the little girl down to me.

"The girl's skin slipped from her body wherever I held her … finally, I was able to cradle her in my arms so I didn't cause anymore injury to her as I carried her to the ambulance.

"The man that caused the fire that killed this poor, unrecognizable little girl, asked for forgiveness years later. The family that, after the fire, never saw her disfigured face, or held her in their arms, or felt her pain, forgave him. God may have forgiven him as well, but I never will, and I see her yet."

The vivid, graphic recollection is among 400 pages that Dusenbery wrote about his 39-year career as a patrol officer. He called the book "Stories by a Dead Cop," a title that turned out to be all too true all too soon.

Dusenbery, who had struggled with a heart ailment for about five years, died at age 64.

Dusenbery was a gentle giant on the city's force. He loved being a patrol cop, though he could have had almost any job he aspired to in the department, said Des Moines Police Chief Dana Wingert.

"Dan's heart was in patrol because that's where he could meet the most people," Wingert said. "He loved people. If you were on Dan's beat, there was a good chance you knew him and a better chance he knew you."

Dusenbery's memoirs, which the family may publish someday, provide a rare glimpse into the daily life of a police officer. It is true what police often say: You can't understand the life unless you've lived it.

He was a big man full of life. If you ran into him at police headquarters, one needed to mark off time to hear about son Brian's football exploits or the latest goings-on with daughters Lyssa and Jacki.

Dusenbery overflowed with this cheer, but he carried with him the terrible memories of, as he wrote, "all the savage things that people do to each other or themselves, intentionally or unintentionally."

Dusenbery loved his work, but he discouraged his loved ones from taking up the trade, he told me when I worked with him on a story about his grandfather, a World War I veteran, in November.

"I have seen a lot of things I wish I'd never seen," he said.

Patrol officers often are witness to the humanity at its worst and saddest.

"I remember the battered and beaten faces and bodies of the children that were tortured by the very people God entrusted to protect them. ... Homicides and mangling car accidents; we worked and struggled to save people's lives, most times in vain. Being with people when they die and staying with corpses long after their death. Finding the bodies of those who have been dead, sometimes for days ...

"The smell of death is one you never forget."

They weren't all terrible days behind the badge for Dusenbery. He recalled an assignment to clear out the youths lingering in Greenwood Park after sundown when the park was closed.

Other patrols had chased the kids out of the park, ticketed some. But Dusenbery and his partner Jim Pomeroy had another idea.

"As we drove, I occasionally stopped the car and Pomeroy would shine our hand-held spotlight around the wooden area, never in the direction of any of the kids," Dusenbery wrote.

Eventually, they parked and walked around the upper park in the areas away from the kids, "obviously searching for something while shining our flashlights around bushes and clumps of trees."

They got back in their squad car and watched the hills, scanning intently. Several kids approached the officers.

Pomeroy asked the assembled if they had seen anyone moving through the area, a man with blood on him — a lot of blood.

The kids were drawn into the story. Pomeroy volunteered: "He may be carrying a bloody ax with him."

Pomeroy spun a wild tale of a serial ax murderer on the loose who always struck shortly after sundown. The two cops got back in their car and slowly drove out of the park.

"We looked back to see a string of headlights behind us," Dusenbery wrote. "I felt like the Pied Piper leading all the kids out of the park. The kids left Greenwood Park every night about 10 minutes before sundown for the next two months."

Dusenbery often worked an east-side patrol car on the day shift. He and his partner stopped at the QuikTrip at East 14th Street and Guthrie Avenue for coffee most mornings.

In the fall of 2001, Dusenbery met Jacki Graham. Graham was 22 and lovelorn. She worked a year for a youth evangelism team and had met the love of her life in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

She missed her beau terribly and was slightly annoyed by Dusenbery and his partner hanging out by the coffee pot where she needed to clean.

But slowly Dusenbery won her over. Graham's biological parents never played much of a role in her life. But Dusenbery became the father she always wanted.

He became the only man Graham ever called "Dad." And he considered her a daughter, too, right alongside his own kids.

Dusenbery was an amateur genealogist. He researched his own family tree and sought to preserve the old family stories. Dusenbery used Ancestry.com, a website that helps people track their relatives.

At some point in the last 15 years, Dusenbery added Graham and her family — including Barry, the Irishman who is now her husband and a West Des Moines police officer, and their children — to his family tree.

"He was my dad," Graham said. "He just took me in, and that was that."

Good Friday is this week, and perhaps we should close with a story Dusenbery remembered from a Good Friday years ago.

Dusenbery and his partner had dinner at the Holiday Inn downtown. Dusenbery bought two cigars and put them under the visor for later along with a pair of new license plates his partner had picked up earlier in the day.

They responded to an armed robbery call at the old Vicker's Gas Station at 13th Street and Forest Avenue. They suspected it was a serial robber police had been trying to nab for some time.

They sped toward the scene. It was early spring, but a light snow fell and started to accumulate on the road. A car pulled out from a stop sign too soon. Dusenbery's partner swerved to avoid a collision. They smashed headlong into a parked car.

"Our car then spun almost 180 degrees in the air and … when we came to rest our car was three feet shorter than it was before and the black hood was folded over the windshield," Dusenbery wrote.

Dusenbery's partner suffered serious injuries. Dusenbery broke both legs. He thought it was much worse.

"I thought for a moment we were dead until I saw (my partner's) license plates and my broken cigars over the visor," Dusenbery wrote. "I thought they might have cigars in heaven, but surely not license plates."

As of Sunday, Dusenbery knows for certain whether there are cigars or license plates in heaven.

DANIEL P. FINNEY, the Register's Metro Voice columnist, is a Drake University alumnus who grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Twitter: @newsmanone.