Blue Family Mourns

This has been a terrible week for area law enforcement.

Ryan Garner, who was just thirty-three, fought a long, hard battle with cancer, succumbing to the disease Saturday evening. Though not personally knowing this young man, the love of his blue family is clearly evident in expressions of love, memories and sorrow across the social media spectrum.

Not knowing this man is my loss. Doubtlessly, I would have liked him.

I knew Harold Powers very well, however.

Harold, whom I first met in 1977, had been a Captain on Ontario's police auxiliary back then; I was a wet-behind-the-ears twenty-one, eager to start a trek that would end in August of 2013. The first thought when I met Harold was that he would have been right at home playing the part of an Old West Sheriff in a Hollywood western: six-feet tall, thick mustache and probably twenty pounds overweight. Harold was also an extremely friendly man, a guy who liked to laugh but was very serious when it came to law enforcement.

I lost track of Harold when I hired on at Mansfield PD in 1984, but ran into him in 2007 at Mansfield General/ MedCentral/OhioHealth Mansfield, where he worked in security. 23 years after I'd last saw him, Powers was still the same man. That made me happy.

The lasting memory I have of Harold was a November day back in 1981, when he shot and killed a man who had, at around 0440 that same morning, shot Ontario Patrolman David Pugh in the face during a traffic stop on US 30. Dave survived.

Powers shot the man at a range of approximately 100 yards as the suspect, Russell Echols of Cleveland, was engaged in a running gun battle on foot with another officer, Tim McClaran. Harold's round, fired from a six-inch Smith and Wesson, struck Echols in the forehead. Echols died later that morning in the MGH emergency room.

Harold Powers himself once told me he believed his single shot was guided by divine intervention. "If I'd fired straight up into the air, I still think that bullet would have hit him", he'd said. Why did he believe that?

Because Powers was a terrible marksman. He struggled during firearms qualifications.

Harold Powers, 84, died Tuesday evening at OhioHealth Mansfield. The world's light is dimmer today with the loss of Ryan Garner and Harold.

God bless both of these men.