Trooper Down! Read Online Free Page B

that fascinated me about the highway patrol,” he said later. “I had an uncle who was a trooper in the 1930s and I can remember being very impressed with him as I was growing up. I guess part of it was the uniform, the shiny car, and the prestige.”
    It is the prestige that draws most troopers into the North Carolina Highway Patrol.
    â€œIn this state, the patrol is like being in the major league of law enforcement,” said one officer. “In the town where I grew up, even people who didn’t like cops respected the patrol.”
    Louis now believes that, for him, finally being able to join the highway patrol was an act of God, a predetermined fate that would challenge and change him in ways he would never have imagined.
    By 1974, he was out of the Air Force, married, and living in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Uncertain about his future, he returned to college for technical courses and says he would have become a professional student had it not been for his wife.
    â€œYou can’t stay in school for the rest of your life,” she told him. “Get a job.”
    Still drawn to law enforcement, Louis became a sheriff’s deputy in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he stayed for two years. Then the highway patrol beckoned again. On November 15, 1976, he was officially accepted into the organization and began basic training as a cadet. It was his third try at becoming a trooper.
    The course was hard for Louis. At twenty-eight, he was older than most cadets, and he did not fit the mold of the classic hard-nosed, aggressive trooper who “kicks ass and takes names.”
    Six feet tall, 175 pounds, he is dark-haired and fair skinned, with warm brown eyes, and a shy smile that masks a strong sense of purpose. A sensitive, soft-spoken man, he gives the mistaken impression that he is more at home with a good book than a .357 Magnum. Yet underneath that mild manner is a steely, stubborn determination to succeed at whatever he sets out to do. And in 1976 he was determined to become a state trooper—with some prodding, that is.
    â€œI was the type who had to be pushed,” he recalled. “The physical training was especially rough. We had to be out of bed at 5:00 A.M.  and were expected to run up to seven miles a day. There were many mornings when my physical training instructor literally moved me along with his foot.”
    Even after Louis graduated from the patrol academy (third from the top in his class) he found his first few weeks as a trooper relentlessly difficult.
    â€œThe first night on the job my training officer took me into the patrol office and dumped a huge stack of paperwork on the desk. Then, with no instruction, he said, ‘Here, do it.’ I thought, this isn’t for me. I wanted to go back to the security of the sheriff’s departmentwhere I knew what to do and everybody knew me.”
    Throughout this time Louis wanted to quit, and proceeded to tell his sergeant so.
    â€œIf you’re gonna quit,” replied the officer, “at least wait until you get out of training. That way, I won’t look so bad.”
    Louis, however, decided to stay, and by the end of the six-week training period he was feeling better. A trooper at last, he was ready, willing, and able to work alone.
    March 6, 1984: Louis, thirty-six, was now in his eighth year with the North Carolina Highway Patrol. After completing on-the-job training he was stationed first in Hoke County, a rural community eighteen miles west of Fayetteville, then sent to Burke County in 1979. Once known for its backwoods violence, the region, situated in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, had grown and matured into a respectable, pleasant place to live. By 1984, the county, named for Revolutionary War governor Thomas Burke, was 506 square miles of farmland and furniture factories, with a population of 75,000 and an average per capita income of just over $10,000.
    Cutting through the center