A few words about Officer David Lee III

Thank you for your service, genuine care for this city, and for being a good one.

Dear David,

You left us too soon, my friend. While it may be weird to call you “my friend,” it’s something I do with everyone I have met or interacted with at least once. Now, we never met, unless it was a passing glance in our vehicles or something too quick to acknowledge. However, in this case, we have enough in common to let the saying stand.

We both worked in the city on a job that forced us to deal with everyday drivers and their chaos. We’re in our 40s, and have families. You had two kids and a wife; I have a wife, one son, and six pets. There’s similar ground in there somewhere. At some point or another, we each probably wanted to grab a beer before heading home. Call it the husband code of ethics.

Something else we shared in common is our love for the city of St. Louis. Working in the city requires you to care for or like its presence--because if not, the whole arena can just eat a human whole. We both wanted the best for our city, to see it breathe and live for the kids to enjoy. A land for the future generations to both understand what came before, and what could be tomorrow.

KSDK News

Being a traffic cop meant you had to get down and dirty with the most dangerous highway in the city: Interstate 70. One could nickname it Daytona 70, and it wouldn’t contain a hint of hyperbole. People whip around corners, fly down straights, and leave the idea of a blinker back at the front door of their home. It’s restless, fast, and intense. You had to make a living on those badlands.

I can only imagine the stress behind that, and the work one must do to corral and smother it in front of your coworkers, superiors, civilians, and most importantly, your family. There’s another level of danger with being a cop in a city with a high crime rate and an irresistible grudge with change. I’ve had friends who were cops, and then quickly they did something else for a living. To all the folks who want to defund the police, who exactly will you call when a threat arises?

According to everything people said about you, David, you did the job right, all the way down to the end of your life. It would have been easy to wait a little bit or wait for backup to arrive on scene before assisting the accident on the side of the road with so many wild motorists zipping past you. But then again, you aren’t most people, because most people don’t want to do this job, or can’t do it right.

You assisted the people in the accident, and gave your life in the line of duty in the process. In this case, the duty wasn’t an intense shootout or standoff. It was a drunk driver, someone illegally in the United States, who struck you and ended your life. In the most fateful of encounters, you were in the one spot that this drunken moron was going to connect with. That’s the cruelty of life in one instant.

At your funeral, you were remembered as a “protector and guardian” In other words, you gave a shit. You didn’t just utter those words when you graduated from the police academy. You really did care for the greater good of St. Louis, and showed that care all the way up to the very end.

Once again, you just left too soon. St. Louis, and the country itself, needs more people like you. The fact that so many good eggs pass before their time while some of the worst souls get to live on is another cruel fact of life, as if there isn’t enough karma and poetic justice in the world. It’s is your loss that makes me forever question the presence of a god up there, moving chess pieces around and determining who comes or goes.

I personally think we’re all screwed at some point or another on this endangered slab of planet rock, but no one will ever really know. What I do know is that if we had met, there’s a good chance we could have been friends.

You reportedly liked sports, so there’s a fine chance that a deep discussion about the Cardinals, Blues, Battlehawks, or the Missouri Tigers could have occurred. Maybe you were a Chiefs fan, or you didn’t like them at all. I would have loved to ask you about the Rams leaving town, and see how long the rant lasted. Afterwards, I would have mentioned Trump, and the time of that rant would be much longer. In an instant, a connection would be fused with two souls who could have never met.

That’s the very sad part about losing someone like you, David. The “what ifs” run amok in everyone’s mind about what potentially laid down the road, the true cost of someone taken. It’ll forever be a mystery, all due to one unsensible person putting their good times above the lives of others, especially the ones like you who have to serve the streets of the wicked.

You’ll be missed, my friend. We may not have been friends in reality, but there’s enough shared ground to make the idea stick. Rest easy, David. We got this.