Paralyzed ex-cop finds new life, new town
By Tracy Johnson, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
He left for a quiet life after a gunman’s bullet took away the life he’d planned.
Mark Sigfrinius was still in the news several years after a 1989 roadside shooting left the Seattle police officer permanently paralyzed. People recognized him everywhere. A “Rescue 911" television re-enactment of his final traffic stop brought cards from well-wishers all over the world.
The attention touched him, encouraged him -- and began to wear him out. He and his wife packed up and moved to Goldendale, a tiny town on Washington’s southern edge, looking for refuge from the publicity and a lifestyle that wasn’t so draining on a retired officer’s pension.
What Sigfrinius found was an unexpected way to serve the community again. He’s now running for his third term as Goldendale’s mayor.
While the pace is more laid-back in this sun-dried rural city of about 3,760 people, it’s never been truly quiet for the 55-year-old retired cop.
Everyone knows him. Residents lay their concerns on him at the grocery store, or they call him at home.
But these days, being mayor is exactly what he wants to be doing.
“There’s very few people -- I can’t think of any right now -- that I would change places with,” he said recently, sitting at a favorite breakfast restaurant in town.
“Even if they walk.”
Sigfrinius nearly died in his police uniform on May 15, 1989. The shooting spurred the Seattle Police Department to require all officers to wear protective vests, which some motorcycle patrolmen found hot and restricting and often left hanging in their lockers.
Sigfrinius was 40, a 22-year police-force veteran patrolling Fremont on his motorcycle when he saw a car with expired New Mexico license plates that was going too fast.
He flipped on his lights. The car pulled over.
The driver had no license, but Sigfrinius doesn’t remember sensing any danger from the brown Oldsmobile or the three people in it. He headed back to his motorcycle to grab his ticket book.
He walked back to the driver’s window. Jutting out of it was a gun. The driver fired. A round struck Sigfrinius in the lower chest. He fell, but managed to draw his own weapon and aim, emptying it into the car as it sped away.
People panicked. Some scrambled to help. Sigfrinius was calm, practical. He told them to get the license-plate number of the car, to grab his radio and make the dreaded call: Officer down.
Finding a new purpose
Sigfrinius never wanted to be anything but a cop, even when he was in the seventh grade and a teacher made the kids put together an “occupational notebook” of what they wanted to be.
“The idea of them paying you to ride a motorcycle and write tickets,” he said wistfully. “Man! What a deal.”
Abruptly losing the use of his legs forced him to find another calling. He ran for office almost on a whim in 1995, when Goldendale’s government was in shambles and City Council meetings often turned into ugly fights. He never thought he’d get elected; he was an outsider who’d lived in town just a few years.
His wife, Priscilla, said she was “a little leery at first.” “I couldn’t see him as a politician,” she said, then laughed. “I still can’t.”
The guy now known as “Mayor Mark” is graying around the edges, with blue eyes and thick forearms. He wears western-style shirts and a wooden orthodox cross on a silver chain, and he pulls on fingerless leather gloves to propel his wheelchair.
He’s always ready with a reasoned answer or a quick quip. He isn’t bothered by critics -- and there are quite a few in this Klickitat County seat, where the unemployment rate of nearly 14 percent tops every other county in the state.
He doesn’t mind that City Councilman Steve Johnston has launched a write-in campaign against him, charging that he hasn’t done enough.
“He’s a good friend of mine,” Sigfrinius shrugged.
Not one for showiness, he announced that he’d run for mayor again this November in a front-page news story that quoted his low-key ambivalence. “Yeah,” he told the Goldendale Sentinel. “I’ll try it one more time.” 'Where the heck is that?’
Goldendale lolls close to the steep banks of the Columbia River. Sunshine spills over the town -- the loftily proclaimed “Golden Gate of the Evergreen State” -- most of the year, though sometimes through lashing winds or a sheet of snow.
City Council members insist the city is “rural, not remote.”
Sigfrinius said it’s an everyone-knows-everyone town where “the teenagers usually wave at you with all of their fingers.” Residents swap four-digit phone numbers because everyone has the same 773 prefix.
In 1992, Priscilla Sigfrinius suggested it as a place they could relocate their life together. She’d driven through it once, an accidental detour on her way to Oregon, and liked the smooth hills and patches of farmland.
“Goldendale?” her husband asked her. “Where the heck is that?”
He’d been working as the public information officer for the Everett Police Department, but he and his wife had agreed it was time to live life on a smaller scale. Their two children were grown, and their Marysville home was too big and expensive for just the two of them.
They took a weekend trip to Goldendale and snapped up the first house they saw.
It would need a bit of work to accommodate Sigfrinius’ wheelchair. The bathroom needed more space. The doorway was too narrow. They’d need to build sloping paths leading up to the front and back doors.
But Priscilla Sigfrinius said that when she first stepped into the little rambler on East Collins Drive, it felt like home.
Facing ‘the long term’
The .38-caliber bullet that upended Sigfrinius’ life is still lodged upright in his spine. He underwent 18 hours of surgery to repair the damage, including the almost deadly hole it tore through his liver. The fact that he would never walk again sank in slowly. He remembers a wheelchair-company representative at the hospital gently telling him he should choose something comfortable because he’d be in it “for the long term.”
The words hit hard.
Health problems plagued him for more than a year. He spent many weekends in the emergency room with a fever, an infection or some other scare. He missed his son’s high-school graduation ceremony because his lung had collapsed again.
He suffered severe burns when he rested his foot too long against the heater on a friend’s airplane. He didn’t know it was there. He couldn’t feel it.
Frustration came from having to rely on other people for help with things that used to be routine, like going up a few lousy stairs. He missed being a cop.
He leaned heavily on his faith, explaining that “supposedly, if you have enough faith, you figure out there must have been a reason for all of this.” The day he finally got back on his Harley Davidson by himself -- not the brightest thing to do while he was home alone and still weak, he admits -- helped renew his spirit. The sleek blue motorcycle is modified, just like his boast-worthy 1959 Jaguar, so that he can drive it using only his hands. That late-summer afternoon of 1990, he climbed on, shoved his wheelchair into the sidecar and rode to a friend’s house under a clear blue sky.
A flair for easing disputes
These days, the challenges he faces are nothing like those he faced patrolling Seattle streets and responding to domestic-violence calls. He’s trying to find ways to bring in tourists -- maybe an idea for a sports-car racetrack will do it -- and lure manufacturing businesses that will bring much-needed jobs.
At City Hall, a wooden building next door to the town’s bowling alley, irate citizens sometimes show up to complain about ragged roads or how the new trashcans are too small along Main Street.
Sigfrinius has been known to come out of his office to listen or help settle disputes -- a knack that reminds his staffers that he used to be a police officer.
“He doesn’t let anything throw him,” said Pat Shamek, his administrative assistant. “He takes everything in stride.”
Dave Hill was a Goldendale police patrolman when he first met Sigfrinius, who was new to the town and wasn’t paying enough attention to the posted speed limit -- so it’s been alleged -- in his van. Hill pulled him over.
Sigfrinius stuck his head out the window, suppressing a grin as he bellowed dramatically, “Officer! Officer! It’s not my fault!”
He explained that he was hungry -- and that his wife promised him dinner just as soon as he could get himself home. She was obviously to blame, Sigfrinius told the officer.
“I couldn’t have given him a ticket if I wanted to,” Hill recalled. “It was just hilarious.”
Sigfrinius ended up appointing Hill as police chief. They’re now close friends, though Hill said “that does not interfere -- if I have a butt-chewing coming, I get it.”
Hill, a veteran cop who wears cowboy boots with his uniform, said emotion sometimes sneaks up when he thinks about what Sigfrinius has overcome.
“That’s got to be a hell of a scary thing to wake up one morning and all of the sudden, you can’t walk,” he said. “Every time I sit here and think I’ve got a rough day, Mark is my inspiration.”
Sigfrinius said he seldom thinks about the shooting anymore. Or the guy who did it.
Lazaro Hernandez used the same gun -- stolen from a police officer in Texas -- to kill a man in Seattle and one in Pierce County days earlier.
King County prosecutors said Hernandez was trying to avoid arrest when he fired at Sigfrinius.
Hernandez, who got more than 80 years in prison and is serving the time in Nevada, blamed crack cocaine.
Life after serious trauma
Sigfrinius still keeps in touch with some of his old colleagues in Seattle, where he was known as a joker, an upbeat guy and a first-rate cop.
“You can walk around the halls here, even to this day, and mention the name Mark Sigfrinius -- it’s invariably met with admiration and fond memories,” said Clark Kimerer, Seattle police deputy chief of operations.
“He was one of the great personalities wearing the blue uniform.”
John Abraham, a Seattle motorcycle officer and police safety coordinator, now calls on Sigfrinius when tragedy hits the department. He said his pal and former colleague is just the person to encourage other officers who have suffered catastrophic injuries because “he’s proof that there is life after a serious trauma.”
Sigfrinius hopes to spend the next four years running the Eastern Washington city, a job that he said is always “one thing after another.”
After that, who knows? Maybe he and his wife will move out to the 80 acres they bought not far outside town.
He can reel fish from the Columbia River and start taking it easy.
For real this time.