By Brian Dickerson, Detroit Free Press Columnist
This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.
When a police officer dies young, there should be pomp and ceremony.
There should be a motorcade 6 miles long, including patrol cars from places the fallen officer has never been to.
There should be striped trouser legs creased to a razor’s edge, black oxfords buffed to a high sheen and gleaming badges taped with black bands of mourning.
There should be a flag, and white-gloved hands to fold it, and proud family members to hand it to.
Police officers in Waterford took part in such a ritual just a few months ago, when their colleague Nicole Davis’ husband, an officer in the Bloomfield Township Police Department, was killed in the line of duty.
Uniformed mourners from five states escorted Gary Davis to his final resting place. Bagpipers played. Students from Lahser High School, where Gary Davis had worked as a liaison officer, presented his wife with a videotape commemorating his life.
Michael Waleskowski’s funeral won’t be like that.
Waleskowski took his own life Sunday morning after fatally shooting his wife, son and dog and setting the house they’d all lived in afire.
The Waterford police officer’s last night shift had ended abruptly a few hours earlier, when a supervisor told Waleskowski he was under investigation for theft, collected his badge and gun and sent him home.
In a suicide note addressed to Waterford Police Chief John Dean, Waleskowski expressed shame at his predicament and said he’d killed his wife and child so they wouldn’t have to share his humiliation.
His wife’s relatives lived out of state, he explained; once he was gone, there’d be no one nearby to help her and their 9-year-old son.
But Dean, a father of four, is having no part of Waleskowski’s sympathetic self-portrait.
In his final hours, the chief told his subordinates, Waleskowski surrendered any claim to the public honors normally due a police officer.
And so there will be no 21-gun salute, no bagpipes keening, no badges striped with black bands.
Not like Mike
Dean’s anger and revulsion are primal; any parent, any human being, can understand them.
Confronted with such evil -- or, if you prefer the psychological model, such derangement -- the last thing any of us wants to do is acknowledge the perpetrator as one of our own species, much less one of our own profession.
But Joyce Gulley, who works for the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office, has little choice.
Gulley’s job is to counsel those whose loved ones end up in the medical examiner’s storage vaults. Tuesday, she was helping Michael and Lorna Waleskowski’s stunned relatives make funeral arrangements.
The circumstances, Gulley acknowledged, were extraordinary -- “one of the tragedies of all time” -- but the decisions to be reckoned with were practical ones. One funeral service or three? Cremation or burial?
Late Tuesday afternoon, family members opted for cremation of the Waleskowskis’ remains and a single funeral service at Waterford’s First Baptist Church.
Gulley, who is the spouse of a police officer, finds Michael Waleskowski’s actions as incomprehensible as anyone else.
But after witnessing his family’s grief, she cannot indulge the comforting delusion that Waleskowski belonged to some separate, alien species.
“When people lose their way and can’t find their way back,” she says, “well ... it just touches so many lives.”