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Officer Down: Trooper Andrew Stocks
By Mandy Locke
The News & Observer
RALEIGH — Liane Stocks had long feared that knock on the door by uniformed men, with hats in hand, apologizing that duty had taken her husband.
But not Tuesday, not now. She expected that knock more than a year ago when her husband Andrew Stocks served as a soldier a world away in Iraq.
Andrew Stocks died Tuesday afternoon, just hours into his shift with the state Highway Patrol in Wake County. As Stocks rushed to tend to an accident, he lost control of his cruiser and slipped into the path of a garbage truck. He died in an ambulance headed for the hospital.
“I wasn’t prepared,” Liane Stocks said Thursday. “It wasn’t supposed to be now.”
Stocks, 43, was an Army Reservist, called to active duty in 2006. He’d spent nearly all of his career serving his country in the military. He’d joined the Marines right after graduating from high school in Cary. He spent seven years fighting fires and responding to crashes on military runways. He came back to North Carolina and worked as a paramedic in Durham and Orange counties and taught first-responder classes at Wake Tech before signing up for the Army to train as a physician’s assistant.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 sidelined that plan, and Stocks was deployed to Afghanistan. He came home again in 2003 and soon after joined the state Highway Patrol.
“He loved to help people,” Liane Stocks said. “He felt like that’s what he was here for.”
Stocks was finishing out his military obligation in the Army Reserves, in a unit that didn’t expect to be called into active duty, Liane Stocks said. When his unit was called up, Stocks was put in charge of supplying ammunition to front-line combat soldiers.
He fretted about leaving his wife and her daughter, Ashley Nicole Mallet, now 9.
“He felt like he needed to go,” said Trooper Matt Young, who worked alongside Stocks since 2004. “The military was a big part of his life.”
Stocks made it back safely. He’d been stateside exactly a year Tuesday.
Over the last year, Stocks fell back into the patrol duties he’d had since joining the force in 2004. He was a go-to guy, colleagues said, just as capable of dissecting what went wrong in the most gruesome of crashes as he was ringing the doorbell to inform someone that a loved one had died in a crash. He was to begin teaching first-responder classes at Wake Tech again in the coming weeks.
Life seemed to be returning to normal. The box he’d prepared before he left for Iraq had sat undisturbed in the Stocks’ home in Garner. His wife had urged him to square away his affairs in case he didn’t make it back.
On Tuesday, Liane Stocks opened that box. It included a letter in which Stocks told his wife how he wanted to be buried.
“He made the list,” Liane Stocks said. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to make these decisions once he was gone.”
His patrol comrades will begin saying goodbye today and will salute him at a full-fledged Highway Patrol funeral Saturday. Stocks asked to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with his other comrades from the military.
ARRANGEMENTS
Andrew J. Stocks is survived by his wife, Liane Stocks; stepdaughter, Ashley Nicole Mallet of Garner; his parents, Anne and James Stocks of Cary, and his brother, Skip Stocks from Federal Way, Washington.
Visitation is this evening between 4 and 8 p.m. at Brown-Wynne Funeral Home on Maynard Road in Cary. Funeral services will be at 1 p.m. Saturday at Colonial Baptist Church on Tryon Road in Cary.
The Highway Patrol has established a memorial fund at the State Employees Credit Union to assist the Stocks family.
Stocks died on the job in Raleigh.
Copyright 2008 The News & Observer