By Mark Wilson
Austin American-Statesman
SAN MARCOS, Texas — Aly Laifer worked at the Chipotle in downtown San Marcos from 2011 until 2014. As in many other cities, the restaurant, nestled just off the Texas State University campus on North LBJ Drive, was a favorite spot for local cops.
She first met San Marcos police officer Kenneth Copeland there about six years ago. She said he would come in two to three times a week, and if her break lined up with his visit, she would sit with him to talk.
“He was such a good guy,” she said. “He always talked about his family — he has four boys. I remember when he brought them in one day they were so cute and so excited to meet dad for lunch. He talked to me about school (and) always asked about how life was.”
Her memories of Copeland will have special meaning this week as the city honors the slain officer with a procession and funeral Wednesday. Copeland was fatally shot Dec. 4 while serving an arrest warrant. The shooting suspect, Stewart Thomas Mettz, sits in the Hays County Jail charged with capital murder.
But in 2013, the Chipotle where Laifer and Copeland became friends was at the center of another horrible crime that shocked the city.
On Oct. 17 of that year, San Marcos police found two of Laifer’s co-workers, 22-year-old Hailey Nicholls and 27-year-old Jesse Robledo, dead inside an apartment in the 300 block of Craddock Avenue.
Both had been shot in the head.
Howard Williams, the city’s police chief at the time, said investigators believed that 23-year-old Daniel Brewster Stillwell, Nicholls’ ex-boyfriend and a former employee at the restaurant, broke into her apartment and gunned the pair down.
The bustling college town hadn’t seen a homicide in two years before that day, Williams told the American-Statesman at the time, adding that he couldn’t remember a multiple homicide like it in his 10 years with the department.
Copeland “was actually the first person who I saw when I came to Chipotle the day Hailey and Jesse died,” Laifer said. “He wanted to make sure he was the one who told me because he knew it would be hardest for me since we were best friends. He promised me he would find Daniel and that everything would be OK. He was just genuinely one of the kindest humans ever.”
Later that afternoon, police found Stillwell’s body inside a vehicle that appeared to have gone over a cliff on RM 32 near the Devil’s Backbone, a twisting road lined with steep drop-offs northeast of Canyon Lake.
The details of the incident were laid out in an arrest warrant that would never be served.
The document said Stillwell, who lived in the same apartment complex as Nicholls, told his roommate he came home and saw Robledo’s vehicle outside her apartment around midnight. He took a gun from his roommate’s closet and used it to smash through a glass door and shoot the pair, the affidavit said.
“The last thing Stillwell said to (his roommate) was that he did not want to live in a cage and was going to kill himself by driving off a cliff,” the document said.
Copeland, again, was the man who brought the news to Laifer, who said she still appreciates how he went out of his way to tell her what had happened to her friends.
“He did cry when he told me. He knew them well from Chipotle also,” Laifer said.
Laifer said that Copeland really cared and that he came by the restaurant every day for a week to check in on her and the rest of the staff.
When Laifer stopped working at Chipotle, she didn’t see him as much, she said. But every time she did, he would always stop to ask how her life was and catch up.
During a vigil honoring Copeland last week, Robin Stelle, the pastor of PromiseLand Church in San Marcos, said Copeland always went beyond the call of duty, connecting with kids and families, much as he did with Laifer.
“He was someone who brought peace and protection. That’s why there’s hundreds of people who came out here today in the snow,” Stelle said.
Danny Arredondo, a patrol officer and a former president of San Marcos’ police union said Copeland built bridges and made sure whoever he was dealing with felt acknowledged. He, too, said the compassion Copeland showed Laifer wasn’t out of the ordinary.
“He was every bit of that kind of guy,” Arredondo said. “That wasn’t extraordinary for him. That was just who he was.”
©2017 Austin American-Statesman, Texas