By Christine Byers
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS COUNTY — The line snaked alongside the police academy, upperclassmen ushering new recruits into the first phase of a six-month training regimen that would culminate with the young men and women taking oaths as the newest members of the St. Louis County Police Department.
As they entered the building, upperclassmen touched a bronze plaque bearing the names of local police officers killed in the line of duty.
One by one, the new recruits followed suit.
David Weinhold, 22, touched his father’s name.
The raised letters that spell out Richard Weinhold are somewhat brighter than the others, where the patina is worn from the touches of hundreds of officers who pass it when they return for training.
David was 8 years old on the day his father left for his job as a county police officer and never came back. His siblings were 11, 6 and 3.
Images of the elder Weinhold, 44, his name or sometimes both mark nearly every wall inside the academy in Wellston. It’s where Weinhold served many of his 13 years on the force and earned the highest statewide honor in his field: instructor of the year.
And it’s a place where the younger Weinhold believes he was destined to go — a path made possible, in large part, he says, to the BackStoppers, the nonprofit organization that financially supports the immediate families of fallen first responders.
Weinhold didn’t want his name to serve as a free pass through the rigors of the recruit experience. He wanted to earn the badge.
The first day of training concludes with a video depicting images from police funerals, to remind recruits that the profession can be deadly, said Officer Dan Jacquin.
He pulled David aside, told him his father’s funeral would be featured and offered to let him skip it.
David declined.
“I want to go through this just like everyone else does,” he said he told Jacquin.
It was the reassurance about his mindset that his instructors needed.
“Right then, we knew we had something special,” said Jacquin, who was a student of the elder Weinhold.
Rick Weinhold was 30 and working for a trucking company when he came across a newspaper ad seeking county police officers.His wife, Julie, said she chided him, saying, “You’re not macho enough to be a cop.” He loved animals. He volunteered for the Special Olympics. And he had a childlike sense of humor.Stories of Rick’s mischievous antics surfaced during David’s days as a recruit.
Officers told him his father once got the attention of a recruit class by vacuuming around an instructor in the middle of a lecture. During another lecture, he silently walked into a closet and walked out an hour later, leaving the recruits to wonder if it was another entrance.
In October 1999, Chief Ron Battelle promoted Weinhold to sergeant. The promotion came at a time when his family needed it most. By then, Weinhold was a father of four. Julie brought the children to the promotional ceremony.
“Our checkbook was a nightmare,” Julie said. “We were in the hole.”
The couple worked opposite schedules so one of them could stay home with their kids. Julie, then a nurse, said she rarely saw her husband for more than 15 minutes a day.
The day before Halloween in 2000, a scheduling error let her spend a rare day with her family. Natalie, then 6, asked her dad during a car ride if he would be a police officer in heaven.
“He told her, ‘I can’t be, there’s no crime in heaven,’” Julie recalled. “So he said he’d be a Boy Scout leader.”
The next day, Weinhold and several officers tried to evict a man locked inside a home. As a young police officer started up the basement stairs, Weinhold grabbed his arm and said, “I’ll go first.”
Moments later, police say Thomas Meek, 43 and armed with a shotgun, leaped around a corner at the top of the stairs and blasted a deer slug into Weinhold’s left shoulder. The round pierced his lungs and heart, throwing him back against the young officer.
Meek was ruled unfit to stand trial. He is a resident of a state psychiatric hospital in Farmington, Mo.
Chief Battelle was among the first to visit the Weinhold home in St. Peters that day. He remembers seeing David crouched behind the couch, as dozens of friends, family and police officers milled about.
Days later, Battelle saw young David nestled in the crook of his mother’s arm during the graveside ceremony.
After that, a friend brought by pictures of Weinhold from a Boy Scout trip he had taken with his sons the weekend before he died. One image took Julie’s breath away. He was wearing a white T-shirt and a camera malfunction created an angel-wing effect behind him.
A copy of the “angel picture,” as it’s known around the department, hangs on the wall inside the personnel office at police headquarters in Clayton.
David passed it when he went to interview for a job with the county police.
The money from BackStoppers allowed Julie to quit her nursing job and become a stay-at-home mom. But mothering alone wasn’t easy."Most of the time, I was really excited to have their teeth brushed and (them) in bed before midnight,” Julie said.
In 2007, Julie married her son Sam’s baseball coach, Dennis Lueck. She wondered how Rick would have felt. While preparing to move, she found an envelope marked “Funeral Plans.”
Inside, she found a letter to her along with an outline of how Rick wanted his funeral to go. He wanted the words, “The Lord Alone,” on his tombstone, and told her that if she remarried, he asked only that she find a man who would be “great — not good — to their children.”
David graduated from Lutheran High School in St. Charles and completed a criminal justice degree at Maryville University.
All through his school years, he kept his eye on a career with the county police, he said.
Pursuing that goal took on new meaning for David following the events in Ferguson, where the shooting of a black man by a white police officer ignited protests and criticism of the police nationwide. He shook his head while recalling threats to kill police officers that he read on social media.
Julie urged her son to remember that people’s anger lies with decades of unfair treatment by the government, and police officers are the face of that government.
She wonders how her husband would have handled the heat.
“Rick’s mother rode on Freedom Buses,” she said, which protested segregation at bus terminals. “He was such a fair man, as most of them are. But right now, people aren’t seeing police officers as people.
“David is a very fair person. And I know he could get hurt and, yes, he’s putting himself in danger, but I have confidence in his training.”
Recruits get Tased and pepper-sprayed to know how their bodies would react should their weapons ever be used against them and understand how they affect suspects.
“Right before I got sprayed, I asked the instructor if it was too late to pull the ‘dad card,’” David said. “He said, ‘Yep,’ and sprayed me. That sucked.”
Emotionally, David said he held it together for the most part. A presentation from the parents of a fallen Bridgeton officer moved him — especially when they said that the officer had left a young son behind.
He remained stoic when he learned his father would be the fallen officer who the class would honor, as is customary with every academy class. That meant a shadowbox with his father’s police portrait along with a folded flag would be displayed in the classroom every day.
The picture featuring his father’s blue eyes, square jawline and dimple in his chin was behind him as he packed his bag on his last day at the academy.
Days before graduation, the class surprised David with a plaque displaying a few lines from the letter his father wrote to his mother before he died."If I have been killed in the line of duty, I died for my belief in helping other people ... My family is proof to the rest of the world that I was a success ... Please continue to make me proud,” it read.David chose his father’s chief and his mother to accompany him on stage at the Maritz center in Fenton to pin his badge. Chief Jon Belmar announced that David’s badge carried his father’s DSN: the number used to identify officers.
Battelle, now executive director of BackStoppers, put his arm around David.
“What’s gratifying about being with BackStoppers is seeing them start to rebuild their lives and the courage they show as they grow and adjust to what’s happened to them,” he said. “It is really gratifying seeing how David has overcome all of this.”
Soon, David’s instructor shouted “class dismissed” for the last time.
He headed for his mother. Rested his head on her shoulder. And wept.
She comforted him in the crook of her arm.
“When he walked in that academy and saw Rick everywhere, it really hit hard,” Julie said. “But this is good for him. Yes, he’s crying, but he’s crying like he should have 15 years ago.”
Lt. Michael Reifschneider, 52, was there to greet David when he reported to the Wildwood precinct Monday. There, a picture of Reifschneider’s father, Officer
James Reifschneider, hangs among the nine portraits of fallen county police officers.
The only portrait visible from inside his office is Weinhold’s.
“I look at Rick every day,” Reifschneider said.
Reifschneider was 14 when his father, 37, was killed in 1977 by a drunk driver during a traffic stop.
He told David, whether for good or bad, he would always be known as “Rick’s kid.”
“You always carry around your dad’s name, and you can either sell it or keep it in a place of honor,” he cautioned.
David’s field training officer, Ryan Wojciuch, 29, of St. Charles, began their tour patrolling the heavily wooded precinct.
“Your No. 1 goal of the day is to go home and make sure everybody else goes home,” Wojciuch said.
David watched silently as Wojciuch conducted traffic stops and stood by to ensure a wife moved out of her estranged husband’s home peacefully. Wojciuch concluded the shift at Babler State Park, telling David he should check for trespassers there after dark.
“My dad used to take me here when I was little,” David said.
Wojciuch reminded David to report to the police academy Wednesday for his first in-service training.
When he got there, Officer Weinhold parked in the front lot.
He walked straight toward the entrance.
And touched his father’s name.
Copyright 2015 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch