By Kristin Davis
Virginian-Pilot
SUFFOLK, Va. — Shane Everett asked for the midnight shift because all kinds of things happen in the dark. People rob convenience stores and break into buildings and drive after drinking too much.
The young police officer liked to hunt for cars swerving along Suffolk’s lonely back roads.
He wrote DUIs, seized drugs hidden inside vehicles and stalked the Chuckatuck 7-Eleven for would-be trouble-makers – the only place on his beat that was open that time of night.
Everett could get along with just about anybody. Just three years out of the police academy, he showed remarkable poise: If someone he arrested spat profanity-laced insults, Everett treated the person nicer.
Everett quit college a semester before graduating in 1997 to join the Suffolk Police Department, fulfilling his dream to be an officer.
Late one night in April 2000, a high-speed chase shattered that. Disabled and stripped of the thing he loved most, nearly a decade passed before Everett found satisfaction again – in police work of a different sort.
Everett idled outside the 7-Eleven around 1 a.m. when he eyed an Acura with tattered temporary tags. He stopped the car on Godwin Boulevard. A man sat in the driver’s seat, a woman beside him.
The smell of marijuana wafted through a slightly open window. Everett feigned friendliness and said nothing about it. Instead, he casually mentioned the expired tags, a tactic he calls “keeping ‘em on ice.”
Everett returned to his car with a fake Social Security number the driver gave him and waited for the another officer. The road was deserted.
Just as the back-up cruiser pulled up, the Acura sped off. Everett followed.
He remembers seeing the tail lights , just glowing specks in the distance. He remembers glancing his speedometer as it neared 120 mph. And he remembers losing control less than two minutes after the chase began.
As Everett approached a curve, the back end of his car lifted to the left and tumbled side-over-side, then came to a rest, right-side up.
His body was pummeled: He suffered several fractures to his back; cracked multiple ribs; broke his left wrist and left leg. A doctor said it looked like a grenade had exploded at his right knee. Amputation was considered, then abandoned for an artery transplant.
Everett spent three weeks in the hospital and two months at home in a hospital bed. He lay on his back so long he passed out the first time he sat up.
Nine years later, a brace keeps Everett’s foot from dragging. Tattoos cover scars on his left arm where he can still feel imbedded glass. Pain persists from damage to nerves. Like the old and arthritic, he can feel the weather change. The winter chill hurts especially.
No one knew whether Everett would walk again. The man who skied on snowy slopes and behind boats and liked any sport that took him outdoors relied on other people to cook his meals and clean his house and mow his lawn.
Katrina Everett was one of them. They’d once served on the same patrol squad and had recently begun dating.
“He liked to get DUIs. He liked to write tickets and handle disputes,” she said. “He was very enthusiastic about everything.”
She took him to his first social event after the crash, pushing him a mile up the street in his wheelchair for a Fourth of July gathering.
Depression turned to determination. The wheelchair became a walker. The walker became a cane. Finally, Everett abandoned even that.
But he could not be a police officer. He retired in 2002. He was not yet 30.
He finished his degree and tried to get a job as an accident investigator for an insurance company. But the insurance companies thought a former police officer would be biased, Katrina Everett said. “None of them called him back.”
They married in 2005. Everett got a job in retail. His wife became a police sergeant.
“He felt like he was missing out,” she said. “He thinks making a difference in someone’s life is everything.”
This summer, Everett again discovered his dream, trading retirement checks for a job as a forensics technician .
He doesn’t complain as he climbs in and out of his police-issued SUV with “CSI” painted on the side.
One cold night before Christmas, Everett responds to an alleged rape in a quiet neighborhood where tangles of lights shine from bushes and trees. He collects a bag of clothes and a comforter that he will process for evidence.
He’s not chasing bad guys. But his methodical work helps put them away.
Everett shares the story of his crash with classes of newly minted police officers. He calls himself “show and tell,” plays a snowy video of the accident, tells them that investigators ruled he hadn’t broken any policies but that the crash was preventable.
He shrugs at that. He takes questions. And he tells them to forget they ever met him, forget everything he said except for this: No matter how uncomfortable a seat belt feels over the Mace and the guns and the ammunition you carry on your waist, wear it anyway.
It was the only thing that saved his life.
The young guys Everett patrolled the streets with are sergeants and lieutenants now.
“It’s kind of like a little time warp,” Everett said. He carries a note pad and a pencil in his pocket and listens to the radio chatter inside his SUV.
He doesn’t have a badge or a gun or flashing blue lights. He doesn’t have the authority to pull anybody over or make an arrest. But he responds to recovered stolen vehicles and breaking and enterings, to rapes and deaths.
“I love a good death investigation,” Everett said as worked inside the forensics lab one late evening this month.
He recalled a warm morning in October when he drove out to a winding, unlined stretch of road near the North Carolina border. A man in search of deer bones had discovered a body discarded in the woods.
“Somebody died and we’ve got to figure it out.”
Copyright 2009 Virginian Pilot