By Thadeus Greenson
The Times-Standard
If you ask him, retiring Humboldt County Sheriff’s detective Troy Garey was just born a couple of centuries late.
“It would have been nice to be in law enforcement in the 1800s,” Garey said Thursday.
“As a cowboy, you had a code of honor. Now days, people don’t have that. When a cowboy gave his word, it meant something. Now days, people lie through their teeth. There’s just no code, no honor anymore. As a society, I think we need to cowboy-up a bit.”
Set to retire at the end of his shift today, Garey, 64, took some time Thursday while tying up a few lose ends in his office to reflect on his more than 40-year career in law enforcement, which includes 14 years and two stints with the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. For the last few years, Garey has worked as a detective, working homicides and sex crimes, and locking up some of the county’s most violent predators.
Glancing at a bulletin board in his office, Garey pointed to pictures of a few of his recent cases: Among others, there was a picture of Paul Alan Jasnosz, who was sentenced to serve more than 400 years for repeatedly raping and abusing his step-daughters.
“I’m proud of those,” Garey said, gesturing toward the pictures. “But, 200 years ago, those types of crimes only happened once. That’s why the good Lord made trees and ropes.”
That’s not to say Garey treats all criminals with equal disdain. He told a story of how suspects would sometimes show up at his Loleta home -- which is listed in the phone book -- to tell him they thought they had a warrant out for their arrest and that they wanted to turn themselves in. Garey said he would check, and if there was a warrant, he would handcuff the suspect to his car, bring him a chair, a Coca-Cola and a bag of cookies, and call a patrol deputy to come pick him up.
Described universally as hard working and dedicated, if a bit “old school” and gruff, those who have worked with Garey said he will leave some big shoes to fill.
“The main thing I can say about Troy as far as work is that any time I’ve asked him for help, he’s dropped whatever he was doing and he’s been there,” said detective Rich Schlesiger.
During the presentation of a resolution in Garey’s honor Tuesday by the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Garry Philp described Garey as professional, tenacious and always willing to tackle a project.
“Humboldt County’s better that he was here,” Philp said. “We’re going to miss him, but we wish him the best in his retirement. He deserves it and his family deserves more time with him.”
Garey, who was born and raised in Missouri before his family moved to California’s Central Valley when he was about 6, started his working life on a dairy near Fresno. He got married at the age of 18, was a father by 19 and had his second child before his 20th birthday. But, after about three or four years of working split shifts on the dairy, Garey said he knew he had to make a change and applied for work with the Fresno County Sheriff’s department in 1962.
With law enforcement and military in his blood lines, Garey said being a cop seemed a natural fit.
After stints working in the county courts and the jail -- where Garey said he learned to deal with people and learned their ‘con games’ -- he was set out on patrol.
“I was with a partner for three or four weeks, and basically he just showed me the report forms, the beat boundaries and the coffee shops,” Garey said with a chuckle.
Then, he was on his own. And, Garey said, he always had one goal.
“As a law enforcement officer, my primary objective when I go to work every day is to make sure I came home every night,” Garey said, adding that he managed to do that every night of his career, except for one.
It was Dec. 7, 1982 at around 8:12 p.m., when Garey said he felt the bullets. He and two other officers were responding to a house, following up on an armed robbery suspect, when Garey said the suspect opened fire on them with a .375 H&H Magnum, commonly referred to as an elephant gun. The initial shots hit Garey’s fellow officers in the legs, leaving one down in the street screaming, lying directly in the suspect’s line of fire.
With another deputy who responded to the scene, Garey said he tried to drive his patrol car down the street in order to pick up the injured deputy and bring him to safety. As his car approached the injured deputy, Garey said the suspect opened fire. Garey, who said he was leaning over into the passenger’s seat and essentially driving blind to stay out of sight, was shot three times: Twice in the leg and once in the wrist.
When he came to later in the hospital, Garey said it was a particular sound that woke him up -- “a sound that, to the trained ear of a cop, could only be one thing: a bottle of Budweiser opening.” Garey said he opened his eyes to see the whole SWAT team -- which he described as a brotherhood -- sitting in the hospital room with he and the two other injured deputies. Garey said he asked one of the SWAT commanders if they’d killed the guy, and learned that no, the team -- which Garey had trained -- had taken the suspect by hand without firing a shot.
“I said, ‘good, that’s the way I trained you,’” Garey recalled, adding that a good SWAT team should almost never have to use deadly force.
Garey -- both fiercely proud and fiercely religious -- said he checked out of the hospital the next day, against the recommendations of doctors. In fact, he said, when a nurse tried to wheel him out to a waiting car, Garey put the breaks on.
“I said, ‘you guys carried me in here, but I have to walk out,’” he recalled, adding that he immediately had his wife take him to the impound lot where he could see his patrol car, riddled with bullet holes. “I have no idea how we made it through that alive. Well, I do, because it was by the grace of God that we lived through that.”
Garey said he was back to work in a matter of months, adding that the other two deputies -- both of which had been injured worse than he -- were back on duty within two years.
“It just goes to show you the kind of people I had the privilege to work with,” he said, before taking a moment to reign in his emotions.
In February 1988, Garey decided his time with Fresno County was up. He retired, and a month later moved to Humboldt County, where his wife, Alana, is from, and started working for the sheriff’s office. It was, however, short lived as a handful of years later he and his wife up and moved to Missouri, where Garey spent stints digging fence post holes, milking cows and working in a hot dog factory before finally going back into law enforcement.
Then, one day in September 2002, he said he came home with a twinkle in his eye and told her the Lord had been talking to him, telling him to quit his job and return to Humboldt County.
In a matter of months, the family moved back, and Garey returned to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. After stints working in the jail and on patrol in the Eel River Valley, Garey wound up back in the detectives’ chair.
Garey said the job has been hard on him -- that he’s “seen crap that would make a Billy goat puke” -- but that he’s also loved it.
“I like being able to go out there and solve crimes and protect the public from predators,” he said.
But, Garey said he’s ready to move on. He said he and Alana have put their Loleta home on the market, with plans of moving to Grants Pass, Ore. as soon as it sells to help Alana’s parents on their cattle ranch up there. He said he’ll miss the job, and mostly he’ll miss the people around the job. But, it’s time for the cowboy to return to the ranch.
“It’s been a good, good ride,” Garey said.
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