By John Boyle
The Asheville Watchdog
ASHEVILLE, N.C. — At an age when most men are pondering Medicare options and recliner choices, Jerry O’Donnell is navigating uphill garage runs filled with gut-busting push-ups and burpee breaks.
Hey, he’s got to hang with the kids, who happen to mostly be about four decades his junior. You see, at age 65, O’Donnell has decided to become an Asheville Police Department cop, and the physical training, or PT, is no joke.
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“When we do PT, we go on these runs in the parking garage — you run up, run down, run the parking garage,” O’Donnell said. “And then you do exercises — 15 air squats, run up another level. Do 50 push ups, run up another level. Do 50 burpees.”
You get the picture. It’s not what most 65-year-olds are doing in retirement.
But O’Donnell, who has had a successful 40-year acting career, is just built different. He’s played a lot of cops over that four-decade acting career, but soon he’ll be doing it for real, assuming he passes all the tests, both physical and on paper.
“I always think when you slide into home at the end of your life, you want to be all used up,” O’Donnell said, sitting in a training room at APD’s downtown headquarters. “You know — dirty, scarred up, a little bloody, and spent.”
O’Donnell moved from Los Angeles to Asheville five years ago with his wife, Alison Crowley, 61. A native of Brooklyn who spent four years in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, O’Donnell has had guest starring spots and recurring roles in dozens of television shows, including “Dexter,” “Mad Men,” “Bosch,” “Seal Team,” “Without a Trace,” “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” and “JAG.”
“I feel blessed and grateful to still have some ability, so you know, that’s like a sense of purpose — to be of service,” he said.
O’Donnell and his fellow cadets are about halfway through Basic Law Enforcement Training (BLET). They take their state test in mid-January and, assuming they pass, will graduate on Jan. 30 and be sworn in sometime in March.
But after that comes a month of post-BLET training and three rounds of field training. In all, it takes about a year to become a full-fledged APD officer.
APD’s recruiting surge
This may be obvious by now, but the APD does not have an upper age limit for new officers. You do have to be at least 20 years old, which O’Donnell clearly has covered.
Department spokesperson Rick Rice said the APD does not track its oldest recruits, but he did say, O’Donnell is “certainly the oldest in the last 20-30 years.”
He’s “probably the oldest ever, but there’s no way to do a simple check of records to confirm,” Rice said.
Generally, recruits are in their 20s or early 30s. For their last two BLET classes, with 36 cadets total, the average age was 31.74.
“Besides O’Donnell, who is 65, we have one cadet who is 55,” Rice said. “After that, there are three in their 40s — 42, 41, 41.”
As we’ve reported before, APD’s cadet recruiting has surged over the past two years after dropping precipitously in 2020 through 2023 in the wake of social unrest and outcry after the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer.
“Thankfully, recruiting has picked up,” Asheville Police Chief Mike Lamb told me via email. “Our current academy is four times larger than any class we’ve had since 2019. Additionally, we have had an increase over the last two years of lateral transfers, with many prior APD officers returning.”
Lamb said the department adopted a pay ladder plan this year that “addressed pay compression and created rank advancement based on seniority.
“This plan also allows us to compensate lateral hires based on their law enforcement experience,” Lamb continued. “In addition to our pay ladder, we have an in-house academy, technological advancements (drones), and improved community as well as political support.”
APD also hired a new recruiting firm, Safeguard, and Lamb said that has driven an increase in applicants.
‘When he puts his mind to something, he does it’
O’Donnell, who comes from a long line of men who served in the armed forces, didn’t mention money as a driving factor in his decision to join. He also has numerous family members who worked as teachers, so the notion of community service runs deep.
Last fall, after Helene devastated the area, he and Crowley saw firsthand how the community pulled together.
“We’ve lived in LA for a long time where there’s not a big sense of community there, right?” Crowley said. “So it felt really wonderful, and he wanted to be a part of that.”
Crowley, a former actor who now runs a company called Bolster & Bridge that teaches yoga to cancer patients, said O’Donnell has always wanted to be a cop. But she did not want him doing it in Los Angeles because she considered that city too dangerous.
She knows Asheville has its fair share of crime, but she feels better about him serving here.
“There’s no doubt it’s dangerous,” Alison O’Donnell said. “But I feel like he really, really wants to do it, and I want him to have a chance to do it. And, I think that outweighs any fears of danger, because I think he’ll take good care of himself and good care of the people of Asheville.”
They have been married for 23 years and together 28, so Crowley knew she was not going to be able to talk him out of it.
“I feel he really wanted to do it, and when he puts his mind to something, he does it,” Crowley said.
“Jerry Atric”
At 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, O’Donnell has always kept himself in shape. Before the academy started, he was working out for an hour a day, six days a week, although he was taking it easy on running to save his knees.
Still, he’s got a head full of almost all gray hair, and he knows it’s impossible to hide the years from his classmates. O’Donnell said it didn’t take them long to rekindle a nickname he’s heard before.
“My name is Jerry, so ‘Jerry Atric,’” he said. “If I make a noise, it’s ‘Are you OK? You gonna die?’ Jerry Atric gets in there. I mean, just every old joke in the world. And I bust chops, too, so I have to be able to take it.”
OK, “Jerry Atric” is actually pretty funny, and I will be borrowing that in the future. I say that as an overweight 61-year-old guy who often wakes up with a sleeping injury.
In all seriousness, O’Donnell’s youthful classmates said last week they do enjoy ribbing the old guy, but they said O’Donnell gives as good as he takes. And they really do admire his drive.
“He’s the youngest 65 year old I think I’ve ever met,” John Speessen said.
“What I would say is it doesn’t matter what age you are, if you’ve got the dedication and determination to be here, and you keep up with the rest of us,” Addison Childers said.
So far, O’Donnell has.
Growing up blue collar, catching the acting bug
New York set the pace for O’Donnell.
Growing up in Brooklyn and then Long Island as the oldest of six children, O’Donnell thought about following in a cousin’s footsteps and becoming a chiropractor. He even took pre-med courses at a local community college.
But it just didn’t feel quite right.
“I had a secret dream to be an actor, but in my neighborhood, it was all cops, firemen, construction, criminal — that was the four jobs you got out of my neighborhood,” O’Donnell said with a laugh.
He told his friends he was going to visit a girlfriend in a nearby town, but he was actually taking an acting class every Thursday night. O’Donnell auditioned for a play in college, and he got one of the leads.
“And I caught the acting bug,” O’Donnell said. “So I did my pre-med stuff, and then I went and studied with this famous teacher in New York, Uta Hagen. She was a big deal.”
He did a lot of theater in New York, “which is really the most fun as an actor, because it’s you and the audience There’s nothing there,” he said.
When the talent agency O’Donnell used opened an office in Los Angeles, he made the move and started landing television parts.
Some years he made a full living as an actor. Others he had to rely on his skills as a bartender and restaurant manager.
O’Donnell usually wasn’t star struck, as he had mingled with other actors for years. But he said he did have a moment of awe on the set of “Dexter,” a show about a serial killer, but not from meeting the star, Michael C. Hall.
“I was a fan of the show,” O’Donnell said. “And you know when Dexter walks in with the doughnuts out of the elevator? When I was working, I came out of the elevator and I had to bring up evidence to a detective in the murder area.
“So I come out, and I had this out-of-body thing,” O’Donnell said. “I’m like, ‘I’m inside my television.’ It’s exactly the same as Dexter’s view, and the camera pans around and watches him walk. I’m like, ‘This feels like I’m in the eye.’”
O’Donnell makes no pretense that this particular experience will help him as a cop, but he does feel like his overall work as a thespian will translate to the streets of Asheville.
“It’s funny, but empathy is a big thing as an actor, because it means seeing through somebody else’s eyes really, right?” O’Donnell said. “So you have to do that as an actor, and I think that kind of is really what you see, like you’re meeting somebody on their worst day. And a lot of times, plays aren’t written about life just going along merrily — it’s always a crisis.”
O’Donnell said he’s been impressed with the amount of training APD gives along the lines of empathy and de-escalation, and the training in general. The APD moved its cadet training back in house this year for the first time in a decade, although they still coordinate with A-B Tech on some aspects of training and testing.
Crowley said she’s also been impressed with the training and detail APD has employed, especially the months-long background check O’Donnell had to go through.
“We were getting calls from people we hadn’t heard in 10 years saying, ‘Hey, I just got a call from the Asheville Police Department. Are you applying to be a police officer?’” Crowley said with a laugh.
Like his wife, O’Donnell has some concerns about the job, but he says his trainers, who are APD officers, leave nothing to chance.
“I’ve never been so prepared for every little thing that we go through,” O’Donnell said. “And then you have three months of field training with a field training officer.”
As long as his body holds up, O’Donnell says he’d like to work as a cop until at least age 70, during which time he probably won’t be able to perform as an actor. Most roles require at least a 10-day commitment, he said.
Hey, passing time in a recliner is just not for him.
“My little thing is that there’s like a little construction crew inside your body, and if you keep moving, the (workers) are like, ‘We’re gonna keep building this. He’s still going, guys. Let’s keep building,” O’Donnell said. “And if you’re on the couch and lounge around doing nothing, it’s like, ‘OK, let’s break this thing down. Time to get it in the ground.’”
He’s not ready for the ground. And he actually considers his age a benefit in some ways, particularly the calmer disposition that comes with experience.
“That’s the one thing that comes along with age — I don’t have to prove anything to anybody,” O’Donnell said.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century.
