Brenda Lund and her 8-year-old son, Jared, listened intently to the police scanner in their Green River home.
A high-speed chase was going down on I-70, and she knew her husband, Utah Highway Patrol trooper Dee Lund, would be in the pursuit.Most unsettling, though, were the gunshots she and Jared could hear in the background as troopers and deputy sheriffs communicated over their radios.
"My son started screaming, `Daddy! Daddy! We gotta go pray for Daddy!' " Brenda said.
Mother and son went to another room, knelt in prayer and then returned to the scanner.
For a split second, Brenda felt relief, believing that the shots were not a gun battle but the police officers' efforts to stop the suspect vehicle by shooting at the tires.
"Then I heard someone in a horrible scream say that he'd been hit."
Though she refused to think it at the time, she would find out later that the victim was her husband.
In a Deseret News interview Friday, Brenda recalled the events that "never in a million years" she thought would happen to a cheerful, easy-going man who loved protecting and serving other people.
A volunteer emergency medical technician for the city of Green River, Brenda has been trained to deal with stress and trauma. But nothing could prepare her for the call she was dispatched to Wednesday night.
After climbing into the ambulance with two other EMTs, who were close friends of her and her husband, she expressed concern about whoever the victim was. "I don't want this to happen to a cop," she told them.The ambulance raced to the shooting, about 10 miles east of Green River. About a minute before the ambulance arrived, trooper Boyd Gledhill radioed to the ambulance to ask who was aboard.
In anger, Brenda threw a handful of first-aid equipment against the ambulance wall.
"I knew at that point there's only one reason why he would ask that question," she said, fighting back tears.
The ambulance driver pulled over, but Brenda still would not believe the worst. When Gledhill helped her out, she insisted on going to the scene.
"You can't go down there," Gled-hill said.
"But it isn't Dee. I can handle this," Brenda said.
"But it is Dee."
Gledhill and trooper Jeff Horrocks held Brenda for a long time. Then Gledhill put her in his car and drove her back to Green River, refusing at first to let her go to the local clinic, where the ambulance was going to take Dee.
By that time, she knew he had been shot in the eye but did not know how serious it was. The dispatchers and police, apparently knowing she was listening, had ceased talking about the trooper's condition over the radio.
Still the optimist, Brenda did not believe her husband was in any grave danger. "I thought maybe he would be blinded or disabled."
She hadn't heard he was unconscious or that their friends were frantically administering CPR inside the ambulance. She didn't know how serious it was until a trooper informed her that her husband was dead.
Brenda climbed inside the ambulance. "I felt his face and hair and said to myself, `This is not bad. He doesn't seem too hurt . . . I then folded the sheets down . . . I wanted to see his body one last time."
`Too nice to be a cop'
On Aug. 24, 1978, Brenda Cooper and Dennis "Dee" LaVelle Lund, both natives of Weber County, met on a blind date. It was a church party, a Hawaiian-style luau. Afterward, Lund, 22 at the time, invited her to go four-wheeling in the mountains east of Ogden.
"He just got a new Jeep and wanted to show it off," Brenda recalled.
Three weeks later, they were engaged. Three months later, they married.
"It was really fast because we just knew . . . "
For the next few years, they supported themselves on her salary as a licensed practical nurse and with his job as a salesman for a heating/
air-conditioning company. Their first child, Tina Marie, was born in 1980. Their second child, Lyle Dennis, died shortly after his birth in 1983.
A month later, Dee said to his wife, "You're gonna kill me."
She feared he was about to tell her he had a girlfriend but instead said he wanted to be a trooper, a dream he'd had since junior high and an occupation held by his brother and brother-in-law.
"I was really supportive of him and wanted him to do it," Brenda said. Why didn't he become a trooper earlier? "Because he thought he was too nice. He didn't think he was mean enough."
In April 1986, Dee was hired by the UHP and worked in the Protective Services division. Ten months later, the Lunds were on their way to Hanksville, his first post as a highway patrolman.
He got his first bitter taste of reality a few months later when called to investigate his first fatal accident. The victim, it turned out, was his close friend and fellow Scouting leader.
"After he got home, he broke down. . . . He had a really difficult time. He was very compassionate," said Brenda.
But the tragedy did not dissuade him from his new profession. "He wanted to help people. He was more concerned about helping and protecting people than he was about his own image."
Dee quickly gained a reputation among colleagues as a friendly but capable police officer, one who was able to find humor in just about anything. He gained the nicknames "Easy" because "nothing ever got him riled"; "Birddog" because he was good at "sniffing out" drugs and stolen cars; and "Diesel" because of his talent in making semitrailer truck horn sounds with his mouth.
The only thing that angered him, said his wife, was encountering delinquent youths.
"He would get angry that they were getting in trouble so young. It really worried him."
But on the way to the juvenile detention center, he often stopped at the local convenience store to buy the youths a drink and to give them a stern lecture on moral values.
Shattered dreams
The trooper was transferred to Green River in October 1989. It turned out to be an assignment he cherished. He got along well with his sergeant, Steve Rapich. He became active in the community, joining the small town's fire department and ambulance crew. He enjoyed working with the local sheriff's offices in all kinds of police work. And he loved the proximity of the outdoors where he could hunt, fish and camp.
"We planned to retire here," Brenda said. "He loved his job. He always referred to it as fun, not work. And I was really proud of him."
Now, Brenda is left to pick up the pieces of her family's dream life. She's left with the difficult task of finding some way to explain to her children why anyone would want to harm their father.
And she's left with trying to find a way to deal with her own feelings about the wayward teenagers who cut her husband's life short.
"They're just babies. They don't even know what they've done. . . . When they took this officer's life, they took the greatest officer in the whole state of Utah."
Youths charged
Two Indiana youths were charged with capital murder Friday in connection with Wednesday's shooting of Utah Highway Patrol trooper Dennis "Dee" LaVelle Lund.
George Todd Kennedy, 16, Camden, Ind., and Jason Scott Pearson, 18, Delphi, Ind., were charged in 7th District Court in Castle Dale with one count of capital homicide, which carries a possible death sentence, three counts of attempted aggravated murder, and one count of evasion, said Emery County Sheriff's Capt. David Owens.
"Kennedy was charged as an adult," said Owens. "Bail was set at $500,000 each, and they will be housed in the Emery County Jail until their preliminary hearing, which is set for Friday, June 25."
Lund was shot in the left eye with a .22-caliber rifle during a chase on I-70 that began about 8 p.m. when two teenagers in a stolen car stole gas from a service station at Thompson Springs.