Bruce Dudley honored with CLEF’s 2015 Public Safety Award
Published in the April 15-28, 2015 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Marty Cheek
Bruce Dudley created the Morgan Hill Police Department’s Crime Scene Investigation program.
Bruce Dudley realized soon after retiring in 1997 after 30 years with the Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety that he could never spend the rest of his life without purposeful involvement in the community. In his golden years, he has been active with the Morgan Hill Police Department, creating its Crime Scene Investigation program, mentoring officers, and volunteering his time with the Citizens Police Academy classes and other programs.
Dudley has become such an integral part of the MHPD’s culture that he was selected as the recipient of the Community Law Enforcement Foundation’s 2015 Public Safety Award. He will be presented with the honor at CLEF’s Cops & Robbers Ball April 25 at the Morgan Hill Community and Cultural Center.
Born in 1943 in Berkeley, he spent most of his youth in the Willow Glen district of San Jose. After high school, he joined the U.S. Coast Guard with an intention of adventure — but that plan didn’t end up the way he had hoped.
“I was going to see the world when I did four years in the Coast Guard — and I saw Alameda. That was it,” he said with a mischievous grin. “I was an electrician’s mate, and Alameda handled the electrical equipment on port security boats and some of the other boats.”
Having lots of time on his hands, he joined the Coast Guard’s track team as well as playing trumpet in the band. The band went to Seattle to perform in the World’s Fair, the only traveling Dudley did while in the Coast Guard.
After leaving the Coast Guard, he found a job working for IBM as an electrical inspector. A ride-along with a friend who was a San Jose cop got him thinking about a career change, and he became a reserve police officer for the city in the mid 1960s.
“Every night was different. I didn’t have to go into the office and look at the same desk every day,” Dudley recalls as the appeal for the job. “The thrill of helping people, of being involved — I couldn’t get enough of it. The adrenalin rush was also a big part of it. It was an exciting job — always something different.”
Photo courtesy Community Law Enforcement Foundation
Bruce Dudley will be honored with the Community Law Enforcement Foundation’s Public Safety Award at an April 25 dinner.
He applied for a full-time police officer job with San Jose, but wasn’t hired. That’s when Sunnyvale’s Department of Public Safety suggested Dudley consider its unique program where officers serve both as cops and fire fighters. In 1967, he joined that department, and fell in love with the opportunity to take on both high adrenalin jobs.
“It was exciting. You have the excitement of patrol and you can dig up your own activity,” he said. “And then you if you get burned out — too much court time or other things — you go to the firehouse. Suddenly the kids are waving at you with all five fingers, you’re not getting the same wave that you get as a policeman.”
Over the years at Sunnyvale, he developed his skills as a detective and helped build the city’s CSI unit. Encounters included a shoot-out with an escaped prisoner from Texas, a life-or-death situation involving five officers. The Sunnyvale police chief later praised him: “Good shooting, Bruce. Everyone turned and ran and you stayed there and kept shooting.”
Dudley described what was going on in his mind that kept him from running from the gun fight: “If you think about it, if you turn and run, he’s still shooting at you. If you shoot back, there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll survive. So that’s the way of thinking. It’s not an invincible feeling.”
Over the years, he had to deal with several homicides. The ones involving young girls still haunt his sleep, causing him to wake up at night with the need to protect the children. And as a fire-fighter, he once fell through the roof of a burning building.
Bruce Dudley as an officer in Sunnyvale.
The most dramatic moment during his career as a cop took place Feb. 16, 1988. That day, Dudley got a radio call from an emergency dispatcher that caused him to drive his CSI van to the ESL Incorporated site in Sunnyvale. Three or four other officers arrived at about the same time.
“It sounded like a dead body in the parking lot. That’s what the call came out as,” he recalled. “So I drive right up when I got there. I’m right in the middle of it. And all of a sudden, shots are coming out the window. Shots are still going on. This is not a static scene, it’s evolving constantly. People are running out the doors.”
Richard Wade Farley, a former employee of ESL, had been stalking co-worker Laura Black for four years. After she got a restraining order, Farley entered ESL’s building with several guns, shooting former co-workers. He killed seven people and wounded four, including Black.
Dudley recalls aiding her. “All of a sudden, a woman comes out and she’s in a complete trance. She doesn’t know what to do. She’s holding her arm across, so I thought she was shot in the arm or something. Turns out she was holding the arm on. There were only a couple of tendons. She had been shot point blank right in the shoulder.”
In shock, Black was not thinking clearly. Dudley kept yelling at her to get down, but she didn’t. So he crawled across the lawn, and got her on top of him and carried her through the hedges, then picked her up and got her into the CSI van.
The ESL crime scene took three days to process using a 12-man team led by Dudley.
After Farley was found guilty, the defense attorney sent a letter to Dudley’s police chief saying: “Never in my career did I see the evidence in a scene of this magnitude so well prepared and documented.”
Much of his CSI experience in Sunnyvale has helped Dudley, as a part-time temporary employee of the MHPD in a non-sworn position, create over the years a CSI program for Morgan Hill. He wrote the first manual for CSI procedure in the department.
“Initially, I was the only CSI. I was called out to crime scenes and took care of it,” he said. “(MHPD Sergeant) Carlos Guerrero came here from Campbell, and he’s now in charge of the unit because they want a full-time sergeant in charge of it. They’ve got a really good team.”
With a tone of sadness, Dudley recalled one of his most difficult moments working in Morgan Hill’s CSI program. That was the Friday evening in November 2011 when 14-year-old Tara Romero was shot in a gang-related drive-by shooting in her Morgan Hill neighborhood. Dudley waited 45 minutes with her body for the coroner to show up.
“That’s the only time I cried at a crime scene because I was all alone with her,” he said. “I just couldn’t understand it. You want to tell her how sorry you are that you weren’t able to be there for her ahead of time. I didn’t understand it.”
Dudley gives of his time and talent in various volunteer activities in Morgan Hill. He participates in taking photos at community events — such as taking portraits of participants at the annual Senior Ball put on by the Youth Action Council. He also helps coordinate the Citizens Police Academy program that instructs local residents on the various aspects of public safety.
“I’m the only one who is there for all 13 weeks,” he said. “It’s different instructors every night, and I tie it together and give it continuity. I’m able to say to the academy participants, ‘Remember last week when the sergeant talked about this. This ties into that — they’re directly linked.’ The new instructor would never have known what happened last week.”
CLEF is another nonprofit organization in Morgan Hill that he has been highly involved with as a volunteer over the years.
“CLEF has the same concept toward the department that I do,” he said. “I’m doing it because it needs to be done. CLEF does it because there’s things that need to be. The canine unit, the license plate readers, the night-vision, those things don’t fit into our budget. But CLEF says that the guys can do so much better stuff with these devices.”
Sharron Daniel, president of CLEF, says that when people ask Dudley for help, he never says no.
“He’s the first to offer his assistance for CLEF for activities and fundraising and photography,” she said. “Any time we have a need for pictures, we call him our unofficial official photographer. He normally does the Cops & Robbers photos for us, but not this year because he’s our Public Safety Award honoree.”
He was nominated by the police officers at the MHPD because of his volunteer work at the Citizens Police Academy and for his involvement in developing the CSI program over the years, she said.
“He’s got a good heart. He has a love for Morgan Hill and wants to ensure this is a safe community for the people in it,” Daniel said. “He has a passion for police work. He could be retired but he chooses to stay active in his retirement years.”
