Introduction

      Car trips in the Wood family were different than they were in our friend’s families. In their cars, favorite restaurants, scenic views, unique buildings, or entertaining billboards were the waypoints that allowed them to track the progress of their journeys. Their cars sped idly down the road, often with little thought about the territory they passed or the events that happened there once upon a time.

      For my highway patrolman father, each journey was marked by memories of fiery crashes, the routes of high-speed chases, “deuces” who had to be wrestled into handcuffs, and countless citations. Mileposts and freeway exit signs served less to guide the traveler than they did to define the boundaries of patrol beats and mark the locations where battles of life and death had been fought by motorists, outlaws, and lawmen, much like battlefield monuments or tombstones.

      Dad would share some of these memories with us along the way and would include a lesson here and there when appropriate: A sharp curve in the highway served as an opportunity for an impromptu lesson in the operation and handling of a vehicle at high speeds. A highway merge became the focus of a lesson on defensive driving. A dip in the freeway was a physics lesson about the areas that would block radio signals from transmitting cries for backup.

      As young boys eager to join the law enforcement profession and follow in our father’s footsteps, we wouldn’t have had it any other way. Indeed, much of the discussion was at our insistence and due to our constant questions. We found it fascinating, exciting, and educational and secretly made notes to ourselves to remember this or that fact because it might save our lives someday when we were grownups.

      Our mother, ever indulgent, let our father weave the tales, while she tried to think about something else other than the dangers and horrors faced nightly by her husband on patrol. Dad was cautious to edit the narrative for young ears and sensibilities and didn’t talk about the gruesome details of what happened to God’s finest creations when they slammed into a 100-year-old oak tree at 95 miles per hour, or when they mindlessly drifted into an accident scene full of officers and firemen because they were attracted by all the flashing lights on the emergency vehicles—but Mom filled in the blanks automatically in her mind.

      She remembered the gray look on Dad’s face that night, early in his career, when he swung by the house for a quick dinner in the middle of his shift. He had just come from working a particularly gory accident scene and she had innocently served spaghetti; he could barely look at it and left after taking in nothing but coffee.

      Like most wives of rookie cops, she had helped him through the sometimes painful and horrifying early days of his career, when everything was new and confusing and he was still building the emotional skills necessary to handle the job and make sense of all that he saw and experienced. She would listen to the stories of what he had seen and done during his shift, giving him someone to lean on when he needed it and easing the burden by sharing the pain. She heard about the kids thrown from cars as they rolled over, about the false reassurances he had to give to people about those he knew wouldn’t make it, and all the other things that give cops nightmares long after they’re over. She was relieved that he didn’t share these stories often anymore, didn’t need to, but she remembered them like she had been there herself, the details vivid in her mind.

      Those memories weren’t as difficult as the night she got the phone call telling her he was in the hospital because he had been hit by a drunk driver. He had been working an accident scene, standing in front of a tow truck with his boot on the front bumper to form a knee rest for the report book he was taking notes with, when the car slammed into the rear of the truck and flung him like a rag doll a hundred feet away into the iceplant. She did her best to forget that and the nagging thought that it could happen again at any time, but the sometimes crippling back issues that would lay him up for days in the years that followed would always remind her.

      She also remembered the night when he called to say he would be home late, because he’d had to shoot at a man and the investigators would be talking to him for a while longer. The man eagerly surrendered at the shot, unharmed by the bullet that lodged in the object he was taking cover behind, and the shooting was declared in-policy. They would later joke about the “Great Gunfight at the Mission Trading Post,” but behind her smile was a worried wife who knew that someday her husband might encounter an armed man who didn’t want to surrender so easily.

      Thus, it was with great determination and grit that Mom would endure our family journeys to the Magic Mountain amusement park and points north, because the highway always took us past a special place, with a special story for Dad to tell and a special set of lessons for us to catalog. It was a story of fear, courage, sadness, sacrifice and valor. It was a story that began and ended for four brave men near a freeway exit sign simply marked “Henry Mayo Drive.”

      The events of that night would be remembered not by the street name, but by the name of the city in which they occurred: Newhall. In time, that name would become loaded with a special meaning for law enforcement, spoken with a tone of reverence by those who knew what happened there. Unfortunately, that circle has grown smaller and smaller over the years, and the site itself has been razed and remodeled so that no trace of the original killing field remains.

      We can’t allow the memories of what happened that day to fade away, and we can’t allow the lessons written in blood to be forgotten. As such, it’s time to go back to rural Los Angeles County and a young freeway that snaked through its canyons and the unincorporated city of Newhall . . .