Forty-five years of promising to protect and to serve
By John Joyce
Published in News on March 13, 2015 1:46 PM
He bought the boat.
He cleaned out his office.
Then he took a job.
It turns out Sgt. Jerry Maxwell isn't good at retirement.
But the 44-year veteran of law enforcement still plans on hanging up his handcuffs today -- even if the 63-year-old will be trading in his badge for an identification card as security safety coordinator at Stratus Solar.
His career in law enforcement began at 19 as a dispatcher with the Cumberland County Sheriff's Office.
And through the years, he has done everything from patrol and SWAT to working with the State Highway Patrol.
So when, at last, he walks away from the Wayne County Sheriff's Office, there will be a lot to process.
But why he stayed so long has never been a question.
"It just gets in your blood," Maxwell said.
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Law enforcement is inherently dangerous.
While stress is the No. 1 killer in the profession -- Maxwell said lawmen across the country die each day from heart attacks -- armed suspects still pose a very real threat.
"I've been shot, beat, cut, stabbed and run over by a car," he said. "But all five of 'em didn't hurt as bad as the Taser did."
Maxwell said he has had to use his service weapon three times in the line of duty.
In fact, the first time he shot a suspect coincided with the first time he got shot.
"It was an armed robbery. I was chasing him on foot, and he shot me," Maxwell said. "I shot him back."
Maxwell said he got hit in the leg.
But the suspect fared much worse, getting hit in the hip.
It started with a response to a robbery -- when Maxwell saw two suspects running.
"I chased the one that went right," he said.
After a short foot chase, the suspect jumped in a pipe behind a bush. He turned around and fired a shot at Maxwell with a sawed off shotgun. A doghouse absorbed most of the pellets. Three more hit Maxwell in the leg.
"He jumped down in the pipe and was behind a bush, but I could see he had on blue jeans -- white blue jeans -- and I could see his hip," Maxwell said.
The officer fired six times. All six shots found their mark.
The suspect is still in prison.
Maxwell remembers the day he was sentenced to 83 mandatory years -- and is certain the man still remembers him, too.
"I bet he does," he said. "Every time it rains."
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Despite being injured several times in the line of duty, Maxwell can recall a simpler time when the streets were less crowded and communication was much slower.
"When I first started in law enforcement, even up to the early 1990s, we didn't have cell phones," he said.
If the dispatcher needed to talk to a trooper, he would call him over the radio.
"They would call you and say you need to call the office and we would go to a phone booth and give them the number and they would call you," he said.
He said things were easier in those days. The radios troopers used had only four channels, as opposed to the 40 used today.
"And we had no computers, not until probably the mid-'80s, early '90s," he said.
Crime was a whole different animal back then, too, he said. Troopers worried more about driving and the other cars on the road than they did about drugs or guns.
"Back then, maybe one out of every 60 cars you stopped had a gun in it. Now, it's one out of every six cars you stop has a gun in it," Maxwell said. "We didn't have the drugs like we do now. In the early '70s, we had acid and LSD ... stuff like that, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is now."
The laws, too, were much stiffer.
These days, the jails are full and the law so full of loopholes that defendants get reduced sentences, charges are diminished and cases are sometimes dropped.
"Yeah, I mean, back then, the jails weren't as full, so you stayed in jail. Now they have to let you out of the jail because the jails are full," he said. "It's a much gentler, kinder judicial system today."
Maxwell can remember when the legislation for drunken driving changed. He said the state dropped the legal limit for blood alcohol content from .10 to .08.
He explained that today, if a DWI suspect takes a Breathalyzer and registers a. 08 BAC, he is legally drunk. With the lowered rate, however, convictions are harder to come by, he said.
"If you had remaining in your body alcohol that was .10 any time after driving, you were guilty," he said. "That was all there was to it. They were guilty. But now, you've got to have all kind of driving, they have to be swaying, dropping over on their feet and knees. (Legislators) put so much stuff in there it just ties your hands."
Maxwell said he never lost a case where the driver registered a .10 BAC or above, but remembers a time when he pulled over a driver with a permanently revoked license due to repeated drunk driving convictions.
The driver, he said, blew a .14 on the Intoxilyzer.
"It got dropped down to an improper muffler," he said.
Maxwell shrugged.
"Good lawyer."
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Maxwell has mixed feelings about the career field he leaves after nearly half a century.
In his time on the road, he said he has delivered two babies and has notified too many parents their children had died on state highways.
The notifications were some of the most difficult days on the job, he said.
Maxwell said he believes the future of law enforcement is bright and that there are quality officers in the pipeline to take over for those who are leaving the profession, but he is concerned that some are unprepared for the world they are entering.
They are young -- and might not realize the responsibility they are taking on.
He said before leaving the highway patrol, he would have to conduct background checks on some of the incoming candidates for patrol school.
"They still lived at home, even after college ... they didn't even have checking accounts ... and when they got into the real world it was a smack down. I'm telling you, when they went to patrol school they had a rude awakening."
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Shifting his eyes from the rear view mirror to the road ahead, Maxwell said he, too, has changed.
"I've gotten older. I can feel it. But my kids are grown, so I just decided I was going to start doing some of the things I have wanted to do," he said.
He knows how much his family has sacrificed so that he could serve the citizens of his native state. Now he wants to share more in their lives and in his grandchildren's lives.
Now "Daddy" gets to be just that, he said.
"I bought me a boat -- a pontoon boat. It's got three pontoons so my girls can ski behind it, or whatever they want. They can fish," he said.