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Two

One hour later

T he notifications about death are the thing Chief Fry dreads most in this job. It takes seconds to give or receive the news. Yet the needlessly lost lives haunt his dreams. He can recall each and every one as he hurtles toward Moscow.

A Latah County sheriff’s deputy had found a body the next day and called it in. The corpse had been on the ground for two days. It looked like the kid, a college student named Joseph Wiederrick, had frozen to death. He’d been intoxicated.

The department spread out, trying to piece together what had happened, and Fry became the point person for the kid’s parents.

Notifying parents of the loss of their children is something you never get better at.

And tragically, student deaths are not that unusual.

There’s one practically every semester. Typically, it’s the result of a car accident that occurs during the long drive most of the kids take to cross the state in treacherous conditions in winter.

One year Fry taught a class up at the university, and right before Thanksgiving break, he told his students: “Remember, drive extra-slow. Your parents don’t care what time you get there. They just want you there.”

Fry may be a cop, but he’s also a husband and the father of four kids—three daughters and a son. “I understand what that’s like as a parent, to drop a child off,” he’ll say. He knows that parents expect their kids to be safe in college.

And he also knows that sometimes, they aren’t.

The tragedy with young Joseph Wiederrick was a double whammy for Fry because it seemed like no one in the community helped the kid out by notifying law enforcement that he was in trouble on the night he ended up dying.

His body was found two miles from town. Two miles. Fry knew that someone must have spotted the drunk kid while he was walking.

Sure enough, when all the details about Wiederrick’s final night were in, and when Fry put together a map for Joseph’s mom, Michelle, it emerged that Joseph walked a circuitous eight miles before lying down to rest one last time.

Various people in the town did see the kid. They could have helped him by calling the MPD when he stumbled into their backyards or, in a few cases, into their homes.

Instead, they just watched him or sent him on his way. One lady later said: “I just didn’t want to get him in trouble.”

Joseph would have been in trouble. He would have been locked up and most likely given a criminal citation. But nothing more.

Fry tells everyone he works with that the key to serving the community is respect, respect, respect.

“You ever see the movie Road House with Patrick Swayze?” he’ll ask people. If they haven’t, he tells them to watch it.

The movie’s message is his message, the one he instills in his officers: “Be nice, be nice, be nice, and until it’s time not to be nice… be nice. If you treat people with respect even when you arrest them, they’ll thank you.”

But in 2013 the town’s residents seemed unaware of the chief’s message of police compassion.

The tragic story of Joseph Wiederrick that he put together went something like this:

On January 20 at two a.m., a Moscow woman hears a noise downstairs.

She goes to take a look. Is it an animal?

It’s a human. A drunk human. An eighteen-year-old man, clearly disoriented, smelling of alcohol, his blond hair disheveled, is stumbling around in her basement. She doesn’t know how he got in. He’s lost.

“Safe, safe,” he mumbles to her. It’s clear he wants to stay, sleep it off.

But she asks him to leave. He’ll figure it out. No need to call the police.

It’s black outside. Snowdrifts piled high. But students often wander drunk, a nuisance with their noise and their parties.

Joseph shuffles off down Highland Drive.

Three a.m. Bang, bang. He’s knocking on another door, this one on Mountain View Road.

The owner looks through the window. “Go home,” he says to the kid.

Again, there’s no call to the police. The townsfolk think they’re protecting him.

It’s a mistake.

Four a.m. Bang, bang.

A third homeowner looks out the window, shrugs, and goes back to bed.

Joseph wanders away. He’s trying to get back to his dorm but has no idea where he’s headed.

Somehow, he ends up near Paradise Creek. Two miles north of the city.

Joseph trips and falls. He hits the frozen creek. His body sinks like a dead weight through the ice into the frigid water.

He fights. He climbs out. He crawls under a nearby bridge. And rests.

And rests.

His body is discovered by police two days later. It emerges that Joseph Wiederrick had drunk too much at a Saturday-night party given by the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

Fry doesn’t like to toot his own horn, but he reckons that since he became chief in 2016, attitudes in town have changed about a lot of things, including over-the-top college drinking.

He isn’t stupid enough to think you can stop college kids from drinking.

But he believes you can take steps to keep it in check.

You can, for example, go, as he does, to Rosauers, look at the keg list, and figure out where each keg is. If a keg is somewhere it isn’t supposed to be—if, say, it’s with a group of underage kids—you take it away. Nicely, but that’s what you do.

One time Fry and the guys took forty-two cases of Keystone Light away from a fraternity party because they saw a nineteen-year-old pushing the cart. So, yes, you’ve got to teach them that the law is the law.

If Fry and his ride-along partner Captain Paul Kwiatkowski had been called to deal with drunk Joseph Wiederrick, sure, they might have locked him up, but he’d have still had his life ahead of him.

Fry is upset that people in Moscow don’t get that. “What else can we do?” he asked Paul one time.

“Keep going,” his friend and colleague said. “Don’t give up.”

The two guys had looked at the framed quotations on Fry’s wall. The chief knows them by heart, but he still reads them every day.

The first is from Philippians 4:7: And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds.

The second is from a Theodore Roosevelt speech on citizenship.

In April 1910, after finishing his second term as US president, Roosevelt delivered “The Man in the Arena” speech at the Sorbonne in Paris.

He was on his way to Oslo, Norway, to officially accept the Nobel Peace Prize, which he had been awarded in 1906 for his efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again…

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Fry thinks about those words: Who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.

So as the chief reaches the city’s outskirts, he takes a deep breath. He knows that with this startlingly awful and strange case, now more than ever he needs to get a critical message through: The Moscow police, on his watch, are to be trusted, not feared.