What happen to Ken Van?
By Pat Soll
It's been a while since I
visited the FPK web page. This morning I read the article in the training
section that Sled Smith wrote about Ken Van. I can fill in a few of the
blanks....
Ken was also my trainee.
They (LT.Jim Anderson, I think) gave him to me after Smith had
him. When he worked with me Ken lived in Carson with his wife
and twin daughters, northeast of Carson Station. Smith's story made Ken
sound much different than the man I knew and worked with. While Ken
was not someone who was easily offended or sensitive, I'm not sure how
he would take to Smith's writings. Ken was an excellent
deputy, even as a trainee. He had a tremendous street sense about him and was
very comfortable doing the job. I never heard him speak to or around anyone on
the streets in the demeaning terms Smith describes. He was always a
professional - one of the best trainees I had.
When Dave Andrews was
killed, there was some concern at the time that Ken was the target. We had
arrested Claudie Lee Clay for 211, and he had promised to kill both of us and
some other FPK deps in court. As you may recall Sam Shippey and Dave Andrews
were partners and Ken and I were partners (TO/Trainee) in the north end. Two
salt and pepper teams, and Sam and I and Ken and Dave were similar in
appearance. Sam and I car-pooled to work. We were on the way to work when he
heard about Dave's killing - no one bothered to call Sam at home. It has a hard
day and weeks that followed for Sam and in the long term (along with wife
concerns) I was partly responsible for his leaving the department and becoming
a successful chicken farmer in Arkansas.
While on duty one day a
925/417 call came out at Ken's home address in Carson. We rolled code-3 from
the north end and beat the first Carson unit there. Ken's neighbor had seen a
black man carrying a gun walking around the back yard of Ken's house, but he
was GPA. The department moved/hid Ken and his family to Orange County for about
a month and Metro "lived" in his home waiting for the suspect to
return. He didn't come back and Ken was moved back home. You may recall all of
this.
Ken only stayed at the
station a short time after that and, before he was officially off
training, went back to the jail. He caught so much heat from his wife that he
couldn't stay. She was going nuts over the whole thing.
He later went back to
patrol for a time at Lennox Station and eventually quit the department in favor
of his marriage (smart man); his wife never got over the experience at FPK. The
last I heard, he and his wife were running a day care center somewhere in
Carson - that was a looooong time ago, and I don't know where he is now.