NAME: Michael King

AGE: 50

QUOTE: “The coolest thing, and it doesn’t happen frequently, is people telling you did a good job.”

Michael King was not deterred when he was issued a traffic citation within the first few months of getting his driver’s license.

He was encouraged.

“When the patrolman came up to my car, he said, ‘Young man, you are following too closely,’ ” King said. “I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ He said, ‘I remember you. You were in the driver’s ed class.’ Then he asked, ‘Did you not listen to what I said?’ I told him I did, but I guess I didn’t well enough.

“The roads were slick and my dad was in the car. My dad said, ‘You got what you deserved.’ I believed it.”

King was impressed with the Colorado State Patrol officer when he spoke to his driver’s education class two months prior to the citation.

“He came in and talked about safe driving,” King recalled. “He was a big, strong guy. He was the perfect image of the ideal state trooper. He was 6-foot-4, 215, 220 (pounds) and squared away.

“I looked at him and thought that would be a good job. He represented pride, respect and integrity. To me, he was a tremendous citizen.”

The officer represented the things King didn’t have in his life as a child, and what he greatly desired.

“I came from a poor, broken family,” King said. “At 11 years old, I had to grow up quickly. I worked my tail off from 11 on. I did it out of necessity. If I didn’t work, my brother and sisters didn’t have food and clothing.”

After he graduated from Poudre High School in Fort Collins, he needed to get away.

King moved to Frisco out of high school and took a job as a mechanic at a gas station, but quickly found a connection with the state patrol.

“We had a service contract with the state patrol in the area,” he said. “I became friends with the troopers. That just spurred my interest more, so I took classes at Colorado Mountain College until I was old enough to apply with the patrol.”

King was in the second graduating class allowed to become a trooper at the age of 21 in September 1977.

King started in Vail and worked there two years. He was transferred to the Fort Collins office, where he worked for seven years. In 1987, he was promoted to sergeant and was relocated to Sterling. In 1993, King was made captain and was assigned as the associate director of the academy in Golden. In 1995, he was promoted to major and sent to Grand Junction to manage the northwest quadrant of the state until he retired after 30 years of service last summer.

“I never considered leaving the state patrol,” he said. “I remember thinking every day, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.’ I never looked back. I looked at promotions to enrich my career.

“My tremendous wife (Barbara) and kids (Mikaela and Ryan) are the ones who really paid the price for me being a trooper. The nights sitting at home waiting for me to arrive and I end up being three, four or five hours late. The times my wife worried so much because I was so late and she did not know why. The days of no cell phones and communications with loved ones. All of the moves — 11 in all since Barbara and I have been married. All because I worked for a state agency and when one gets promoted, one moves somewhere in the state. I could not have been a trooper for so many years if I did not have a family that supported me.”

King spends his retirement days fly-fishing and tandem bike riding with his wife. He also plans to join the JUCO Committee this year.

“I think I’m going to be working on awards,” King said. “I’m Tillie’s (Bishop) assistant,” King said, referring to the former lawmaker.

Most of all, he loves traveling with his family.

“Retirement is good, but there’s not a day that goes by I don’t miss the patrol,” King said. “I miss the people I worked with, from the staff support to troopers and other commanders.”

As much as King enjoyed working with fellow officers, he was fascinated with the not-so-common everyday duties.

“(The job) is so unpredictable,” he said. “That’s really the most exciting thing. No two days are the same. There is so much diversity when you deal with personalities. Everyone has a different reaction when they get pulled over. Every accident has different circumstances with different results.”

The worst are accidents involving children, he said. Those are harder to forget.

“One sticks out in my mind,” King said. “It’s there all the time. It happened on Thanksgiving Day 1990. I was a sergeant in Fort Collins. We received a report on an accident involving a small child. I got there and Grandpa was holding an 18-month-old boy crying uncontrollably and telling the boy you’ll be OK. The truck ran over the boy’s head and split it wide open. Grandpa was driving and had his 4-year-old grandson with him. The 18-month-old came out of the house following behind them to go with his grandpa when the accident occurred.

“At the time, I had a baby at home, Mikaela, and the other trooper with me had a baby girl at home too. After we cleaned up the scene, I told the other trooper, ‘I’m going home to hug my kid; you should do the same.’

“Every Thanksgiving morning I wake up and think of the little boy. All of my kids’ friends probably think Barbara and I are terribly strict with our kids, but I’ve seen way too many kids die on the highways. Until you hold a young girl in your arms, do everything you can to save her but she dies, you can’t imagine what it does to you.”

King did.

“There was a party up in Thompson Canyon (west of Loveland) and we received (the call of) a serious accident a few miles from the party,” he said. “From the investigation and reconstruction of the accident, I found the vehicle had been traveling at 96 miles per hour and lost control. A 16-year-old girl was ejected 250 feet. I was six or seven minutes away. When I arrived, I noted she didn’t have any marks on her, but she had horrendous internal injuries. I could tell by her condition. I cradled her head and kept her still. I knew she was close (to dying) and she did moments later. Then I had to go tell her mom her daughter died. That was one of the toughest things I’ve had to do in my career. You get so many responses, but this poor lady beat the heck out of me. ‘No, no, no, it can’t be my daughter.’ I couldn’t say anything else after that. I was lucky to get the words out I did. She was a single mom and now alone.”

King has delivered a baby in the back of a Ford Pinto and pulled a guy out of a car that was trapped underwater in the river, among other things, but one heroic incident was particularly special.

“The coolest thing, and it doesn’t happen frequently, is people telling you did a good job,” King said. “I had one incident in 1980. I was riding motorcycle patrol on (Colorado) Highway 287 south of Berthoud and was operating the hand-held radar. A car stopped and the driver said there is a bad accident a mile away.

“I got there and there was a Chevy Caprice, a motorcycle off the road, a guy lying in the middle of the road and a huge pool of blood under him. The motorcycle was passing on a hill and was sideswiped by the Chevy. The motorcyclist’s left leg was hamburger. He was bleeding profusely. I tried to stop the bleeding with direct pressure but it did not slow. I finally found the artery and shoved my finger inside it to stop the bleeding. He obviously lost his leg, but survived. He was charged with a DUI and driving under the influence of drugs, then later convicted.

“About 10 years later, I got a call from a man named Otto Otterpohl. He said, ‘Trooper King, I have to tell you what I’ve done with my life.’ Once he said his name, I immediately knew who he was. ‘I’m working for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.’ He said he turned his life around and ‘I owe it to you.’ Then he asked me if I would be a guest speaker for them. I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do that.’ I had my message prepared, but as I got up to speak, I realized it was a recognition event for me saving his life. They gave me a nice plaque. It was most rewarding when he surprised me and came to my retirement dinner and spoke.”

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E-mail Allen Gemaehlich at agemaehlich@gjds.com.