As Sheriff John Rutherford sat in his parked SUV, he recalled details of a crash scene there from four decades ago as though it had happened yesterday.
He was a rookie cop barely out of the academy. So new to the job, he was still working with a training officer.
A hit-and-run accident had left a woman lying in the northbound lanes at the base of the Buckman Bridge. She had been ejected from her Karmann Ghia while heading southbound. She had no external injuries. It looked as though she was asleep.
When Rutherford looked at the woman, he saw himself. Young, just getting started in life.
The books strewn around the road were signs she was in college. He had graduated from Florida State University less than a year before.
He’d never thought about life ending so quickly for someone their age.
“When she put on those slacks that morning, she had no idea she was going to die in them,” Rutherford said.
It led him to question what happens after a person dies. Is there anything more?
Rutherford said he wasn’t saved when he became a police officer. That accident was among the cases that helped lead him to the Lord and helped him look at law enforcement as a ministry.
It’s one of the cases the outgoing sheriff talked about recently as he drove for hours through Jacksonville, going from scene to scene of some of the many incidents that had an impact on him.
A day that detailed a snapshot in the career of a boy from the Westside who became sheriff.
Some cases brought painful memories of loss. Others had given him hope.
But the young woman killed in the accident and a father who took his life about a year later were catalysts in Rutherford becoming right with God. For using his badge as something more than a way to arrest people.
That suicide bookends Rutherford’s 41-year law enforcement career that ends Tuesday.
Not a natural calling
Rutherford wasn’t one of those boys who grew up wanting to be a police officer. In fact, until he was in college, it hadn’t crossed his mind.
Even going to college wasn’t something Rutherford thought much of after graduating from what was then Forrest High School.
While on break one night, two of his co-workers at a Kmart food store asked Rutherford what he was going to do with his life.
To Rutherford, he was living the dream: Surfing all day, dating his high school sweetheart (now his wife) during the evenings, then making more money than he knew what to do with stocking shelves at the store.
But he listened to his “really older” co-workers. “They were in their 30s,” he recalled, with a laugh.
Three months later, he was taking classes at what is now Florida State College at Jacksonville. He wavered between majors. Maybe he’d teach government or history. Maybe he’d become a psychiatrist.
While trying to figure it out, he met Harold Davis, a classmate in his 40s with whom he shared two classes. The two ate lunch together nearly every day at the Waffle House on Roosevelt Boulevard.
Davis talked about how much he loved being a police officer and encouraged Rutherford to take a police science administration class. Rutherford was hooked. He was going to become a police officer.
Rutherford received his associate’s degree, then enrolled at Florida State University in 1972 to earn his bachelor’s degree in criminology. But he wasn’t going without his girlfriend, Pat, whose father gave Rutherford permission to marry her.
In 1974, their son, Michael, was born in February; Rutherford graduated from FSU in the spring; and began at the police academy in October. (Rutherford and his wife also have a daughter, Lee.)
Thirty years later, he would be standing on a stage after a landslide win in his first election for sheriff.
Sharing that stage with Rutherford was Davis.
Hitting the streets
Long before Rutherford became sheriff, he spent many years patrolling the streets of Jacksonville. As he winds his way through town, he recounts a variety of arrests he made over the years.
Like the time he drove up on several guys whose car was stuck off Dunn’s Creek at 2 or 3 in the morning. As he’s trying to help them out, he gets a call about the attempted theft of a boat motor not far from where they were.
When his backup arrives, Rutherford heads down to talk to the owner of the boat motor.
Thieves had cut the lines, though the motor was still in the road. Rutherford spotted a multi-colored comb that likely didn’t belong to the owner, whose hair was cut extremely short, but could belong to one of the long-haired guys whose car was stuck.
He drove back to where the car was and talked to each of them individually, while keeping the comb hidden under his clipboard.
After talking to all of them, he dropped the comb on the ground and said, “Hey guys, did one of you drop this comb?”
One of them said it was his, a gift from his mother.
“I told the other officer, ‘They’re all under arrest,” Rutherford said.
One of the best arrests he ever made came when he drove up on two men in a car facing a boat ramp. We’re just doing some business, the men told Rutherford. Insurance business, they said.
“We’ve got all our business papers in those bags,” they said, pointing to three bowling bags, one of which still had the tags on it.
Rutherford asks if they mind if he looks at their business papers.
“And they let me. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
What he found in the bags was jewelry stolen from a store in Brunswick, Ga., that was being fenced to a man who lived nearby.
Anger over the young victims
Rutherford’s anger is still apparent as he talks about the children who were killed when murders spiked in the mid-2000s. Innocent victims who fell prey to the violence of those around them.
First came 13-year-old Shenice Holmes in May 2006.
“She’s literally laying in bed reading a book and that round comes through the window,” Rutherford said. “It was just terrible.”
The sheriff spent the next day — Mother’s Day — with Shenice’s mom.
He said the murder brought one of the best examples of community response from law enforcement.
Shenice was caught in the crossfire of “dopers” living in apartment complexes separated by 30 yards of woods and overgrown brush. It was in those woods, they hid their drugs and weapons.
Rutherford responded by using inmate labor to clear out the brush and woods, making it impossible for the criminals to hide anything there.
A couple of months later, 8-year-old DreShawna Davis was shot and killed when a group of brothers fired shots into her grandparents’ home in retaliation for something her uncle was suspected of doing.
That night, as he talked to DreShawna’s grandparents, Rutherford’s anger grew. As he went to talk to the media that night, the emotion hadn’t subsided.
To this day, he doesn’t remember what he said. That night he had to ask Rick Graham, a former colleague, “I didn’t cuss, did I?”
Reminders hit home
The drowning death of a young boy hit Rutherford particularly hard. As he recounts the story while parked where it happened, he stops a few times to fight back his emotions.
He and his partner were on patrol when they noticed a group of people walking in a line through a water-filled borrow pit with their hands down in the water. It was clear they were looking for somebody.
About the time they learn a little boy is missing, someone pulls his body up from beneath the water’s surface. The boy’s nose is filled with clay and his hair is matted down by the water, Rutherford said, his voice again trailing off.
“These children really hit you hard,” he said, as though he’s trying to explain his emotions.
He and his partner tried to revive the boy with CPR but were unsuccessful.
When Rutherford went home, his aunt who taught him to swim wanted him to see how his son and daughter were doing in the water.
His son was probably 3 or 4 at the time and swam underwater to Rutherford.
“Well, he comes up,” Rutherford said, then pauses for about 10 seconds. “He comes up and his hair is matted down just like that little boy’s.”
Another pause later, he manages, “That was tough.”
He couldn’t control his emotions at the pool. “I just lost it,” he said.
At that point, Rutherford said, “You just start hugging them. That’s when you start to really appreciate what you’ve got.
The ones he saved
There are countless cases, though, that have given Rutherford hope or proved to him he made a difference.
The mother of a 16-year-old kept calling police to their apartment on Ken Knight Drive West, usually asking them to take the girl away. Rutherford said the mother always had different men in the apartment who invariably were trying to hit on the woman’s young pretty daughter, but the mother always sided with the men over the daughter. Rutherford always made the men leave.
He remembered the apartment was immaculate, thanks to the daughter. She was determined to live with pride and find a way to get out of the life her mother had built for her. She knew education was the key, she told Rutherford. He agreed with her and encouraged her.
Though he lost touch with her, he feels good about what likely happened.
“I think that girl made it,” he said. “I really hope she did.”
He remembered being called to a former Pizza Hut at Soutel Drive and Lem Turner Road. The manager’s wife thought her husband was cheating with an employee there. She shows up at the restaurant with a gun and shoots at a couple of people.
Everyone flees the restaurant except one of the Girl Scouts who was there with her troop. When Rutherford arrives, the woman is at the back of the restaurant, holding a gun to the girl’s head and her arm around the child’s neck.
He was able to talk her into putting the gun down on a nearby table, but she kept hold of the girl, who was about 8 years old.
Rutherford had an idea. He started talking a little softer to the woman. So much so, that she had to move a couple of feet toward him — and away from the gun. He did it again, and she moved a little closer again so she could hear him, but still held on to the girl.
When she was about 10 feet away from the gun, he realized it was his chance. So he rushed at her and got to her before she got to the gun. The woman had let the girl go when Rutherford came toward her. The woman was arrested.
About 10 years later, Rutherford got a call from a fellow officer asking him to come to a barbecue restaurant at Biscayne and Dunn Avenue. The officer introduces him to a young woman, who appears to be 18 or 19.
After they shook hands, the girl asked if Rutherford remembered her. When he said he didn’t, her response stunned him.
“I’m the Girl Scout you rescued,” she told him.
She didn’t remember much about the day Rutherford saved him, but her mother sure did, she said.
“My mom always talks about you,” she told him.
Rutherford also remembers the time he saw a man struggling as he walked out of the Gate store on Busch Drive. He thought the man was having a heart attack. As he got closer, he saw the man was choking.
There wasn’t a sound coming from the man, he said. Rutherford tried the Heimlich maneuver a couple of times, but no luck.
He could feel the man getting woozy and knew time was critical.
He tried the maneuver again “with everything I had,” he said.
Finally, he heard what sounded like a cork popping.
Rutherford had dislodged a piece of hot dog that was stuck in the man’s throat.
“It was amazing,” he said.
The one he couldn’t save
But not every life could be saved, including the one that practically bookended his career.
About a year after Rutherford responded to that accident scene at the base of the Buckman Bridge, he had another case that helped lead him to the Lord.
When Rutherford arrived at an apartment, he found a man lying on the bed, bleeding profusely from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.
He tried mightily to save the man as his wife and children screamed hysterically.
The children were so close in age, they looked like stair steps.
The man died as Rutherford was working on him, as his children and wife were pleading for their father and husband to make it.
The death stirred a lot of feelings inside for Rutherford.
It was the first time he had lost someone he was trying to save. Maybe, he thought, being a police officer wasn’t the job for him.
He also wondered again what happens when you die. “When you close your eyes when you’re dead, is that it?” Rutherford asked himself.
That night, when he went to bed, as soon as he closed his eyes, the smell of the overwhelming amount of blood came back. “I would go right back to that scene,” he said.
For the next three weeks or so, Rutherford said he could only sleep an hour here, an hour there.
“I could not get that case out of my mind and I couldn’t get the smell out of my nose,” he said. “It was horrible.”
He began to wonder about his salvation and his own mortality. He turned to the Bible for answers, reading it cover to cover twice, mostly while in the police car.
Ultimately, on May 28, 1978, Rutherford said he was saved. From that moment, the job became a calling, a ministry.
In the final months of his law enforcement career, Rutherford worked to help Mike Williams get elected as his successor.
One day, while helping with campaign signs, Rutherford was introduced to a man with the same last name as the suicide victim. It was one of the man’s sons. One of the stair-step children, from one of the cases that helped change Rutherford’s life.
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