Published on Wednesday, March 29, 2006
in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Resiliency pays off for state trooper

State Trooper Eddie Pope, 37, recently stopped a woman speeding on the way to a store. He let her go with a warning. Flustered, the woman nixed the store and headed home, where she found her mother having a stroke. She got her mom to the hospital in time.

The woman wrote a letter to the Florida Highway Patrol, claiming Pope saved her mother's life. Pope visited the woman's mother in the hospital. Both women are his friends for life.

Actually, the Charlotte County trooper has many tenured friendships through interventions and chance meetings. For instance, 9-year-old Adriana Smith met Pope after a hay ride accident on Halloween. Knowing the girl missed out on trick-or-treating, Pope went to visit Adriana in the hospital bearing 15 pounds of candy and a stuffed animal. She will never forget him and wrote him a letter telling him so.

It's a combination of these little "extras" and his impressive law enforcement track record that led Pope to last week's receipt of FHP's "Trooper of the Month" award.

Recently, Pope launched "Operation Red Light" in Charlotte County, a sting that found him disguised as a Department of Transportation worker and later as a homeless person stationed at major traffic intersections. When he'd catch a car running a red light, he'd radio to an officer a few blocks away to flag down the offender.

"At the intersection of Olean and 41, we caught 71 people running red lights in 21/2 hours," said Pope.

A few years back, he helped snag the "Hamburglars," a duo that robbed restaurants and fast-food chains from Fort Myers to Sarasota. Just a couple of weeks ago, he collared a man cowering in the closet of what will be Pope's new home.

He said law enforcement officers will tell you the job is in their blood. Pope knows it's in his. And he knew it even when he was told he would never be a trooper.

In 2000, he worked security at Harpoon Harry's at Fishermen's Village. The manager asked Pope to remove a man from the premises. He chased the man outside -- the man got into a car and peeled around the back of the mall. As the car turned a corner, Pope saw two children walking down a ramp into what would have been a head-on collision. Instead, Pope pushed the children aside and got run over -- twice -- by the suspect.

"It was like a Steven Segal movie," said Pope. "My knees were pretty banged up. I couldn't walk, I needed surgery and physical therapy. All the doctors told me to find a different line of work."

When he was strong enough on his own, he continued to work out and work through the pain, determined to go through trooper training.

The training academy is in Tallahassee; the regimen involves classes five days a week for 28 weeks. At the time, his girlfriend, Sally, told him, "You're not going anywhere for that long without marrying me." And so they got married.

And wouldn't you know it, Pope graduated with the President's Award and the Best Athlete award.

"That's my thing," he said. "I got so tired of people making excuses as to why they couldn't do things. I wasn't about to let anyone tell me I couldn't do what I was meant to do."

Sally attests to his love of his job.

"He leaves the house every day with a smile on his face," she said. "And I grow a few more gray hairs."