For Retiring Sergeant, The 'Blocks' Finally Got To Be Too Much To Bear

Published on 7/14/2007 in TheDay.com
By Julie Wernau

Groton — Sgt. Randy Bronson thinks of life's challenges as blocks that accumulate on a person's shoulders until the weight grows too heavy to bear.

At just 48 years old, Bronson, who retired Friday, has had more than his share.

For much of his 26-year career at the Groton Town Police Department, Bronson has acted as the department's death notification officer, knocking on doors to deliver what is easily the most devastating news a family will ever hear: children killed by drunken drivers, husbands killed in late-night car wrecks, a child dead on Christmas morning.

Bronson was trained that he should acknowledge to families that he couldn't know how they were feeling.

Then on Feb. 5, 2005, that knock was at his door.

With his wife, Sandy, upstairs, two state troopers stood in Bronson's doorway. His son, 23-year-old Richard Lee Bronson, had lost his life in an early morning crash on Route 169 in Lisbon. An acquaintance, Michael D. Panus, 27, was driving under the influence of alcohol. There was black ice on the road.

“They told me, and handed me his wallet ...” he said, tears in his eyes. “Then I did the hardest death notification I've ever had to do.

“The day freezes in your life, and you remember every little detail.”

He and his wife preserved their son's bedroom exactly as he had left it — the calendar on his wall with an “x” to mark each day that had passed. The wallet that the officers had given him, “... I couldn't take it out of my back pocket for about two months,” Bronson said.

He and his wife knew the odds. The majority of couples break up after the death of child, Bronson said. There are too many reminders, he said, including each other.

Finally, this year, they made a decision to leave their Voluntown home, purchasing 110 feet of waterfront property in Griswold, where they have been living in a trailer while Bronson, a few police officers and a builder friend construct a home with a wide-open floor plan and “lots of windows” for him and Sandy to move into this fall.

“For us, it's our tranquility,” he said. “... We knew it was for the best.”

•••••

For Bronson, holidays had become bad memories. On one Thanksgiving in the late 1990s, Bronson, the department's hostage negotiator, spent nine hours on the phone with a man threatening to kill himself and his wife. Christmas is the holiday when he arrived at a fatal accident scene to find a 12-year-old boy lying in the road. He made the death notification at 5 a.m., the house lit up like a Christmas card, young children surrounded by presents.

“It is a terrible job,” said Ed Fontaine, Bronson's father-in-law, who worked with Bronson at the police department.

Bronson took a desk job in the records department in 2005. Finally, this year, he walked into Chief Kelly Fogg's office and told him it was time to retire.

Police get more of the blocks on their shoulders than the average person, he said.

“Giving CPR to a baby that you know is dead but you are doing it so that the parent knows everything is being done that's possible. ... My best friend in 1985 committed suicide. ... I'm the one who received his suicide note,” Bronson said.

Bronson has a scar running the length of his head from a motorcycle accident. He has had his shoulder reconstructed and undergone two wrist surgeries. He's witnessed things, horrible things, at accident scenes that linger in his memory.

“Life's building blocks are very heavy,” he said.

Fogg said Bronson will be difficult to replace.

“He put his whole being, his heart and soul, into the job and was very sincere about what he did,” he said.

•••••

Over the years Bronson has had many jobs at the department — starting out in the 1980s with little more than a badge and a gun. He started before the department had portable radios, he said, moving up to shift supervisor and shift commander.

He also helped usher in the “community policing philosophy,” in which neighborhoods like Poquonnock Bridge and Navy housing were pinpointed by police. Bronson's role was to remain stationed in the community and create community networks together with town service agencies, people living in the communities and community leaders in order to get to the heart of a problem, rather than simply arresting people when something went wrong. He dealt with squabbling neighbors, absentee landlords and teenagers who were on the road to prison.

Bronson said he is most proud of his job in community policing, where he felt he was able to make the most difference.

“I graded and paved a road so that my successors would have a nice, easy road,” he said. “It's tougher to make a road than it is to drive on it.”

j.wernau@theday.com