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“My main goal is to be a sworn police officer again,” Leonard said. “After that I’ll do whatever this department needs for me to do.”
Does this double-amputee’s goal appear to be far fetched? Not according to Jim Fealy, High Point’s police chief.
“We are looking forward to the day that Ken can come back here as a full-time employee,” Fealy said. “He’s got a tough road ahead of him, but anything we can do to help him overcome those hurdles, we’re going to do.”
Currently, Leonard serves as a volunteer for the department where he worked for 12 years before resigning to work in Iraq for DynCorp. He performs data entry for citations and other paperwork. At the time of his resignation from the High Point Police Department, he expressed his desire to return to it
after a year or so.
“When he left, I told him I’d hire him back, and I intend to,” Fealy said.
To say that Leonard is popular with the personnel in the High Point Police Department is an understatement. Recently, he was surprised by being presented with a paid trip to New York with tickets to today’s and yesterday’s Yankees’ games, as well as a Yankees’ Gary Sheffield jersey and $1,000 in spending cash, all raised by individual donations from department employees. Furthermore, Ron Orgias, a High Point policeman and former New York cop, has arranged for Leonard to visit the New York Police Department.
“The NYPD is going to treat me like royalty; I’m really excited about that,” said Leonard, whose grandfather was also a New York policeman. “Those guys are my heroes, especially since 9/11. Also, I’m a huge Yankees fan.”
Leonard has been a Triad resident for 22 years. He was 15 when his family moved to Greensboro from New Jersey. After graduating from Ragsdale High School, Leonard enrolled at UNC-Greensboro. After earning his degree in Political Science at UNCG, Leonard joined the High Point Police Department in 1992. During his first tenure as a High Point cop, Leonard worked as a patrolman, a school resource officer (at Ferndale Middle School), a housing authority officer, a hostage negotiator and an honor guard.
“One good thing about working for the police department is that if you get burned out on something and want to do something else, you don’t have to quit your job to make a change,” Leonard said.
DynCorp originally approached Leonard earlier in his police career, when he had just started as a school resource officer. The company was interested in sending Leonard to Bosnia to train police officers.
Leonard turned them down at the time, but when a fellow High Point policeman told him of his own interest in DynCorp, Leonard decided to check into the company again. By 2004, the company was looking for qualified policemen to train policemen in Iraq.
“I started thinking about the situation,” Leonard recalled. “I was single with no kids. I had never really traveled much, and this seemed like a great opportunity. I was a big supporter of what we were doing in Iraq. I had heard that when the Iraqi security forces became strong enough, our troops would be able to go home. I thought that this would be a great way for me to use everything I’d learned here and contribute to what we were doing.”
For 14 months, Leonard had a rewarding experience in Iraq, accomplishing what he had set out to accomplish. Then came the fateful trip of Dec. 30. Leonard was driving with five men in his vehicle and six co-workers in the vehicle behind him. Terrorists recognized his party and set off a bomb hidden in an orange traffic barrel as he was passing it.
“After the bomb went off, I knew exactly what had happened,” Leonard recalled. “My feet got jarred, so I knew they were hit.”
At first Leonard did not realize how bad his feet had been hit. Others were injured in his vehicle, but none as bad as he was. The vehicle behind them pushed the one Leonard had been driving in a safer area. But flames were coming out of the air conditioning vents and the occupants had to get out. Leonard crawled from the car and fell to the pavement.
“That’s when I saw my feet,” he said. “I could tell they were gone. They were still attached, but they were shredded.”
Eventually, help came and Leonard and two of his passengers were taken to a Baghdad hospital where he was given first aid. As the New Year was ringing in, Leonard was on a plane to Germany, where he had more prep work for the inevitable amputation. DynCorp’s insurance company told the severely injured
bombing victim he could have the amputation at any hospital he wanted. Leonard chose Duke University Hospital. His feet were cut off at the ankle.
“Dr. Robert Zura at Duke was fantastic,” Leonard said. “He left a lot of my leg and I think this helped my recovery a lot.”
From Duke, Leonard was driven to Moses Cone Rehabilitation Center in Greensboro where he still goes regularly on an outpatient basis. His two-story home in Thomasville, near Finch Field, has all the bedrooms upstairs. As a result, the insurance company is paying for some additions to make living there more convenient with him. Lori Raines, his girlfriend who lives across the street from his house, tended to him regularly, helping him make the adjustment.
This year Leonard has gone from being bedridden to being in a wheelchair to using crutches to walking without them. He has resumed driving again, thanks to hand controls in his car. In addition to volunteering at the police department, Leonard is working to pass the POPAT (Police Officer Physical
Agility Test), which is a requirement for him to resume his career as a High Point Cop.
“The biggest thing I’m having trouble with is the dragging,” Leonard said. “You have to drag a 150-pound person on uneven ground.”
The former and, hopefully, future policeman is working out at Davidson Community College on improving his physical skills so that he can pass POPAT.
“Ken has a lot of physical skills to overcome,” Fealy said. “He’ll do his part, I know, and get himself into the kind of shape where we’ll be able to hire him back.”
Leonard is open to what he would do upon his return to the department.
“I would like to go back on patrol for a little while just to prove to myself that I could do it,” he said. “But if the department says they want to keep me inside, I’d still be thrilled to death. I’ll do whatever this department needs for me to do.”
Leonard shows no bitterness over the physical hardship that he has had to deal with since the end of last year.
“I’m glad these injuries happened to me rather than one of the other guys,” he said. “I think all of them had wives and kids. As their team leader, I had to be responsible for them.”
“Ken’s attitude is just tremendous,” Fealy said. “He’s an exceptional young man. He’s one of us, so we’re still family.”
Staff Writer Kevin Reid can be reached at 472-9500, ext. 230, or reid@tvilletimes.com.