Stopping the bad guys, even in childhood
Friends, family, superiors honor slain U.S. marshal
TUCSON — Decades before there was Chase White, the deputy U.S. marshal in Arizona, there was Chase White, the preteen who stood up to a sixth-grade bully.
A schoolyard tyrant set his sights on Doug Pipkins, a self-described loner and easy target, one winter day on an Illinois playground. The boy braced for the misery he was sure would come, he recalled at Friday’s memorial services for his slain friend. “All of a sudden, there’s Chase, standing right next to me,” Pipkins told the crowd of mourners, mostly police officers. “Like a scene out of a movie, he tells this dude, ‘You mess with him, you gotta mess with me.’ ”
The bully left. And White and Pipkins became best friends.
Pipkins used Friday to give the bestman speech he never delivered for White, a man who never had a formal wedding reception due to military-related travels from his days in the U.S.
Air Force.
Pipkins, who now is a police officer in Illinois, remembered the man who insisted on blasting DJ Magic Mike instead of Metallica. He spoke of White as a sports star by day who would nerd out at night with Dungeons and Dragons until the wee hours of the morning.
But most memorable in recent years, according to him and the half-dozen other family friends who spoke Friday, was the pride White had for his wife and four children .
It was what they spoke about the last time they talked on the phone, about a month ago. It was a call that ended with two words, haunting now given last week’s shooting: Be safe.
“Chase and I never really said that stuff until just recently,” Pipkins said, holding back tears. “We had this new connection with one another. It was something we never had our entire life.”
He paused, took a breath and looked at White’s flag-draped casket at the Tucson Convention Center.
“It hurts.”
White was attempting to arrest 26year-old Ryan Schlesinger on Nov. 29 in Tucson. The shooter, who was wanted for harassing and stalking police, allegedly opened fire on White as he approached a residence. White was rushed to the hospital after a brief volley of shots, but it was too late.
“Chase was a hero,” said Chief Deputy Timothy Hughes with the U.S. Marshals Service in Arizona. “Chase was a leader. Chase was what we should all aspire to be.”
After those days in school and attending college in Illinois, White enlisted in the Air Force. He served from 2000 to 2007, earned multiple commendations and achievement medals, and later joined the Air Force Reserve at the 926th Wing at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
White spent six years working as an investigator for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Las Vegas. There, he dug into alleged civil-rights violations and discrimination.
He decided to join the U.S. Marshals Service in 2015.
“It was the happiest he’d ever been,” said his widow, Sue Ellen White, who was joined onstage by the couple’s four children. “He was fulfilled, and that meant more to me than anything. I would never take that from him. I would take a lot of things, believe me. But I wouldn’t take that.”
White was the first deputy U.S. marshal to be killed in the line of duty in Tucson in 66 years, according to online records kept by the Marshals Service. He was the 49th law-enforcement officer to be shot and killed this year across the country, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a non-profit organization that keeps track of police killings.
Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew G. Whitaker, in a statement Friday, praised the work of deputy marshals, such as White, who arrest fugitives, guard judges, transport prisoners and serve warrants.
“Our deputy marshals risk their lives every day,” he said. “For the last three years, that’s what Deputy Marshal White did for us. On this day of his funeral, the entire law enforcement community mourns his loss and we honor his sacrifice.”
The suspected shooter is being held on suspicion of first-degree murder of a federal officer.
White’s body will be cremated and his remains sent home to Illinois, according to a U.S. Marshals Service spokesman.