One of Lansdale’s finest says goodbye
Lansdale police Lt. Alex Kromdyk retires after 34-year law enforcement career
It was a Saturday afternoon in 1990, and nobody would have blamed Alex Kromdyk for taking it easy, at least for a few days. Then 28, he had just pulled up to his brother’s place in Blue Bell after driving crosscountry from Barstow, California, following his discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps.
“There were people telling me, ‘Just relax, you just got back,’ but that’s not me — I had to get a job,” Kromdyk remembered. So early the next morning, while the world outside his window was still asleep, he went out, got a copy of the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, and started perusing the job listings. It so happened that it was the only day that the Lansdale Police Department had posted an ad in the paper looking for new officers.
Kromdyk took the test, went through the yearlong process of becoming a cop — a period during which he worked as a private in-
vestigator — and was sworn in as a Lansdale patrol officer on Aug. 19, 1991.
Nearly 26 years later, having ascended to the rank of lieutenant and currently serving as the department’s acting chief since the retirement of Chief Robert McDyre in March, Kromdyk is hanging up his uniform — although his next career move could be as challenging and rewarding as his time in law enforcement.
Retirement was a difficult decision he’d mulled over for quite some time before finally “pulling the pin,” as he’s fond of saying, around the same time McDyre bid farewell to the department, Kromdyk admitted during a conversation in his office at Lansdale police headquarters, surrounded by half-filled boxes and cards from wellwishers propped up on his desk. He’d considered putting his name into the running to succeed McDyre as permanent chief, but, he said, “My whole career, every single cop that retired, they always told us, ‘You’ll know when it’s time, you’ll know,’ and they’re right. Earlier this year I just felt like it’s time. It’s time.”
“I think the department is in the best shape it’s ever been since I’ve been here,” Kromdyk continued. “These are the best officers we’ve ever had, bar none. Their integrity is beyond reproach. These are intelligent, caring officers who have empathy and the understanding of what the people in this community go through on a day-in, day-out basis. And we have great young leaders here who have already shown that they’re willing to step up and do what’s best not only for the department but for the people they serve in the borough. So that helps my decision a little bit. I don’t think I’d be able to leave if I had any doubts as to the condition of this department. I would have to right any wrongs first, and I don’t see anything wrong here.”
“I have a lot of mixed emotions,” said Marcy Kromdyk, his wife of 20 years, at a goodbye luncheon at the station on Thursday attended by numerous Lansdale police officers past and present, as well as Lansdale Mayor Andy Szekely, renowned area defense attorney Greg Gifford — a friend of Kromdyk’s since he joined the police department — and others.
She alluded to the wellknown struggles of any police officer’s family — holidays spent apart, school functions missed, constant worry due to the inherent dangers of the job — while beaming with pride at Kromdyk’s career achievements and his standing as an extremely well-liked figure in the community. “His entire career has been about protecting and serving others, and after having that be constantly on, all the time, to now see the stress starting to come off his shoulders is good,” she said. “In his leadership role, he’s always wanted to make sure his guys are safe, he sees them as his responsibility, and he’s always going to think about them and worry about them.”
“Never have I ever heard a person say a bad word about him,” said Kromdyk’s daughter, Caitlyn, while holding one of Kromdyk’s five grandchildren on her lap (a sixth grandchild is on the way, Kromdyk said). “Whatever he does, he does it to the max, every single time, and clearly his career reflects that,” Caitlyn added.
If you figure in Kromdyk’s eight years as a military police officer, his law enforcement career has spanned more than three decades. In 1980, he joined the U.S. Air Force and served three years in the Philippines. Not long after leaving the Air Force, he enlisted in the Marines. “I didn’t think that I really got the full military experience that I was looking for (while serving) in the Air Force,” Kromdyk said. What was he looking for? “What the Marine Corps gave me!” he grinned. “The camaraderie, the training... the Air Force was more lax than the Marine Corps, but most things are.”
“He was still a Marine when he showed up here,” recalled Lansdale Sgt. Dean Miller, who had been with the department about five years when Kromdyk was sworn in. “He was sharp, he was ready to work — a ‘lean, mean Marine machine,’ as they called ‘em. Neither one of us are quite so lean anymore,” said Miller, who’s set to follow Kromdyk out the door next month when he, too, retires. “We enjoyed an incredible career together. We were friends throughout and shared stories about our kids and our lives. I’m thankful to call him a friend.”
After five years as a patrol officer, Kromdyk was reassigned to the department’s detectives division, where he spent a year establishing himself as something of a forensics whiz kid, particularly when it came to finding and lifting elusive fingerprints, and through that solved tricky car theft and burglary cases. “I just had a knack for finding prints,” he said, crediting training he’d received both from the FBI and one of his mentors, now-retired Towamencin Detective Sgt. Stu Newman.
Though he said he loved detective work, in 1997 he jumped at the chance to become Officer in Charge (OIC) for the patrol squad run by McDyre, who had just been promoted to sergeant.
“I admired Bob because I knew he had been down on NET (Montgomery County’s Narcotics Enforcement Team) — he was really interested in drug investigations and my background was traffic, so this was a new facet in law enforcement I knew I could learn from him,” he said.
After a couple of years together on a squad, McDyre was promoted to detective sergeant, and in June of 2000, Kromdyk was promoted to patrol sergeant and ran his own squad for the next nine years.
“Alex was my primary sergeant when I finished field training in 2002; I was in his squad for three years,” said Detective Sgt. Michael Trail, who will become the department’s acting chief on July 31 and hopes to succeed McDyre as permanent chief. “(Kromdyk’s) the consummate professional,” Trail said. “He was a very hands-on sergeant. He would come to every call and make sure you turned over every rock, so to speak, and was very thorough when you did things, and that was great. That’s what you want. He always had the best interests of his officers in mind, and the community, and he still does to this day. He’s got a good temperament, and he’s always one to go for a laugh. You need that. You can’t be a serious person in this job or it’ll eat you up.”
“Alex is definitely good for a laugh,” Miller concurred. “And he always brings a story — a looooooong story.”
“He’s always good for an old Marine Corps story about when he was in the military police,” said Officer Matt Erbele, a six-year member of the department and a fellow veteran Marine. “We were both at Camp Lejeune and stationed in Okinawa, even if we were separated by, you know, several decades,” Erbele laughed. “He’s been a great help to me here. When I first started he was always giving me advice on how to handle situations, the best ways to deal with people,
certain ways to de-escalate situations, things like that, as well as helping me get to know the borough and the residents.”
Kromdyk’s veracious police work and affable personality earned him respect well beyond his own department. “Alex is a close friend,” said Towamencin police Lt. Jeff Kratz, who called Kromdyk a “truly dedicated public servant and a master at what he does.”
“From our earlier days on the street to our current roles in administration, if there was ever a critical situation, Alex was the guy you wanted at your side,” said Kratz. “He always had your back and quite frankly, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me when the proverbial you-knowwhat hits the fan.”
In 2009, when McDyre became chief, he picked Kromdyk to be his administrative sergeant and numbertwo man in the department. Last year, Kromdyk was promoted to lieutenant. And now he’s calling it a career, although he said he’s very happy to leave the department in the hands of Trail.
“Mike cares for the department like I do; he cares for the people that work here like I do. And that’s important,” he said.
But just as he’s walking away from one career, Kromdyk is walking toward another.
“If things work out, I may have an opportunity to write for TV,” he smiled noting that he’s not able to divulge too much at the moment. “I was approached by someone in the television industry who I’ve known for a while and I was asked if I had an interest in helping them write for a TV series that they have an idea for,” Kromdyk said.
Though he’s long had an affinity for writing, as anyone who’s seen some of his creatively penned (and headlined) press releases over the years certainly knows, Kromdyk explained that he started taking script writing more seriously several years ago when he reconnected with his old Air Force pal Edward Bernero, who like Kromdyk became a cop (in Chicago) after his military service, and started writing scripts on the side for kicks. Eventually, Bernero’s writing got noticed — “he told me that out there, every (script) gets read because they’re always afraid of missing the next big thing,” Kromdyk said.
Bernero moved to Los Angeles, where he co-created the popular NBC crime drama Third Watch, then executive-produced the hit CBS series Criminal Minds. Kromdyk went out to L.A. about six years ago to visit Bernero for a few days, during which Bernero encouraged him to try his hand at writing.
Back at home, Kromdyk wrote a script for a television pilot, which eventually found its way into the hands of another person ensconced the TV industry who liked it and recently reached out to Kromdyk to collaborate on the nascent series idea.
“So if it comes to fruition, great, and if not, I think I will continue to write in some form or another,” Kromdyk said. “I really enjoy it. It’s so different from what I’ve been doing (as a police officer).”
“I’m excited for him to try that,” his daughter Caitlyn said of the TV writing opportunity. “I know he’s going to do it well.”
Meanwhile, Kromdyk laughed, “I’m a little behind on my fishing for the year,” while his wife Marcy said that the immediate plan was for Kromdyk to “take a month off just to decompress, to adjust.”
“Now that (retirement’s) here, you realize even more that at this place, you’re a family,” Kromdyk reflected, adding with a sly smile, “Just like any other family, you have those crazy relatives that you want to strangle from time to time, but they’re your family.
“A lot of times you spend more time with these folks than you do with your own family, so leaving them is like leaving your own family,” he said. “It’s very similar to when I left the military. You’re leaving these guys in your unit, leaving them behind. There’s definitely a sadness.”
Yet Kromdyk couldn’t hide his happiness at soon getting to spend more time with his family, or his excitement at his burgeoning writing career. And though he’s loathe to sing his own praises — as his colleagues, friends and family will attest — Kromdyk did cop to a feeling of pride and accomplishment regarding his 34 years in law enforcement.
“I can look myself in the mirror and know that I never thought about what was best for me,” he said. “I’ve always thought about what’s best for the department and what’s best for the people we serve. So I’m very happy I can do that — it means a lot to me to be able to look yourself in the mirror and like what you see, you know? It really does.”