The framed single piece of notebook paper once hung in a nondescript place in an old home office at my previous house. It contained a couple of nearly unreadable scratched sentences that referred to a man in camouflage operating a robot.
The memory of the story behind that nondescript piece of paper came roaring back as videos of University of Utah nurse Alex Wubbels wrangling with a police officer over a blood draw dominated the news last week.
This incident, which happened in the 1990s in Ogden, was my Alex Wubbels moment.
I’ve always respected police officers as public servants who had a difficult job to do. To this day, I try to tell them I appreciate their service. The few tickets I’ve received over the years, I’ve often ended up thanking the officer who handed them to me.
More often than not, cops have been there to help, such as the time a highway patrolman helped get me gas as I was stranded with my young family on a cold freeway.
The day in Ogden started out like most work days for an outdoor writer. My brother-in-law and I headed up Ogden Canyon to meet a source for a story and photos on how to catch whitefish.
After a wonderful day of angling, we began driving back to Salt Lake City. I noticed a bevy of television satellite trucks parked on Harrison Avenue. Like a curious reporter, I stopped and asked what was happening.
It turned out that a person had threatened to mail a bomb to Bill Clinton from a postal store in Ogden. The police didn’t know what they were dealing with, so closed off the area.
I called work and an editor asked if I could report on what was happening.
I surveyed the scene and decided I could get a better view from a neighborhood to the west of the strip mall. Crossing no police lines, I walked a couple of blocks and began to interview neighbors.
Then I grabbed a pair of binoculars to get a look at a soldier from Tooele Army Depot dressed in camouflage using a robot to examine the box.
At that point, an Ogden City officer came charging toward me. He demanded my notebook, which I quickly stuck in my back pocket. I told him he had no right to it and that it had a day’s work in it.
“Give it to me or you are going to jail,” he demanded.
“Do what you have to do,” I replied.
So I found myself handcuffed for the first time in my life. He called for a squad car. I fully expected to soon be jailed for reasons that were unclear to me.
A more reasonable cop came to get me. I explained to him that I was a reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune and that notebook had a day’s work in it. I told him exactly what I saw and what I wrote down.
He went and talked to the guy who arrested me. While to this day I regret doing this, I agreed to give him the one page of notes in exchange for not going to jail.
As soon as the nice cop uncuffed me, I tore off the page and handed it to him. I then made a show of writing down word for word what I had just handed him.
My editor, none too happy with my little negotiation (remember my brother-in-law was with me in a time before cell phones and he had a parent-teacher conference that evening), called the Ogden police chief.
The result was a two-page letter of apology and the return of that single page of notes that our correspondent in Ogden framed and mailed to me.
What also happened was that I got a taste of the power an out-of-control cop wields.
I still respect the police but with a more wary eye. When I see an unjustified shooting in the news or, more recently, what nurse Alex Wubbels was subjected to for doing her job, I realize that cops are human like us.
And, like us, they can make some stupid mistakes in the heat of the moment. Unlike us, they have the power to put people in jail or even kill us.
Thank goodness for the courts. I’m glad cell phones with their video options are available as well as body cams.
Most of the time, the police protect us. But, as nurse Wubbels, countless people of color throughout the U.S. and I discovered to our great dismay, there are times when we need protection from the police.
Tom Wharton is a semi-retired Salt Lake Tribune writer with more than 50 years of experience in Utah journalism.