Chris and Thomas Hodges- Your Dad is proud of you

Here is a Miami Herald article from yesterday. 30 years ago yesterday Thomas Hodges was one of three Miami police officers killed in a shootout. Today his two sons are following in his footsteps. Thank you Thomas Hodges Jr and Chris Hodges, I salute you for carrying on your father's work and for serving the public.

Open Post- Jo's Cafe, Bright & Early, Basil's Blog,

a dark parking lot, Officer Chris Hodges shined his flashlight on a trespasser.

The man promptly tackled him. Fists flew, and in the blackness, the rookie Miami-Dade officer felt a hand unsnap his holstered sidearm. That instant, Hodges realized something unnerving.

He was not wearing his bullet-proof vest.

It was his first brush with fear as a cop. It was heightened by a tragedy that shadowed him for decades:

His father was also a Miami-Dade police officer, and he was shot to death on duty.

• • •

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the day that Metro auto theft Detectives Thomas Hodges, Clark Curlette and Frank D'Azevedo were killed in Miami Beach. It remains the deadliest day in the department's history.

Thomas Hodges left behind his wife, Karen, who raised their baby daughter, Laura, and two sons. Both sons are now Miami-Dade policemen. The eldest, Thomas Hodges III, 36, is a rookie officer in Cutler Ridge -- he graduated on his father's birthday.

It is the youngest son, Chris Hodges, 34, whose police career has been most intertwined with that of his father.

He campaigned successfully to get a street named after all three detectives. The sign went up in July 2005. In February, he earned an award for raising money for families of officers killed in the line of duty.

When he accepted the award, he wore a gold chain, its lock welded shut, pressed to his chest underneath his dress shirt. The double pendants are blessed by his pastor.

One is a crucifix. The other is a replica of his dad's police shield.

• • •

Thomas Hodges did not set out to be a cop.

The military had brought him to Homestead Air Force Base. He had blond hair in a military buzz cut and wore thick-framed black glasses.

He met his future wife at a dinner party.

''When I left that night, I went home and told my parents I had met the man I was going to marry,'' Karen Hodges recalled.

After the military, Thomas Hodges wanted a firefighting job. He was turned away because he wore glasses. So he applied at the post office and at the Metro-Dade Public Safety Department, today known as Miami-Dade police. The cops called first.

The job was dangerous. The couple planned for it. They vowed never to stay mad at each other.

He was shot at four times in his first two years.

After one incident, a reporter asked him about his wife.

'Sure, she worries sometimes. Sometimes I worry. So I have to be careful out there, but if she didn't want me to do this, I wouldn't be doing it. This time when I told her about the shooting, she just said, `Again?' Asked if I was OK and said to come home soon.''

• • •

In his heart, Chris Hodges knows which memories are concrete and which are stories told to him so many times they have become real.

This is real: the thrill each time Dad took him and his brother for a ride around the block in the unmarked squad car, a screaming siren on top.

As a kid, Hodges daydreamed about catching the man who killed his dad. And becoming a police officer.

Once older, he hesitated. He worked at the YMCA and studied to become a teacher. His first wife was not keen on him becoming a cop. And what would Mom think?

But he joined. Then his grandmother showed him something he never knew existed: a green scrapbook laced with gold. She had neatly clipped articles about the murders. Inside the album were also photos of a man named Robert Born.

Hodges had never seen his father's killer.

• • •

The day Thomas Hodges died started like most. His wife was in bed. He kissed her goodbye.

That afternoon, Hodges, D'Azevedo and Curlette helped state troopers arrest men selling fake driver's licenses on Collins Avenue and 82nd Street.

Curlette was 28, married with no children, a former Marine. D'Azevedo, 32, was one of the nation's best auto theft detectives. He had recently helped bust a ring specializing in Lincoln Continental Mark IVs.

It was a suspicious Mark IV they noticed in traffic that evening. The car parked a block away at the Beach Motel. On a hunch, Curlette and Hodges, badges clipped to their jackets, pulled up to the motel.

Inside a ground-level room, Born, a fugitive car thief who vowed never to return to jail, waited for them, pointing a 12-gauge shotgun at the window.

• • •

From the day he joined the department, Chris Hodges held a unique place. Veterans looked out for him. He was given his father's original badge, No. 385. As a trainee, he was not assigned to just any unit -- he worked in homicide.

Soon, Officer Chris Hodges, six feet tall and barely 150 pounds, was assigned to Kendall.

It was months later that he and his partner, Marcel Palau, encountered the strung-out trespasser in an apartment parking lot.

Hodges had worn his bullet-proof vest every day -- until that night.

He snapped off his flashlight and put his hand on the man's shoulder. Suddenly, they grappled, and he felt the man unsnap his holster.

''He's going for my gun!'' he yelled.

• • •

The shotgun blast shattered the hotel window, hitting Thomas Hodges point-blank in the face and chest, so close that powder burns marked the wounds.

Hodges never drew his weapon. He was 32.

Born sprinted outside and found Curlette next to the Mark IV. He, too, was mowed down without a chance to draw his gun.

D'Azevedo -- who had been engaged two weeks earlier -- heard the sounds of the bullets and ran to the scene, firing. He, too, was fatally wounded before Born, standing in a patch of sea grapes, put a gun to his head and killed himself.

At the Hodges' home, his mother sat on the single chair across from the television. A news bulletin flashed.

Time stopped. A knock at the door.

''I knew something was wrong but I was 4 years old. I couldn't fathom what had happened,'' Chris Hodges recalled.

During the commotion of the following days, the well-wishers kept vigil at the Hodges house. Thousands attended the funeral. A trust fund was started for the kids. A man whom Thomas Hodges had once arrested sent flowers.

• • •

The trespasser never got a firm grasp on Chris Hodges' gun.

Hearing his partner's cries, Palau rushed in from the darkness to restrain the man. He was arrested.

For a rookie cop, the experience was rattling. That morning after the shift, the bruised rookie drove to a supply store to buy a sturdier holster.

'I finally stepped back and realized, `Man, I could have died yesterday. Did that really happen?' '' he remembered.

• • •

Today, Chris Hodges is no longer a rookie. He moved from the Cutler Ridge station to the countywide economic crimes bureau in 2001.

A few years later, an opening surfaced in the same countywide auto theft unit where his father worked. Portraits of the fallen detectives hang in the unit's lobby.

That night he went home and talked with his wife, Lourdes, a Miami-Dade Schools sergeant.

If he joined, he would be about the same age as his father when he worked there.

In economic crimes, he was investigating mortgage fraud and identity theft. The criminals do not use guns. They rob you with a ballpoint pen.

Something felt wrong.

''I didn't want people seeing me as doing exactly what he did. I want to set my own standard and people to look back and say he was good at what he did,'' he said.

The next day, Chris turned down the job.