Dan Lovelace
In a front-page story on Sunday, the San Francisco Chronicle looked back at a 2002 case that rocked the Phoenix area after a suburban police officer was accused of murder in the on-duty shooting death of a mother of three.
The Chronicle took a close look at the trial of former Chandler police officer Dan Lovelace, acquitted in 2004 of second-degree murder, in light charges being filed against a Bay Area police officer, accused of killing an unarmed man on an Oakland train platform while on duty.
In the profile, the newspaper shows how rare it is for a police officer to be accused of what it calls “the ultimate charge.” Police kill 350 people a year nationally, but the Lovelace case was just one of six in the past 15 years — not including the Oakland case — in which prosecutors have filed murder charges. None were convicted of murder.
The newspaper scored interviews with a wide array of players in the case, including a juror who acquitted Lovelace, and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, who said he brought the charge in part to send a message to law enforcement. The husband of Dawn Rae Nelson, the woman who died in the shooting, was also interviewed.
Lovelace, according to the story, now works as a substitute teacher on an American Indian reservation, but he still wants to be a police officer. “There’s a long road ahead,” he told the newspaper. “Life never comes back to where it was. You can wish and wish and wish, but there’s no such thing as moving on.”
As a side note: The lead prosecutor in the Lovelace case was Vince Imbordino, who is now heading the state’s ongoing eight-count murder trial against Serial Shooter suspect Dale Hausner.