Detective Chris Sergent was getting lunch when the call came over the police radio that a fellow Harford County sheriff's deputy had been shot. He raced to the scene, flipping on his lights and siren and donning a tactical vest long stowed away in his trunk.
Sergent surveyed the scene at the Abingdon Panera Bread restaurant. He knew he'd have to start separating and interviewing the dozens of patrons who had witnessed the shooting.
He focused on the deputy being treated by medics. Senior Deputy Patrick Dailey, a veteran with whom Sergent had served in the agency's honor guard, lay on the ground, wounded in the forehead.
Then came the sound of gunshots in the distance, and word that another deputy, Mark Logsdon, was the victim.
This hit Sergent even harder. Not only had did he and Logsdon serve in the honor guard together, they had bonded as members of the same police academy class. Logsdon was at Sergent's wedding, and Sergent had helped Logsdon move into his new home.
Harford County Sheriff's Detective Chris Sergent was the lead investigator on the fatal shooting of Deputies Patrick Dailey and Mark Logsdon on Feb. 10, 2016.
Harford County Sheriff's Detective Chris Sergent was the lead investigator on the fatal shooting of Deputies Patrick Dailey and Mark Logsdon on Feb. 10, 2016.
When word came that neither deputy had made it, Sergent's supervisor, Cpl. Greg Dietz, turned to him: It's your case. Can you lead this investigation?
Friday marks the one-year anniversary of the fatal shootings of Dailey and Logsdon on Feb. 10, 2016, the most tragic event to hit the Harford County sheriff's office in its 240-year history. Only once before, in 1899, had a deputy been killed in the line of duty.
Now two had been killed in a single incident, along with the suspect, who died in the shootout.
"Everyone is probably a little different than they were the day before," Maj. Jack Simpson said recently.
In the fall of 1993, David Brian Evans left his job as a civil engineer at a firm in Mechanicsburg, Pa., and never picked up his last paycheck.
Three years later, his estranged eldest son, then 19, thought he saw Evans sitting alone at a Bel Air restaurant where he worked as a busboy, and then...
In the fall of 1993, David Brian Evans left his job as a civil engineer at a firm in Mechanicsburg, Pa., and never picked up his last paycheck.
Three years later, his estranged eldest son, then 19, thought he saw Evans sitting alone at a Bel Air restaurant where he worked as a busboy, and then...
The responsibility for finding answers for a grieving community and his colleagues fell to Sergent. In the small but growing county, many deputies know each other, and Dailey, a 30-year veteran, and Logsdon, a 16-year veteran, were old friends to many.
"The way I was looking at it, this guy just murdered two of my friends, and everybody in this agency and this community had been affected by this," Sergent said in an interview this week. "I needed to find out as much information as I possibly could about this guy, and why it happened. All the questions everyone had, needed answers."
More immediately, it dawned on Sergent that the agency would need to begin preparing for two funerals. And its honor guard, which performs casket duties and acts as pallbearers at police funerals, was now without two members.
Sergent, 37, grew up in Bel Air, attending C. Milton Wright High School and entering the sheriff's office's police academy in 2001 at age 20. Sergent said police work appealed to him because he wanted to help people.
"Police were somebody you looked up to," he said.
Sergent became a detective in 2009, working burglaries for his first two years before joining the unit that investigates violent crimes.
He had left the honor guard about two years before the officers' deaths. But on the night of the shootings, he approached the sergeant who ran the unit and asked if he could rejoin it for the funerals.
"As hard of a thing as that was for all of us in the agency, there's nothing else that I would've wanted to do," Sergent recalled.
And then there was the criminal investigation, this one different from most of the ones Sergent had undertaken. There was no suspect to track down, no court case to present.
Instead, he set out to learn more about the suspect, a 69-year-old drifter named David Brian Evans, including his movements before the shooting and a possible motive.
Sergent also had more people to interview than in a typical case. School had been canceled that day because of snow, and many families had been in and around the restaurant. He asked those who directly witnessed the incident to go to one side of the restaurant, while others who had pieces of information were directed to another side.
He also wanted to reassure everyone that they were safe.
One by one, the detectives had the witnesses walk out of the restaurant and get into their vehicles, where they were interviewed. More than 80 people were interviewed.
Sergent spent long hours chasing leads and reviewing information, then would take on shifts with the honor guard, which stays with the casket "from the shooting until internment," said Sgt. Ken Perry, a member of the unit.
"He took that on, on top of his responsibilities as a detective, and on top of being a dad and a husband," Dietz said.
"I was in awe," Perry said.
Dailey's viewing and funeral were first. Dailey had been a stickler for details, making sure the unit moved crisply in formation and looked impressive. Its members knew they had to get it right for Patrick.
On the night of Logsdon's viewing, a motor escort took his body back to the McComas Funeral Home, where Sergent had arranged for their academy class to get together.
On this night, they put their chairs in a circle next to Logsdon's casket and shared stories.
At Logsdon's funeral, few watching from outside the agency would have noticed it was Sergent, the lead investigator, who took the front left position carrying the casket.
Sergent, meanwhile, was able to dig up new information about Evans.
He and his wife had divorced in 1989 in Harford County, and he'd followed her and their children to Georgia and back to Maryland. In 1996, she was grazed in the neck by a .22-caliber bullet. She didn't know who'd shot her but suspected it was her ex-husband, who she said had been stalking her and their kids.
The bullet lodged in her coat and was collected as evidence. Detectives, however, were unable to locate Evans.
In 2014, after his family in Pennsylvania had spent years trying to locate him, Evans was declared legally dead by a judge.
But in the summer of 2015, he resurfaced in Harford County, where he became a familiar face at the Panera Bread.
On the day of the shooting, Evans was spotted by his ex-wife, who called 911.
Dailey was dispatched to check for a possible wanted person.
What he did not know was that Evans was armed with a 9 mm Smith and Wesson he carried in a soft-paddle holster on a belt. He had a second loaded magazine in his pants pocket. In his vehicle was a cache of weapons and more than 2,700 rounds of ammunition.
Sergent's investigation found that Evans had apparently been using the Panera Bread Wi-Fi to search the internet for information about his estranged family.
Sergent still doesn't know why Evans opened fire on the deputies that day.
"We certainly believe he was not up here for the best intentions," Sergent said. "I think he was up here to finish what he was starting before. Thankfully, that did not happen, and his ex-wife and children are all safe."
Digging through evidence, Sergent located the projectile that had been collected after Evans' ex-wife was shot at in 1996. Through ballistics testing, police were able to match the bullet to a rifle found in the trunk of Evans' vehicle.
That case, open for 20 years, was now closed.
After the investigation into the shooting of the deputies was concluded, Sergent compiled his findings in five binders and gave presentations to members of the command staff, including Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. He put everything into a banker's box, topped it with copies of The Aegis newspapers from the week of the shootings, and sealed it up.
His investigation concluded that the officers acted appropriately, from the handling of the initial call to the shooting of the suspect.
"That was a routine call that we would've answered on any day, and deputies would've responded the same way," said Cristie Kahler, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office. "I'm sure that exact scenario unfolds hundreds of times across our state a day."
Sergent says he has visited some of the makeshift memorials set up for the deputies, but he hasn't set foot again in the areas where the shootings took place.
One year later, "I don't think I'm quite ready to do that," he said.
Sergent has since developed a PowerPoint presentation about the case that he gives to new recruits, in part to show the different investigative techniques he used. But he also wanted to make sure that they would remember an incident that forever changed police work for those in a growing but still tight-knit agency.
"I want the new guys to know the facts and be aware of the sacrifice that our brothers made," Sergent said. "There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of Pat and Mark in some way. I think I can speak for the rest of the agency in saying that."
jfenton@baltsun.com
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