| Jacquielynn Floyd: Everyday lives merit celebration 12/28/2000 By / The Dallas Morning News
You could probably make a case that the crankhead who shot a cop on a dark Austin street nearly 23 years ago was a more compelling character than the man he killed.
David Powell was a farm boy with a remarkable intellect, a math whiz who aced his SATs and studied in a prestigious UT honors program. He caved to the dark lure of methamphetamines and dumped school for a new life as drug gangster, shooting speed and dealing dope and collecting exotic guns.
Rather than risk arrest after a routine traffic stop, he mowed down a policeman with an AK-47 assault rifle, blowing out the back window of the car, just like one of Al Capone's boys. He told a jail psychiatrist he felt like a "folk hero."
He's still on death row, where he has impressed his lawyers and the occasional journalist with his complex personality and keen intellect. Even his legal case is unusually interesting, full of Byzantine appeals and retrials that have kept him alive longer than all but a very few condemned Texas inmates.
Ralph Ablanedo, on the other hand, was about as ordinary as a guy can get. He had a wife and two little boys, a house on the south side of town and a new pickup. His notion of a good time was hanging out at home or palling around with other police buddies who worked the same graveyard shift. The most dramatic event of his life was, undoubtedly, his appalling death.
'They forget'
As news events go, it was a watershed event for me. I was an impressionable 19, and it was my first week in the news business, as a newsroom clerk at the Austin paper. The cynical exoskeleton that journalists are alleged to possess was, in my case, still soft and porous.
So the Christmas Eve murder of Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins brought the case back to mind, especially after I read a grieving comment made by one of his friends.
She was especially upset, she told one of our reporters, at the public's preoccupation with the prison escapees believed to have killed Officer Hawkins.
"Our society wants to read the scandalous," she said. "They want to know about these people, and they forget the people who were the families, who were the victims."
I suppose that's true, but it's true because we already know Aubrey Hawkins, and Ralph Ablanedo, and the regular people with ordinary lives who fall in the path of monsters. It's the monsters we want to know about, because guys with families and dogs and kids are so familiar. They're us.
Most people who followed Ralph Ablanedo's killing have forgotten him by now, just as many will forget Officer Hawkins. But the people who matter will remember.
"The things I think about are totally trivial," said Bruce Mills, Ralph Ablanedo's good friend. "We went fishing. We cut firewood. When we both wanted new pickups, we'd go by and look at trucks together."
They're trivial, but they're better memories than the night Ralph died. Bruce, working the adjacent patrol district, was first on the scene. He rode in the ambulance, holding Ralph's hand, trying to ease his pain and terror, even though he accurately realized that nobody shot that bad and that many times is going to make it.
A new life
Bruce Mills, in a way, ended up taking on the life his friend lost. Two years after the shooting, he married Ralph's widow and adopted Ralph's boys, and raised them as his own. He rose to the rank of deputy chief, and last month was named chief of security at Austin's new airport.
"My oldest son is 28, and sometimes he'll think he remembers something we did together when he was little, and actually it was his dad," said Chief Mills, casually sharing rights to the "father" title with his old friend Ralph.
"You hear about something in the media, a crime or a plane crash, and it passes," Chief Mills said. "But somebody's going to remember it forever."
Officer Hawkins' killers may well end up more famous than their victim. But his mourners have the comfort that, given the choice, Officer Hawkins is the one we would rather have known.
Jacquielynn Floyd can be reached at 214-977-8065.
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