Sheriff, trooper receive MADD honors
SUBMITTED PHOTO
Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Dale Reuter, left, and Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White pose for a photograph after being presented with the Heroes of the Heartland medal last week by the Heartland Chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Two local peace officers were honored last week by the Heartland Chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Missouri State Highway Patrol Trooper Dale Reuter and Nodaway County Sheriff Darren White both received the Heroes of the Heartland medal Saturday during the chapter’s annual “salute to law enforcement” banquet in Belton.
About 40 officers from north and central Missouri and eastern Kansas were recognized during the event.
All were nominated for exceptional efforts to clear their states’ highways of impaired drivers by other officers, MADD members, or people whose families have been affected by drunken-driving accidents.
Reuter and White were nominated by Emma Barnett, who is both a MADD volunteer and the 911 dispatch and jail supervisor for the Nodaway County Sheriff’s Department.
Barnett, who introduced both her nominees at the banquet, said that Reuter, a 13-year patrol veteran who earlier served as a Maryville Public Safety officer, has played a leading role for the past decade in staging the impaired-driving “docudrama” hosted by the Maryville R-II School District.
Presented each fall, the docudrama simulates a fatal vehicle collision before an audience of area high school sophomores.
In addition, for the past seven years, Reuter has been in charge of training and maintenance related to the Datamaster breathalyzer machines used in Nodaway and Worth counties to determine the blood alcohol content of drunken-driving suspects.
“Dale is highly passionate about removing impaired drivers from Missouri roadways,” said patrol Sgt. Tom Ziegler, Reuter’s Troop H colleague.
Ziegler added that Reuter makes a point of sticking with cases through the court process in an effort to ensure that guilty offenders are convicted.
Barnett wrote in her recommendation that Reuter arrested nine people for driving while intoxicated in 2015, assisted in numerous other traffic stops, and often participates in Troop H sobriety checkpoints.
In nominating White, her boss, Barnett singled out the sheriff’s successful attempt to reinstitute the rural Nodaway County Drug Abuse Resistance Education program, commonly known as D.A.R.E.
In Maryville, the program is supported by private donations and Maryville Public Safety, which provides instructors. But in other parts of the county, the school-based effort had faded until White became a certified instructor and began offering the course to any district in the county that requested it.
Barnett noted that in 2009 White also started a 12-step program for alcohol-related prisoners at the Nodaway County jail. She added that the sheriff frequently works alcohol-related accidents and follows up with the families of victims.
“He is there to assist the family in any way he can,” Barnett said. “That’s a big part of it. He checks on the families several times after the accident to see if there is anything he can do.”
In her recommendation, Barnett also said that White takes upon himself the most heart-wrenching act of all after someone has been killed in an impaired-driving tragedy.
“His least favorite thing to do is going to knock on a loved one’s door to tell them their family member is not coming home,” she wrote. “However, Sheriff White says that he would rather do it himself, so no one else has to see it or do it.”
Mothers Against Drunk Driving is a nonprofit organization with the stated goal of supporting the loved ones and families of impaired-driving victims and reducing the number of alcohol-related accidents on the nation’s highways.
The Texas-based organization was founded by Candace Lightner after her 13-year-old daughter, Cari, was killed by a drunken driver.
