Tracy Wheeler had never asked her husband the question before, but on the morning of June 16, a Saturday, she asked him what he'd be doing during his overtime shift with the Howard County Police Department that day.
"Step-outs," Scott Wheeler said, and she cringed. She didn't like step-outs. They require an officer to step into the highway and wave over speeding cars so the drivers can be ticketed.
She told him to crawl back in bed with her instead. "They'll never miss you at work," she told her husband of just 10 months, but they both knew she wasn't serious.
Scott Wheeler had always told his elder brother, Michael, who works for Northrop Grumman in Virginia, that Michael might be the book-smart one, but he was the really smart one. Scott and his bride had moved just a mile away from his mother, Janet, who was a heck of a cook.
He called her that morning and asked if his request for her crab soup had been granted. "I told him I'd have containers of soup waiting for him when he got off work," she said.
Tracy Wheeler knew it was bad when the Howard County police car sent to pick her up about 3 p.m. reached speeds she was sure were over 90 mph.
Janet Wheeler said she knew it was bad when they told her and her husband, Fred, to go to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. She really knew it was bad when Howard County police met their car and swept them inside the hospital without so much as letting them shut off the ignition.
Cpl. Scott Wheeler, 31 and a six-year, much decorated veteran of the police force, lived for two days after being struck by a speeding car on Route 32 that Saturday in June 2007. His was the first death in the line of duty in the county in 46 years.
His organs saved the lives of at least three people. His official funeral dwarfed anything his family could have imagined, and the procession to the cemetery was 8 miles long.
Posthumous awards and pictures of Scott in uniform are everywhere in his parents' Millersville home.
The Wheeler family is convinced the 25-year-old Columbia woman who was speeding when she struck Scott was also on her cell phone at the time. It is possible, they think, that she had been text messaging as well.
Phone records show she was on the phone just one minute before the police clock recorded the collision with Scott, but those clocks aren't synchronized, so nothing could be proved. But it probably wouldn't have mattered. A Howard County grand jury deliberated for three hours before concluding that there was no law under which they could charge the driver with manslaughter.
