CRIME: A Trooper's Last Words

A Troopers Last Words

As he was driving down Connecticut's broad, tree-lined Merritt Parkway one night last week, a Navy chief petty officer named Franklin Jenson saw an unusual sight : an empty state police car was standing at the side of the road with its big rear warning light flashing rhythmically. He slowed. Then he saw something even stranger: a weak blink of light on the ground near the car. He stopped, got out. A white-faced state trooper was sprawled there in the darkness, working a flashlight button with his thumb, and dying from a bullet wound in his stomach.

"Oh God," the wounded man groaned, "oh God . . . get me my rosary ..." As the Navy chief bent over him, the trooper managed to whisper a report. His name was Ernest J. Morse. He had begun chasing a speeder near New Haven, and after miles of pursuit had finally flagged his quarry down. But as he got out of his patrol car, the speeder—a dark-haired youth in a grey overcoat—had pulled a pistol, fired once and driven away. The policeman muttered the first three digits of the youth's Massachusetts license number: 169. He gasped: "Go to the car radio and call." The Navy man obeyed him.

The trooper's whispered words, relayed to Westport police barracks, started Connecticut's biggest man hunt. The speeder, a 20-year-old Arlington, Mass, parole violator named John Xavier Donahue, was sighted that night as he drove into Greenwich, was pursued amid a hail of sub-machinegun bullets and driven to cover in a garage loft. Only minutes later he came out, calling "Don't shoot! I surrender!" By that time Trooper Morse had been dead for four hours.