Badge No. 86 Back on His Chest, Scott Davis is Back on the West Des Moines Beat: 2012 in Review

Editor’s Note: As 2013 opens, we’re bringing back some of the stories that made you talk, laugh, cry or just scratch your head in 2012. This was originally published in February.
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West Des Moines Police Officer Scott Davis is back, maybe not 100 percent, but 99-point-999 percent back. A bit of his lower lip, from the left corner to the middle, remains numb from a series of strokes over the past three years that his doctors said should have killed him.

The numb lip is more of a nuisance than a disability — more like the aftermath of a visit to the dentist than a lingering effect of a brain-stem stroke that is normally regarded as a death sentence.

“Hannah sometimes has to tell me I have food on my lip,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh.

Davis was almost giggling, with good reason. He and Hannah Walter, another front-line responder who splits her time between West Des Moines Emergency Medical Services and the Indianola Fire Department, are newly engaged.

Life can’t get much better for Davis. Thirty-five months ago, his prognosis couldn’t have been more dire.

Today, Badge No. 86 is pinned back on his chest. It’s a duplicate. The original is screwed to a wooden plaque presented to Davis when no one thought he would recover fully enough to wear it again.

No one had guessed he was a candidate for a stroke, either.

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Only 38 at the time, his “bad” cholesterol level was a healthy 128, he worked out six days a week and his body fat measured only 6.5 percent. He’s never smoked. He’s never experimented with drugs. He had some personal stress in his life, “but other than that, I had no risk factors,” Davis said.

“It’s still a mystery,” he said. “I shouldn’t have lived, but I survived with pretty much nothing wrong with me.”

Getting Anti-Drug Message to Kids

The stroke knocked him down in front of a bunch of kids who have crawled into his big policeman’s heart. The leader of the school district's Code 411 program worked with another officer to replace an outdated anti-drug program. Davis was talking to the kids about staying away from drugs, alcohol and tobacco, about staying safe from online predators, what to do if they were being bullied.

A kid at Sacred Heart Catholic School had pressed him on why it was OK to drink wine during communion, but not at other times.

Davis found a way to answer that question and others without putting down parents, mentors or religions. “Don’t let them see me fall,” he remembers thinking the day of his first stroke.

Like most everything else on the most traumatic day of his life — April 6, 2009 — the details are still fuzzy.

Hearing about it is a little like reading his own obituary.

Stroke Takes Davis By Surprise

He remembers getting in someone’s face as the stroke was coming on, telling them to get him the hell out of that gymnasium before the 250 kids who looked up to him saw that he was going down.

“You need to get me to the nurse’s office,” he remembers saying.

No response, just the incessant ringing in his head, effects of the stroke.

“You need to get me to the nurse’s office now.”

He may have sworn. He may not have. Even now, Davis doesn’t know whether the words actually made it out of his mouth. It could have been like it was when emergency medical personnel were asking him his name, over and over, to check his mental status. He was forming his name perfectly in his head, and knew the day and year, too, but he couldn’t make the words come out.

His blood pressure, normally in the ideal 120/80 range, shot up to 165/130.

In the ambulance, he heard the words – “we’re going to go fast” – and knew what they most often meant. The patient could die.

He could die.

A Second Chance

That he didn’t die isn’t something Davis would call a miracle. He doesn’t toss the notion of divine intervention around casually.

But he learned later that doctors told the dozens of officers, friends and family who had congregated at the hospital: “He is probably not going to make it, and if he does, he is going be a vegetable.”

Davis is an organ donor, and the transplant team had been alerted to stand by during the 3½-hour surgery. Instead, he woke up at 9:30 the next morning.

No, Davis won’t call himself a miracle. But he will allow this: “I probably should have died, and there’s no reason I didn’t other than somebody is watching out for me.

“It’s huge,” he said of his “second chance. It makes you look at life a lot differently, slow down and enjoy things.”

That includes spending more time with his sons, Hunter, 16, and Garrett, 11. And planning for his marriage to Walter, who has helped him to understand the need to decompress.

“The kids love her to death,” Davis said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

“It’s Like Being Able to Breathe Again for Him”

Last month, after nearly three years of setbacks and three more strokes, Davis rejoined the police force with a clean bill of health. It had “destroyed” him when he had been medically disqualified after returning to work and then suffering another stroke.

“I just stood there and cried, ‘This isn’t what I want,’” he recalled.

He understood it — what if the stroke had occurred when he was behind the wheel of his cruiser? — but what he wanted was to get back to the kids who had begun to trust him enough to confide in him.

High schools are “full of drugs, peer pressure and bullying,” he said. “It just breaks them down until they finally give in.”

Police officers leading the Code 411 program work on a four-year rotation. Several teachers have asked Davis to return, but he will have to wait in line to return to his old charge.

In this kind of work, success is relative.

“If I can get one kid to stay off drugs, if I can truly change the life of at least one kid, I think I have done my job,” he said. “You can tell the kids who took it to heart.”

In Code 411, Davis used real-life examples from the Iowa Youth Survey, with analysis reflecting under-aged crimes in West Des Moines, Urbandale and Clive.

Suddenly, the problem seemed more real, addressing things that “weren’t an issue when Nancy Reagan was doing ‘Just  Say No,’” said Karla Snodgrass, a science teacher at Western Hills Elementary School, who worked with Davis when he presented the Code 411 program.

“It’s like being able to breathe again for him,” Snodgrass said.

If West Des Moines Police Lt. Jim Barrett had to guess how many lives Davis has touched, improved or saved through the Code 411 program, he would put the number in the tens of thousands. But, Barrett said, it’s impossible to know how many kids stayed away from drugs or quit them, how many walked away, or how many were able to stand up to bullying because of improved self-esteem.

“The department is glad he’s back,” Barrett said. “Scott’s a good officer and an even better person.”

Like Barrett, Snodgrass said it’s impossible to count the number of lives Davis has improved.

“We will never know how many kids he has impacted,” she said. “Kids feel safe around him. They feel like they know him, yet he’s not a teacher and he doesn’t represent the school, so he’s an authority figure they feel safe talking to.”