Note: This article was posted on TheAthletic.com on April 10, honoring Ben Campbell ’11, the Maine State Police Detective who recently died in the line of duty. It was written by Steve Buckley.
PORTLAND, Maine — As a kid growing up in Easthampton, Mass., and, later, as a great, big kid swinging for the fences at Westfield State University, Ben Campbell was a ballplayer.
That’s the first thing one learns about Campbell when inquiries are made, when stories are solicited. We hear tell he was a ballplayer in that fun, non-mercenary kind of way, playing the game not as a means to an end but as recreational pursuit while he plowed ahead toward his life’s goal, which was to work in law enforcement.
“He was such a people pleaser,” said Cagney Turner, who’d just been named captain for the 2009 season when Campbell, a big, right-handed-hitting first baseman with thump, arrived as a junior transfer from Holyoke Community College. “He just had this big smile on him. He was always, alwayssmiling, no matter what the situation, no matter what was happening. He liked to win, just as we all did, and he did show his passion, but that smile …”
Mike Trachtenburg, a center fielder who played two seasons with Campbell, remembers the smile “as the kind where you can see all the teeth. His cheeks would push all out when he smiled.”
Turner and Trachtenburg were asked to share their stories about Campbell in the wake of last week’s devastating news that their former college baseball teammate, who had become a detective with the Maine State Police, was killed while assisting a stranded motorist on Interstate 95 just south of Bangor. The circumstances surrounding Campbell’s death are almost impossible to comprehend: Two tires had become disengaged from a passing logging truck, the tires instantly becoming hurtling, rubberized missiles. One of the missiles struck Ben Campbell.
This young man’s death has special meaning to me. In 1988, my brother Paul, a passenger in a car traveling westbound on the Massachusetts Turnpike in Sturbridge, was killed instantly when a blown tire from a truck traveling eastbound careened across the median.
My brother was three months shy of his 35th birthday. Ben Campbell would have been 32 this past Monday.
Turner and Trachtenburg each learned of Campbell’s death via a Facebook chat group for former Westfield State baseball players. As they shared their memories the other day, speaking endlessly and breathlessly about another man’s smile, this because it was the man’s defining characteristic, it had me wondering if seven years with the Maine State Police had altered Ben Campbell’s sunny disposition.
The ballplayer? It’s not too great a challenge to be smiling all the time when you’re 22 years old and playing college baseball, especially at the Division III level when you’re not likely to have scouts and agents and sportswriters chasing you around. You just play because it’s fun. And you smile, maybe a lot. But then life happens, real life. And when real life takes you into police work, real life can be real hard. Especially in these turbulent early decades of the 21st century.
Did an older Ben Campbell, perhaps weighted down by too many shifts, too many ugly scenes, too many arrests, lose the smile? His “End of Watch” memorial service, held Tuesday morning at the Cross Insurance Arena in downtown Portland and attended by thousands of uniformed law enforcement officials from New England and beyond, should settle the question for all time: No, he did not.
He had a wife, Hilary. He had a six-month-old son, Everett. He had been promoted to detective in 2016 as a member of the state police polygraph team. He adored his family, he loved police work. He had the smile, still.
Colonel John Cote, the chief of the Maine State Police, told the gathering that “Ben had the heart of a guardian,” and that even when making an arrest “he understood it did not make that person a career criminal. Ben would talk to these folks. And through those conversations he would learn that many times the conduct that had led to their arrest was simply the result of problems and circumstances within that person’s life … his smile, his genuine compassion for people, and his perspective were evident with those he dealt with.
And when things did get ugly?
“When someone might resist his efforts to make an arrest and causing Ben to go hands-on,” Cote said, “after securing him he would stand them up, brush them off and then promptly express his frustration that they had forced him to take that throw.”
Cote told the story of what came to be known as The Great Rabbit Roundup. Turns out there was a night, a cold, biting night, when somebody had dumped five domesticated rabbits at the rest stop on I-95 in Medway and then driven off. Nice. But what happened next was so Ben Campbell: He chased down and captured four of the five rabbits, but then, cold, exhausted, he gave up on the fifth. He made it about one mile, and then turned around and returned. He finally found the fifth rabbit and then delivered the whole of lot of them to an animal shelter.
Lieutenant Sean Hashey remembered thinking, “We can’t wait to see what this baseball player from western Massachusetts is all about” when Campbell joined the state police. What he found was that “he had an infectious smile and a special way of grinning at you. He simply couldn’t help it.”
That smile ...
Hilary Campbell, now a widowed mother with a six-month-old son, spoke to everyone when she said, “I pray that his perfect smile … will be with your forever ingrained in your mind and heart.”
This is already happening. Robert John Anthony of Clifton, Maine, the stranded motorist whose car ran off the road that snowy morning last week, the man whose circumstances inspired Campbell to pull his unmarked cruiser over to help out, posted a message on Facebook, part of which was read at Tuesday’s service: “You traded your life for mine in the line of duty. I vow for as long as I live, I will never forget your smile. I will never forget your kindness. I will never forget your sacrifice.”
In the last minutes of his life, Detective Ben Campbell of the Maine State Police was still that 22-year-old ballplayer from Westfield State.
Ben Campbell was still smiling.