A year has not erased the memory of Ohio State police officer Michael Blankenship.Blankenship was fatally shot on Feb. 10, 1997, while responding to a theft report from the Wexner Center.Rebecca Marr, co-director of the Blankenship Memorial and a junior majoring in zoology, said Blankenship’s murder definitely impacted the OSU community.”I remember everything so clearly,” she said. “I can’t believe it has been a year. He hasn’t been forgotten and probably won’t be.”Blankenship was a member of the university police for six years, and spent much of his time teaching students self-defense and lecturing that crime can occur to anyone.Blankenship trained security guards, employees of the Student Escort Service and the Community Crime Patrol. He also taught the Rape Aggression Defense program at OSU.Karl Spaulding, a security guard at the Wexner Center who was instructed by Blankenship, said he thinks about Blankenship all the time.”Every time I walk in the room where the murder occurred, it hits me,” he said.Spaulding attended Blankenship’s last class, and 10 minutes later, Blankenship was killed.”It is significant for us because he spent the last minutes of his life with us,” Spaulding said.Spaulding plans to mark the occasion by gathering with students who attended the class.Scott Tipton, a friend and co-worker of Blankenship said the healing process is slow and difficult.There are certain things that will never go away, his smile, his kindness and his attitude toward his job, Tipton said.”Mikey’s death has touched a lot of people,” he said. “This year will be no different. It will take a hell of a long time to heal, if we ever do.”A private service is planned for Feb. 10 for departmental members and Blankenship’s family, Tipton said.On May 15, National Police Officer Recognition Day, Blankenship’s name will be added to the Police Officer Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., Tipton said.Blankenship was a credible individual and a great law enforcement officer and overallwas a likable person, said Chief Deputy Steve Martin with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.”To some degree this makes us understand how important being cognizant of how fragile life is, anything could happen to you in a split second,” Martin said.After committing suicide, Mark Edgerton, 40, of Upper Arlington was identified through blood tests as the killer.

Additional security measures in place

By Clark Emmons Lantern staff writer

The legacy Officer Michael Blankenship left the Ohio State police department was an increased awareness to the dangers of police work.Blankenship was shot to death February 10, 1997, in the lobby of the Wexner Center while responding to a call.”Within the first three months after the shooting, we saw a heightened level of sensitivity in the sense that officers were very, very cautious and aware of the potential for something to go wrong,” said OSU police Chief Ron Michalec. “Officers were requesting back-up, and rightly so, on calls that normally they would have handled on their own.”Michalec said the department is beginning to recover from the shock of Blankenship’s death. Blankenship was the first OSU police officer killed on campus in the line of duty.”It generally takes about 12 months before the healing process starts to take hold,” Michalec said. “We’re starting to see some healing take place and I think we’ve went through some phases and are now coming into a point of more normalcy. But we’ll never be able to go back to that time before the shooting.”Mike’s death marked the end of an age of innocence in our department, what I call a point of no return, a point at which each officer realized it could have been him and it could happen on any call,” Michalec said.Although no major changes in training programs have occurred with University Police as a direct result of the shooting, the department has tested a new firearms training simulator about a month and a half ago.Michalec said it’s like a flight simulator. It puts an officer in a life-like situation and evaluates how he responds to a given problem or situation. Although the department only leased the simulator for two weeks, the feedback from officers was positive, Michalec said.”The reaction from the officers was fantastic, in the sense that it provided a more realistic training,” he said.The two-week lease cost the department $3,000. It would cost between $50,000 and $100,000 to buy a similar machine. The department hasn’t decided whether to purchase or continue to lease the simulator.The department is also considering the implementation of a program in verbal tactics, Michalec said. These tactics are designed to help police officers disarm an individual using only their voice and body language. The best weapon in an officer’s arsenal is his mouth, Michalec said.Several security changes have been made at the Wexner Center, where the shooting occurred.”We have a heightened security awareness in our lobby where we did not before the shooting,” said Gretchen Metzelaars, director of administration at the Wexner Center. “We also have a large security staff in the building because of the nature of what we do.”Metzelaars said they have created a customer service department responsible for greeting guests as they enter the building.Although Metzelaars would not comment on how they deploy their security staff, she said their responsibilities have been expanded to include the safety of the people in the building.”There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Officer Blankenship and how we lost an incredible human being,” she said.