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Denver Post
Turney low key, barely noticed
Friday, July 11, 2003 - People who know Denver police officer Jim Lee Turney paint a picture of a barely average guy.
He didn't excel in school; he wasn't at the top of his police academy class. At age 29, he's into his second marriage. Several people described a man so quiet and to himself that they hardly noticed him. "If it wasn't for the paperwork," one former employer said, "I'd not even remember he was here." He's not pictured in his high school senior yearbook. Not the sort of person, acquaintances say, you'd expect to wind up killing two Denver teenagers. "He was very soft-spoken, very sedate," said Scott Hurst, a fellow recruit who attended the Denver police academy with Turney in October 1998. The two were often together during physical training exercises. "In the races, I was pretty much last and he was second to last," said Hurst, who is no longer a police officer. Turney could not be reached for comment. Turney was so much in the background, Hurst said, that media reports of a police shooting in Denver early last year involving his former classmate hardly registered. "He was one of the calmer ones in the academy," Hurst recalled. "It just didn't click that it was him, until this shooting." Turney is the focus of a shooting not dissimilar to the last. The first, 18-year-old Gregory Smith Jr., was hearing-impaired. He was shot six times. The latest, Paul Childs, 15, was mentally disabled. He was shot four times. It's an enormous amount of attention for a man who attracted so little of it for most of his life. "Jim is real steady," said Denver police Sgt. Lenny Mares, Turney's commander for about a year. "He doesn't display a lot of emotion." Turney was born in 1973 in Killeen, Texas, a small town midway between Austin and Waco. His family settled in Omaha, and Turney attended Burke High School on the city's west side. Turney graduated 268th in a class of 363, according to a school official, with barely a C average. His senior year he took a normal selection of courses - English, algebra, earth science - with lackluster grades. In Spanish, which he claimed in his Denver police application to have a "slight" understanding of, he earned D's. He did excel in one class - pottery. He earned a B. Turney didn't attend his 10-year reunion last year, according to classmate Nne Ebong. "I can't say I even recognize him," Ebong said as she flipped through her high school yearbooks looking for Turney's photo. She finally found one - from their sophomore year. It was his senior year, Turney wrote in his police application, that he twice used oral and injectable anabolic steroids. Turney floated around after graduation, working one security job after another. At 5-feet-7-inches, he's not a tall or imposing man. "He's stout," Mares said of Turney. When he joined the Denver force, Turney weighed 210 pounds, records show. While Turney was working in Plattsmouth, Neb., in 1993, his son was born to a woman he would marry six years later. The birth, according to application records, forced him to drop part-time jobs and focus on his full-time security work at Omaha shopping malls and hotels. That's about when Turney applied, and failed, in his first bid to become a police officer, in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The security jobs continued. So did the failed attempts at becoming an officer. In 1995 and 1996, Turney applied to the Omaha Police Department. A city official said Turney, whose mother is Asian, applied as a minority candidate. In 1996, he tried unsuccessfully to get on with the Lincoln Police Department. Turney tried his hand at school again, attending part-time at Metro Community College in Omaha for two quarters - he took a couple of criminal justice classes and passed - and then in 1997 at Bellevue University. In October 1998, Denver called. His application from more than a year earlier was approved, even though he ranked last among a group of 158 candidates. When academy was done, Turney ranked 20th in a class of 24, records show. A year after graduation, Turney married Teresa Orme, the mother of their son and a prenatal nurse who grew up in western Iowa. The marriage lasted 18 months. The divorce was not acrimonious, court records show. Teresa was allowed to move back to Iowa with their son. Two months before the divorce was finalized, Turney would pull the trigger five times on Gregory Smith Jr. as the teen climbed a staircase of his home with a small knife in his hands. Turney was calm as he recounted to investigators how Smith didn't stop despite police demands, according to Turney's videotaped statement taken hours after the shooting. Turney, sporting a shaved head and a large tattoo that wrapped around his right arm from the wrist to above the elbow, calmly talked how he "feared for my life" as Smith approached him. Smith was about 5 feet away when Turney and his partner, Sgt. Robert Silvas, fired a total of eight shots. Smith tumbled down the stairs. "I stopped firing because the threat was gone," Turney said. A hearing aid Smith wore was discovered later on the floor of the ambulance, whistling because the volume was set so high, records show. Not long after, Turney married another police officer, whom he met while working at the same police station. Trista Turney refused to speak to a reporter Thursday. They live in a small ranch-style home just north of Denver, the front yard littered with dog feces, a pickup truck parked in front. Despite the controversy, Mares said Turney is an officer to be emulated, noting he logged more arrests than most of his colleagues in what Mares described as one of the city's rougher neighborhoods, north Park Hill. "He is one guy I can trust to do the job," Mares said. "The precinct was his and the bad guys didn't like him." Denver Post staff writer Eric Hubler contributed to this report.
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