Francis Gonzales: From distrust of cops to one of FCPS' most trusted

Raised in rural southeastern Colorado, Francis Gonzales saw himself as an athlete destined to keep his distance from cops. That was just the way it was for minorities like him.

"You respect law enforcement," Gonzales remembers his father saying. 

"Don’t trust them." 

Fast-forward to 2017 and 60-year-old Gonzales is the first to admit time has a funny way of changing a person's perspective. Even more than time, an injury while playing baseball at Colorado State University and a car wreck near Old Town Fort Collins altered Gonzales' path and led him to a 35-year career in law enforcement.

The silver-mustached sergeant retired in April from Fort Collins Police Services, leaving a legacy of assignments ranging from gang and drug task forces to the Old Town beat. The man many call "Paco" can spin a yarn in extraordinarily vivid fashion about the city's most infamous crimes — his attention to detail is remarkable to even the sharpest detective. 

But Gonzales views his contributions a little differently. 

"The uniform and the badge never defined me," Gonzales said. "I’ve been defined by my family and my faith and my commitment to them, and not by the uniform.

"The uniform has been something that I’ve worn proudly. Hopefully I’ve represented it like every officer should represent the uniform. But it didn’t define me."

An injury and a crash

Gonzales grew up in La Junta, a tiny town about an hour east of Pueblo. Football, basketball and baseball were his passions, and he even earned a scholarship to play baseball with the Rams.

An injury during a game at the University of Arizona in Tuscon ended that dream. Gonzales' scholarship dried up and he changed his major from physical education to construction management, dropped out of CSU and went to work as a roofer while selling real estate on the side.

Gonzales admitted he was struggling to find his calling when, in 1980, he rear-ended another vehicle at the intersection of Riverside Avenue and Magnolia Street. He walked away from the wreck unharmed, though Officer John Pino wound up giving him a ticket for following too closely. 

They got to talking. 

"He was very personable. Very friendly," recalled Pino, now a lieutenant at FCPS. "I was always looking to try to recruit some good cops who were able to communicate.”

In the weeks that followed, Gonzales joined Pino and other officers for games of pick-up basketball. Gonzales shadowed street cops and gradually became hooked on their work — distrust turned to devotion. 

His first day as an officer with Fort Collins Police Services was Sept. 1, 1981. 

“Not in a million years did I think that was the path I was going to take," Gonzales said, thinking back to his 24-year-old self. The conversation with his dad, a man of few words but much distrust of cops, went about as well as you would expect.

Gonzales didn't mind.

Hitting the ground running

Six weeks after starting, Gonzales responded to a report of a clerk lying on the floor at the 7-Eleven at the intersection of Remington and Mulberry streets. It was Oct. 16, 1981, and Gonzales was still learning the ropes as he sealed off the homicide scene and took a peek at the cash register receipt tape for the last transaction — a sandwich that cost just north of a dollar and a man's life. 

As the night went on, police followed a trail of clues to Loveland, where another 7-Eleven clerk was found dead. Law enforcement on Oct. 18 stopped a vehicle for speeding in Texas and found a sandwich wrapper in the backseat that linked the car, and its driver, back to the Fort Collins scene.

Paco's hunch panned out. 

Fort Collins investigators pinned the rampage on Marion Albert Pruett, who ultimately confessed. 

“Follow your gut instincts. Be curious," Gonzales said, summarizing the lesson learned that night so early in his career — advice he took to the end. 

Six years later, Gonzales made detective and was sent to a report that a woman had been found murdered in a field near Horsetooth Road. 

Her name was Peggy Hettrick. Gonzales spent 39 days working every angle of that case, devoting much of that time to obsessing over a series of muddy shoe impressions. 

Even decades removed, Gonzales' recall is laser sharp. His ability to pull dates, times, locations and weather conditions is striking, even to those who have worked with him over the years. 

Councilman Ray Martinez was his sergeant, and he lauded Gonzales' attention to detail alongside his intuition that often cracked cases wide open.

“He drove it home,"  Martinez said. "He didn’t leave a rock unturned.”

Community policing before it was catchy

Despite his prowess as a detective, community policing and working with youth was where Gonzales was most invested, long before the term "community policing" became common cop jargon. 

While on the department's gang unit, Gonzales was instrumental in bringing a tattoo removal program to Fort Collins. Knowing ink came to define at-risk youth and contribute to their trajectory down a troubled path, the program played a role in turning around an untold numbers of lives. 

Marcy DiBenedetto was one of those lives.

Admittedly running with a rough crowd during her teenage years, she remembered run-ins with Gonzales, among the only cops who would sit down and chat without passing judgment, she said. Though she got wrapped up in the criminal justice system eventually, her encounters with Paco instilled an endless "possibility of change." 

"I never knew anything different until I was able to get my tattoos removed and kept seeing little glimpses of hope and different lifestyles," DiBenedetto said this week. "That hope that I carried through my life from the 90s really helped.”

Now 33, DiBenedetto works with at-risk youth at The Matthews House in Fort Collins. Without the interactions with Gonzales, she's not sure her life would have ever gotten on track. 

Gonzales' message to youngsters throughout his career was simple: "Education’s your ticket out. Seize that opportunity.” It was a drum he pounded even as self-described hypocrisy crept up — he never finished college, remember. 

He returned to CSU and graduated in 2005 with a degree in sociology and an emphasis on criminal justice. 

N. Prabha Unnithan was one of his professors. While he recalled Gonzales as a student and officer, what stood out more was his departmental expertise and willingness to be a tour guide when Unnithan's family visited from India. 

"I will especially remember the kindness and courtesy he exhibited," Unnithan said.

Taking a stand

Time in SWAT took its toll on Gonzales. And a crash years ago nearly did him in. 

He jokes that he entered the police academy more than three decades ago with a broken ankle suffered during a New Year's basketball game. Now he's leaving with a lengthy list of injuries that required surgeries on both knees, hips and shoulders, among other treatments. 

Gonzales also said he battled cuts inflicted by some who wielded words of prejudice toward minorities. At the time of his retirement, he was among roughly 20 Hispanic officers in the agency.

“I’m comfortable with who I am and what I am," Gonzales said. "But I will not take any kind of racism, any kind of abuses. And I won’t tolerate it happening to anybody else.”

That came to a head in September when Gonzales joined a lawsuit first filed in April 2016 on behalf of former Det. Kennyberg Araujo. Gonzales and Araujo said they "suffered ongoing discrimination based on their race and national origin as well as retaliation throughout their employment with the Fort Collins Police Department," the Coloradoan reported previously. 

Gonzales was once described in an annual review as "the gold standard" for task force sergeants, according to court documents. Yet he was never promoted to the rank of lieutenant.

"It wasn’t about money. It was about principle," Pino said of his friend's involvement in the lawsuit. "I think it has taken a toll on him and on everybody, including the department.”

'That's a legacy'

While in the police academy more than three decades ago, an instructor told Gonzales something that stuck with him for his entire career: "If you never take a person’s dignity away, you’ll never have to fight them."

Gonzales never fired his service weapon in the line of duty. 

After more than an hour of sharing stories about his high-profile cases from the past and present issues about his ethnicity, Gonzales paused to reflect on what he wants people to remember him for in the future.

"When I’m gone, and somebody sees my ..." 

He coughs, trying to stop the tears from welling up and overwhelming him with emotion. He hangs his head. Someone in the restaurant background talks about coffee. People at the counter continue placing their orders.

Thirty seconds pass. 

"My kids ..." 

He pauses for another five seconds. 

"My grandkids ..." 

One more pause, and a couple quick tears. 

"That they see my kids and they say, 'That’s Paco's kids. That’s Paco's grandson. That was a good cop. He was fair, but he was firm. That was a good cop. That’s a legacy.'”

Reporter Jason Pohl covers law enforcement for the Coloradoan. Follow him on Twitter: @pohl_jason.