He called himself the “Knuckle Draggin Country Cousin.” You might have thought that was the truth until you talked with him. Charlie was from the small west Texas town of Garden City, east of Midland/Odessa, where the tumbleweeds out numbered the town folks. The school district was one building, with kids ranging in age from kindergarten through the twelfth grade. After high school he attended community college, which got interrupted by two tours in Vietnam. He once told me about how he made it back to the US after his final tour. While others waited days for a flight to get them to their home state, he was set on getting out of Vietnam as soon as possible. He took the first available flight he could get leaving to any state in the union, and then the next and the next until he got back to Texas. He said he made it home in the same amount of time as the others but got out of Vietnam quicker than they did. That story always stuck with me because it showed how he would think things through and approach them from a different angle.

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Once he had returned to the US, he finished a degree in Law Enforcement Administration at the University of Maryland in 1976. He had originally wanted to be an FBI agent, so in 1973, to get his foot in the door, he took a position in the FBI’s Identification Division classifying and searching fingerprint cards for prior arrest records In 1979, after not having had any success becoming an FBI agent, he took a job with the Corpus Christi Police Department. He worked crime scene and latent prints, eventually becoming the supervisor. When he passed away, most of the Corpus Christi crime scene team drove three hours up to Bastrop to attend the service. This spoke volumes, as he had been gone from Corpus for several years. After retiring from Corpus Christi PD in 1999, he took a position in the Latent Prints Section of the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory in Austin, where he worked for about two years. 

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As he got older it became harder for Charlie to make crime scenes, so in 2001 he resigned from DPS and took a job with the Austin Police Department. 

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Charlie was a member of SWGFAST from 1996 to 2002. This was right up his alley, as they discussed issues in the discipline to set standards. He was a frequent contributor to forensic forums. His posts can still be read on CLPEX.com.

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His quiet and unassuming style would draw you in. He called himself the devil’s advocate, and would argue both sides of an issue in order to make you think on your feet as if you were testifying, or to illustrate there is always more than one side to any issue. His approach to teaching was not about lecturing. He wanted to exchange information and find out what you thought. He never spoke condescendingly, no matter how little experience the examiner with whom he was conversing might have had.

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Charlie didn’t want the spotlight. He wouldn’t take credit if you thanked him, he would simply say “I only opened the door, you needed to walk through it.” His style was to teach so that you could work through a problem. He valued initiative, saying it showed character and who really wanted the job. He had many sayings, but one of my favorites was “you can have twenty years of experience or one year repeated twenty times.”

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He hated when people would hoard knowledge for the sake of power or elitism, believing that knowledge not shared is knowledge lost. To illustrate the depth of his belief in this, Charlie once shared all his training material with another examiner while he was still teaching the very same classes (essentially sharing with his competition). He thought that it was important to take classes from different instructors, since everyone approaches things differently and that might help you learn something new. 

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His teaching credits are extensive and go way beyond the training of the employees at agencies where he worked. He had been an assistant instructor with the DPS Academy starting in 1991, before he left Corpus Christi PD. Throughout his career Charlie gave presentations at police academies, local colleges, and educational conferences for the International Association for Identification as well as the Texas and California Divisions of the IAI. 

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He never stopped his journey, taking any opportunity he could to be active in the discipline. He served on boards and committees with TDIAI as well as the parent body IAI. He was TDIAI President from 2003 to 2004. He also served as the Sergeant-at-Arms, Editor, Historian for several years. 

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He served on both the IAI and TDIAI Latent Print certification boards. He was on numerous committees. He served one term on the Board of Directors for the IAI from 2010-2011. 

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As much as Charlie enjoyed all he was able to do on the international level, his heart was still in Texas. He continued serving to the end and was recognized after he passed away in 2011, with the Dedication of Service award by the IAI for outstanding dedication over time to the Association. He long career show that life is a journey not a destination.

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He loved quotations and inspirational sayings. One he had on his desk sums up Charlie better than any words I have written: 

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All of life is a learning experience. Learning how to see ourselves and others in a kinder gentler light, learning how to see life not so much as a box, but as a river, learning how to juggle your own frailties and those of others with equal care, learning that helping someone love themselves is a far better way to get love for yourself that demanding that they love you. 

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As each generation ages out and new ones take their place, we are losing his spirit of curiosity and sharing. But he didn’t leave a void if we step up. We can make our own contribution to the future and carry on his legacy. Not everyone is comfortable standing in front of a class or posting a question on a forum. You don’t have to jump in with both feet. At conferences he would see first time attendees, approach them, engage them in conversation, make them feel comfortable and then show them around, introducing them to others. When he renewed his membership, he would put in an extra $5.00 to go to the scholarship fund. It can be as little as that.