On the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a Missouri State Highway Patrol officer remembers how he tried to help out his law enforcement brethren devastated by the storm. Within days of the storm, Captain Dale Schmidt with the Patrol’s Jefferson City troop, was one of two commanders who led 50 troopers and six support personnel to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Schmidt says the stench from the death and rotting of fish and animals was overwhelming. But Schmidt says for eight days, his people concentrated on law enforcement activities so officers from the Mississippi Highway Patrol and the Biloxi Police Department could spend some time recuperating and getting their own personal lives back together. He believes the mission gave the people of that area hope and let them know that the rest of the country had not abandoned them.
