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Update: More family members have been located, including a grandson, Robert Warren, who spoke of his grandfather on the Doug Wright Show Monday morning.SALT LAKE CITY — A white oblong ZCMI box was accidentally made a time capsule of a trooper's life when it was left in the attic above a garage.
About a month ago, a homeowner and his son located stacks of letters, newspaper clippings and photographs in their Payson home and were able to reunite the family of a Utah Highway Patrol trooper with his memorabilia Sunday.
Wyatt Scott, 15, discovered the room above the garage one day while rummaging around the garage. He showed the room to his father, Ed Scott, who found the box filled with dozens of letters, photographs and newspaper clippings on the subject of UHP trooper Charles “Chuck” Warren. Additionally, the box held church-related certificates, pedigree charts and school photos belonging to his children.
Warren rose in prominence after he was shot twice in the forehead on Sept. 2, 1969, in Springville when he pulled over a car that was believed to have been stolen. In a coma for two months, he recovered at Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City before returning home nearly eight months later.
To his second wife and widow, Kathleen Warren, he was a man with a sense of humor and a soft spot for animals. He was drawn to law enforcement by his desire to help other people, according to a 1970 article.
“I don’t really remember too much about my father before this,” said his daughter, Dorothy Green, in 2008. “I remember that he was very loving to all who knew him. After he was shot, my memories were seeing him struggle to do the smallest things. We all stuck together and tried to make the best of a horrible situation. My mother (Dorothy Warren) was amazing, about one-third his size. She and my big brother would help him in and out of his chair, into bed and be there to give aid when he would seize. Our family was very strong (we had to be).”
The injury left Warren without the use of his left side and legs, but he remained with UHP, serving for a total of 31 years. Warren’s injury inspired a law that would allow any state trooper who is disabled by a criminal act to receive compensation until retirement age, according to the Utah Department of Public Safety. Gov. Calvin L. Rampton worked for its passage.
Though it has fallen out of observance, the trooper’s sacrifice also spurred the institution of Chuck Warren Day in Payson on June 16. At the tribute commencing the event, then-Elder Thomas S. Monson spoke, honoring Warren.
People from across the nation, led by the Payson Fifth Ward bishopric of which Warren had been a part of at one point, built a new single-level home for the Warren family to replace their split-level house, allowing Warren to move freely in his wheelchair about the house.
Warren married Kathleen in 1979, and after spending 25 "good" years together, she said, he died in May 1994 due to complications from pneumonia.
Scott comes from a family of law enforcement and said Warren’s story “hit home” with him and decided to return the keepsakes to the family.
He contacted Lee Lonsberry, the producer of the "Doug Wright Show," hoping KSL could help contact the family of Warren. KSL called UHP commissioner Rep. Lee Perry, R-Perry to help.
After weeks of looking for family members, retired trooper Les Langford on Friday located Kathleen Warren in Payson. He paid 95 cents for access to an online directory, then called the care center where she was listed. The 80-year-old answered, recognizing one of her husband’s pallbearers, quickly telling him that it would have been Warren's birthday that day. He would have been 87.
Sunday, Wyatt and Ed Scott, along with KSL employees and UHP troopers Langford and Perry, delivered the belated birthday present to Kathleen Warren.
"I'm tickled to death you got it back," Ed Scott said Sunday after his son handed the box to Kathleen Warren.
As she looked through the pink plastic container that had replaced the old ZCMI box, she shared her memories of the time of his shooting. They met when she cared for him as a nurse in Payson after his injury and reunited a few years later before marrying.
"All I heard about was 'Our Chuck, our Chuck this, our Chuck that' and I thought, golly who is this saint?" she said of his arrival at the facility where she worked. “And I met him at the hospital and I was glad I got to meet him.”
He called every night wanting to make sure I'd gotten home OK. So that's the story of our big, hot romance.
–Kathleen Warren
At times, she said, her husband was stubborn, unwilling to even ask directions. Perhaps matching his stubbornness, she once drove with him from Payson to Heber so she could prove the location of a church.
For all his stubbornness, she said, his first concern was always the safety of others. One foggy night after caring for him after his injury, Charles Warren called Kathleen Warren to be sure she had gotten to her Springville home safely. She said she hadn't even gotten her coat off before the phone rang.
“He called every night wanting to make sure I’d gotten home OK,” she said. “So that’s the story of our big, hot romance.”
The night before he died, he made a similar call checking that she arrived home.
"He always cared like that with everybody," she said.
Though her eyesight is now poor, she studied the contents with familiarity and quickness. She recognized some items, but many were new to her.
"Why did all this have to happen this late when I can't see anything but me?" she said.
When she came across an image of Elder Monson with her husband, she told a story about a blessing he gave Warren when he was in the hospital, and how it set the tone for their life together.
“When Thomas Monson tells the story, he says, ‘I didn’t breathe life into him, I just gave him a blessing that he wouldn’t have a certain amount of time to live, but he would just live,’ ” Kathleen Warren said. “And boy, he did. He did. Every chance we got, we did everything. I loaded him into my little Gremlin and away we went to Vernal.”
As she sat in her husband’s old wheelchair, looking through the items about her husband, she smiled and laughed.
“This is really something super,” she said.
