Editorial: Loss that galvanised community

It was three years ago today this newsroom briefly stopped before slipping into what I can only describe as a state of disbelief.

There had been a shooting, and the initial reports we were getting clearly revealed something very, very bad had happened.

Not one police officer gunned down ... three.

One had died at the scene and two were critical.

I had been covering the police desk for more than a decade and I had met, and knew, Senior Constable Len Snee, Senior Constable Bruce Miller and Senior Constable Grant Diver - the three officers who had gone to the Chaucer Rd address of Jan Molenaar who they wanted to question over drug-related matters.

Len Snee died as Molenaar opened fire.

Bruce Miller and Grant Diver faced a life-and-death 48 hours immediately after the shootings.

Their eventual recovery was long but they returned to the job.

But without their fellow officer and mate.

It was battle enough to go through the meetings of reporting strategies and directions required, as well as write stories about police officers I knew ... one of whom I had spoken to and joked with only days earlier.

But that would have been nothing compared to the emotions of their workmates.

Wracked with the sorrow of losing one of their number, and the future uncertainty of two more, they simply toiled on ... did the job they had sworn to do.

I can't describe the amount of respect I felt for that. And the respect for all those who had risked bullets to get those men out.

It was a respect echoed by the public.

The support for the police and all those involved on that front line was huge.

There was an outpouring of disbelief and grief, but also an outpouring of pride.

In a memory of many images from that time, two are deeply embedded.

One is of seeing a clearly far from well Senior Constable Diver taken in to the emotional but uplifting service for his mate and colleague on a portable hospital bed. And I remember the applause, and saw tears on the cheeks of people overwhelmed at his strength, devotion and determination.

Then there was the little boy, maybe just five or six, who went up to a police officer at a public service held at the Ormond Chapel atop Chaucer Rd and simply said "thank you for protecting us".

The officer was pretty well lost for words - he gave a smile and patted the lad's shoulder.

"That makes you catch your breath," he said a little later.

That terrible event, that evil thing which created the most dreadful of consequences, galvanised not just that hillside community, but the entire regional community.

People did not have to have known Len Snee to feel and comprehend the scale of the loss.

A police officer, doing his duty.

A police officer, one of those good people who are on our side, so valuable with his experience and his respected demeanour in his job, and the mana he accordingly cultivated.