Thomas E. Strunk
Thomas E. Strunk
| Died | 1985-03-27 |
Thomas Edward Strunk (died 1985) was a Billerica police officer who was killed on March 27, 1985, while stopping a drunk driver when he was off duty. The town's Thomas E. Strunk Memorial Medal of Valor is named for him.
Strunk served the town for more than a decade. He was a temporary patrolman from 1973 to 1975, a fire fighter in the Billerica Fire Department from 1977 to 1981, and a police officer from 1981. In 1981 he also ran for a two-year seat in Town Meeting, receiving 155 votes.
On March 27, 1985, while off duty and driving in Billerica with his family, he saw a car weaving on the road ahead and judged that the driver was drunk. He stopped the car and ordered the driver out, but the driver rolled the window up on his arm and drove off, dragging him at speeds of up to 55 miles an hour before throwing him against a pole. He died less than an hour later. He had been a police officer for about three years. The town's In Memoriam page for 1985 gives the date of his death as March 17, but the memorial read at the town meeting that spring and the national records of officers killed in the line of duty give March 27.
In 1987 the town meeting voted to pay the full cost of the health insurance of his widow and family. The Thomas E. Strunk Memorial Medal of Valor was first reported in 1988, when Captain Clifford A. Critch of the fire department presented medals to Police Sergeant Thomas Connors and Fire Lieutenant Richard Burtt for saving a woman who had climbed a high tension tower. The award was given in later years to police officers, fire fighters and citizens for rescues, among them a double rescue from drowning in 1998 and a house fire rescue in 1999; the reports of 1998 and 2000 print its name as the Richard Strunk Memorial Medal of Valor and the Richard Strunk Memorial Award.