Diane Philpot
Reported by Erik Smith

It was just another one of those all too many nights that have brought shame to our city. It was one of those nights that have brought fear to our streets and bars to our windows.

It was one of those nights when gunfire rattles a child's sleep, stirs the nearby curious and signals rage, pain, and all too often the abrupt conclusion to another's life. So it was on a dark night in 1995.

"It came across the news," Diane Philpot says. "I heard an officer had been shot."

It was the night Detroit Police Officer Jerry Philpot surrendered his final breath to an AK-47 assault weapon. He was taken to Detroit's Receiving Hospital and died about an hour after the shooting. He surrendered his hopes, his dreams, all of the wonderful tomorrows with his wife and daughter.

"No way in my mind was I thinking that it was him," Diane says. "Then it was probably 15 minutes later that the police car pulled up."

It was the night that altered Diane Philpot's life forever.

"Within the 10-minute span, I had to tell a mother that her son had passed away, had been killed," a Detroit Police officer says. "I had to tell a wife that her husband had been killed in the line of duty."

"I turned around and I saw Jerry's mother, and they were holding her up," Diane says. "I looked at her and I knew. That's when he said well, you know, Jerry's gone. I thought, well, gone where? He said no, he didn't make it. I kind of blanked out. You kind of go into shock."

To the newspapers, the TV and radio, it was another homicide, another picture on a wall, another gathering of uniformed farewells, another tearful widow, another fatherless child.

For Diane Philpot, it was a call to bring peace to her suddenly shattered life. Four years have passed since that night, and Diane says that it's something she just can't get over.

"There's no closure either," she says. "The average person thinks you're supposed to grieve two weeks. That's the average that they think you're supposed to grieve two weeks and you should be over it and get on with your life. However, I think those people have not probably lost someone."

At a time when most might choose the bitter over the better, Diane somehow managed to pick up the pieces of her broken heart, drawing strength from each piece and finding both forgiveness and compassion for those who had so casually murdered a good man.

"For me it's not really that difficult," she says. "A lot of people think it is, but it's just kind of a natural progression for me. And I think that God has put that path in front of me, and that's the one I'm taking and I enjoy it."

As she has done so many times since, Diane Philpot went back to the neighborhood where her husband worked and died. Not in a search for his killer, but to find a way to help, a way to reach the kids who seem beyond reach, to try and make a difference in some lives.

"You're going to find more and more people that are just kind of waiting for somebody to come along and help them," she says. "If they make the decision to get out of that gang and they make the decision that they want out, then I give them a tremendous amount of credit for doing that because that takes a lot of guts to do that."

"How can I not reach a hand out to them and say OK?" she said. "I don't want this to happen to anybody else. And if I don't do it, then I feel like I'm letting Jerry down because I'm not helping one of those kids out."

Today, Diane is chronically busy as a vice president of a police survivors organization, busy committee member, dedicated mom and youth gang counselor. It's a pretty impressive resume from a heart that refused to be broken.

"I want to make a difference now because I don't know if I'm going to be here tomorrow and I've really learned that," she says. "I might not be here tomorrow. But at least what I did today has made a difference somewhere."

"I like throwing a pebble in the water and watching the ripples," she continues. "You might not ever have that ripple come back, but it might make a difference."

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