Just before dawn on January 15, 1983, Kodiak police officer Gordon Brewster Bartel, 29, pulled into the East Harbor parking lot across from the Mecca Bar to follow up on a warning about illegal camping. He intended to write a citation; the man he confronted produced a handgun later described as a .22-caliber and fired. Bartel was rushed to the hospital and died of his wounds.

The man Bartel had tried to cite was arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of murder; a judge imposed a 99-year prison term. Bartel had served roughly a year and a half to two years with the Kodiak Police Department after five years as chief of police in Webberville, Michigan, and left a wife, a son, and two daughters. His death remains the department’s only line-of-duty loss for decades and is memorialized on national rolls and in city remembrances.

Does anyone who lived in Kodiak at the time recall that dawn confrontation or have additional details about Bartel’s final shift?