Part I
Re “Another Side of Curt Massey”
[Editor’s Note: Thursday morning at 5 will mark the one-year anniversary of the death of Culver City police Lt. Curt Massey. His car was struck on the freeway by a wrong-way driver.]
John Davis’s remarkable eulogy for his stepson, police Lt. Curt Massey, was what the mourners packed into Our Lady of Angels Cathedral remembered most about the rainy Friday morning of his funeral last year.
Padric Davis, who, naturally, is still grieving, said the words and insights came exclusively from the pen of her husband of the last 25 years. She had been staying with her son’s widow and their three young children in Pacific Palisades. She had not been back to her Santa Barbara home in the week since Curt had been killed.
“John is a very emotional person,” Mrs. Davis said, “as you can tell from his eulogy.”
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A former Episcopal seminarian who carved a successful career in commercial real estate, John Davis and Padric raised the five children of their blended family in the Palisades before moving up the coast.
Curt grew up as an altar boy in the Episcopal church. “He always had a faith,” his mother said.
When he met and married Melody, “a Catholic girl,” they remained in his and her hometown. As their three children began coming along, the Masseys grew deeply involved with Corpus Christi Church, and close with the long-serving pastor, Msgr. Liam Kidney.
Almost as an aside, Mrs. Davis said, “We used to call Curt Dudley Do-Right,” an image his stepfather eloquently accented in his eulogy.
“All five of them are good kids, but Curt just had a passion for helping people.”
Where did such an admirable impulse originate?
“He was born that way,” the mom who lost her son at the age of 41 answered without hesitation. “When their dad left me, Brett and Curt were 5 and 7. Curt became my little man. I could always count on him. ‘Curt, can you help me?’ ‘Curt, honey, I need a little help over here.’ ‘How do you think we should fix this?’”
Moms may come in a million flavors. Padric Davis’s tone, as it played back after she interviewed, was as mom-soft and pliable as richly crushed velvet.
She said her son’s interests were hardly narrow. “He had a passion for everything.”
One of the family’s favorite memories — both is birth family and the family he and Melody were raising — is that Curt, the lifelong police officer, knew how every gadget on the planet operated.
In the immediate aftermath of Lt. Massey’s death, when his survivors struggled to assemble memories that would sustain them, they were surprised to find, on reflection, how logically the early and later pieces of the puzzle that was his life, fit tightly together.
They did not necessarily recognize the vague outlines of a future police officer during the heat and rush of Curt’s growing-up years. But they sure did afterward. A natural evolution?
“Yes, in high school he would get up from the table and go follow a siren. He would come home from college in Flagstaff with a scanner. He worked as an EMT in college. He did everything according to Hoyle.
“He graduated, went to college, did that in four years, got out, knew, kind of, what he wanted to do, although he had a couple years before he entered the police force where he — he had so many talents. He tried architecture, an excellent drawer. Unbelievable. He could draw anything. Sketching. He designed the house they live in now, to remodel it. He did the complete rendering. But they had to pay a licensed person eventually. If he had been an architect, he would have been behind a desk, and he did not want that.
“Everything Curt did was with passion. He thought he wanted to fly. So his paternal grandparents gave him flying lessons at Santa Monica Airport. But he thought it was too confining to be a (commercial) pilot.
“He knew he had to be out there in whatever he did.”
How did becoming a police officer fulfill his needs?
“Because he was able to help people. He was not a ‘cop.’ He was a police officer who helped. I can’t even tell you… ‘Mom, don’t worry,’ he would say to me. ‘I am not going to turn into a cop. I am doing this because I know I can make a difference.’
“And the guys at the police force. Oh, my God, they are wonderful. They keep saying, ‘He had passion.’ He came to work every day…They said they would sometimes feel poopy, have their lethargic moods. But Curt always had a smile on his face. Never did they not see the original passion.”
During the past year, where did your strength come from?
“Interesting. I asked the young woman I work with in my pre-school class, ‘How do you think I have done this year?’ She said, ‘Padric, you are resilient. You’ve not had an easy life, and you are resilient. I don’t know how to tell you this. You have taken the lessons in your life, and you have gained strength from them.’”
(To be continued)
