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Sunday, May 5, 2002
Dennis Lihte, Police Chaplain
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
He has walked to the front doors of hundreds of homes in Albuquerque over the years, knocked lightly and delivered news that changes peoples' lives forever.
Dennis Lihte, an ordained Baptist minister and the director of a homeless shelter, is one of 30 volunteer Albuquerque Police Department chaplains called to the scene of violent death to help police identify victims and then notify the family.
Too often, the news is related to drinking and driving.
Some of those accidents, even years later, stand out in Lihte's memory.
Like interrupting the carving of the turkey on Thanksgiving Day to tell the family why their son was late to dinner.
Like finding the 13-year-old girl in the back seat of the crumpled car, a beer can smashed into her mouth by the force of an accident, and heading out into the night to try to find her mother or father.
Like telling the mother that her 21-year-old son had driven off an embankment drunk and then learning that another police chaplain had delivered similar news only a year earlier about the woman's other son.
Confronting the living is harder for Lihte than helping police identify the dead.
"When you see the body, it doesn't really mean anything until you match it with the people who loved that person," says Lihte.
"Then the pain you weren't feeling at the scene becomes pronounced. Seeing the devastation in the eyes of these mothers and fathers, it sticks in your mind. It's the hardest part of the job."