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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Friday, June 12, 2009
Sgt. Recalls 'Supertough' Comrade
By Vic Vela
Journal Staff Writer
Ryan Buckner used to get a kick out of getting under Andy Tingwall's skin, but one day he pressed his luck a little too far against his “big, burly, supertough” friend and colleague.
Buckner and Tingwall found an old pair of boxing gloves in a storage closet at the New Mexico State Police Academy — where they were once instructors and formerly classmates — that had probably been collecting dust since the 1960s.
Buckner — now an Albuquerque Police Department Special Investigations Unit sergeant — decided to have a little fun. “I put on the gloves and just started beating him with 'em,” he recalled. “He warned me to stop, but I just kept on beating him.”
Too bad for Buckner that Tingwall fought back. He put on a pair of gloves and gave him a sock in the face he didn't soon forget.
“The next thing I remember was looking up at the ceiling,” Buckner said. “He said, 'I told you to stop.' ”
Tingwall — a sergeant and 13-year State Police veteran who died on a rescue mission after his helicopter crashed into Santa Fe Baldy on Tuesday night — will be remembered as a loyal and decorated officer. But many who knew him for years also fondly recalled him as being a “jokester” who liked to have fun and always had a smile on his face.
Buckner said Tingwall was a cartoonist who liked to “do satires of different people” whenever they did something to crack him up. “If you did something funny or stupid, he would immortalize it in a cartoon,” he said. “I got plenty of ones he did of me.”
Tingwall went through the State Police Academy with Buckner in July 1995. In that same 20-week class was Lt. Eric Garcia, who remembers a prank he pulled in which Tingwall was innocent, but immediately suspect.
Garcia and another cadet put the back end of an instructor's vehicle on a car jack. When the instructor tried to drive away, he couldn't move and his tires would only spin.
“Right away (the instructor) incriminated Sgt. Tingwall,” Garcia said. “He (Tingwall) sat there in class and looked to his left where I was sitting, and I looked back at him with a smile on my face. He knew he and I were in trouble, but he just grinned back.”
Garcia said he and Tingwall were also busted for stuffing hole-punch paper debris inside the ventilation system of another academy instructor's car. “When he turned it on ... it was like a spray of stuff blowing in his face,” Garcia said.
Buckner said his fallen friend was a “hard-ass” when the two were instructors together at the academy, but “everyone just loved him.”
“He would yell at (the cadets) until his voice was so hoarse and he couldn't yell anymore,” said Buckner. “He would say to me, 'You yell at them now.'
“I would just say to them, 'Yeah, what he said.' ”
Buckner — who went by the nickname of Buck, with Tingwall affectionately known as Ting — said he'll always miss giving his good friend a hard time.
“He used to say he was like a lion in a cage, and I would be outside poking a stick at him,” he said. “He was just a great guy.”
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