OCEANSIDE: Slain cop Bessant was 'larger than life'

By TERI FIGUEROA - Staff Writer | Sunday, November 16, 2008 6:14 PM PST ∞

OCEANSIDE ---- The little bullet that killed Oceanside police Officer Dan Bessant nearly two years ago cut down a big man.

Danny, as his father still calls him, filled a room. He was 6 feet 2 inches tall and pushing 290 pounds.

Everything about him was large, friends and family say: his big laugh, his bold sense, his sweetly exaggerated stories, his quiet Christian faith and the way he savored life.

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"I never knew anybody as fun as Dan," brother Drew Bessant said. "Dan just had a way of making even a fun thing, like, fun squared, 10 times better. Even a bad situation, he made it incredible. I don't know anybody else like that."

On Nov. 10, a jury convicted teenage gang member Penifoti "P.J." Taeotui of first-degree murder in the Dec. 20, 2006, sniper attack that killed 25-year-old Bessant while he was on duty.

Trial for a second teenage shooter starts in January.

Two days after the verdict, Bessant's father, Steve, brother Drew, 24, and Oceanside police Officer Scott Garrett, 24, gathered at an Oceanside restaurant not far from Dan Bessant's childhood home.

They spoke of the void "Danny" left when he died.

The slain officer was married and the father of a 2-month-old boy. He was a relatively new cop, a much-admired older brother, an adored son, an Oceanside native with allegiance to his coastal city. His funeral two years ago drew 2,000 mourners.

"He was so proud of being a cop, being a husband, being a dad," Steve Bessant said. "And I was just so proud of him."

'Exuberant and wonderful'

Dan Bessant was the sort of guy who arranged to have a motor home full of buddies drive by his brother's construction site just to moon him.

He was the sort of guy who could gut a hard-won fish. He was the sort of guy who valued Sunday dinners with his mom and dad.

"He was larger than life," his mother, Jeanne Bessant, said in a telephone message. "People think it is an exaggeration, but he really was. Exuberant and wonderful."

Twenty-year-old photographs show a little boy with big eyes and a bowl haircut, a "whirling dervish," his father said.

He played Little League baseball, a little high school football and was a part of his youth group at North Coast Church in Vista. When his family moved to Vista, he convinced his parents to let him continue his schooling at Oceanside High.

"I bleed Pirate green," he told his dad.

At 18, Dan Bessant and his best friend, Richie Scaggs, signed up as cadets with the Oceanside Police Department, working 20 hours a week answering phones and manning the front desk.

Scaggs said in a phone call Thursday that they joked of becoming co-chiefs of the department, their desks facing each other so they could have staring contests.

"Just knowing that you were going to go somewhere with Dan, you knew it was going to be fun somehow," said Scaggs, who now works as a field evidence technician for the department. "You could break down in your car, but by being with him, you were going to have tons of fun."

Scaggs said the two would spend hours on spontaneous road trips to Laughlin, Nev., Mexico or remote desert spots, chatting about, among other topics, the menu for the barbecue restaurant they wanted to someday establish.

Dan Bessant married young, at just age 19. He and wife, Katelyn, would travel the world together, from the Caribbean to Italy to a remote locale in Fiji.

"Danny was my complete opposite, but somehow we were the perfect balance," Katelyn wrote in an e-mail. "He could convince even the most skeptical (usually me) to do nearly anything, because he made it sound as if it would be the most amazing thing to ever happen.

"Our lives were never boring and now I have our son, Wyatt, to continue his legacy of keeping me on my toes. I would not trade my six years with him for anything."

'A heart for underdogs'

There is one particular work-related story Dan Bessant relished telling, his father said.

There was a home in a corner of Oceanside that neighbors had pegged as a drug house. So, the story goes, Bessant, in full uniform, set up a folding chair in front of the home, snapped open a newspaper and settled in.

"One of the things that made Danny a good cop was that he wanted the little guy to be safe," his father said. "He had a heart for underdogs and those without the power to overcome predators.

"After Dan died, a number of people came up to me and said Dan had made a difference in their neighborhoods, that their kids were safer because of him."

As a kid, family friend Steve Garrett played with Drew Bessant. He came to know Dan Bessant better when the two served together as officers.

"Everybody in the department knew he was special, above average," Garrett said.

Katelyn Bessant said he was "so passionate about doing the best job he could."

"He wanted to make a name for himself and become a figure that the community could really trust," she wrote in an e-mail.

According to testimony during Taeotui's four-week trial, Bessant had stopped on his own to assist a fellow officer during a traffic stop in a gang-infested area in northeast Oceanside.

Prosecutors said the teenage gang members were drinking beer and playing with guns when they spotted the officers down the street and decided to take aim.

The motive, they said, was simply to boost their standing in their gang and the gang's status on the streets.

Memories live on

"Danny" lives on in his father's joyous memories, in his brother's laugh, in his mother's broken heart.

And he lives on Wyatt, who is now 2 years old.

"When he was in a room, he had the run of the room," Steve Bessant said of his son, "and I see that in Wyatt. I don't see Dan's features in Wyatt. But he moves like his dad, he is social like his dad. If there is a room, Wyatt is working it."

Like his dad.

Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 740-5442 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.