Oakdale Officer Richard Walton's Killer Gets Parole

Oakdale Police Department Capt. Michael Grill said his first thought when he heard the news that the man who shot and killed Oakdale officer Richard Walton had been granted parole was, that “29 years went by fast.”

“Regardless of whether he was paroled from prison or not, if he died in prison as a result of this, neither one of those situations is going to bring Dick back,” he said. “There’s no amount of time that ever scores it up, and dying in prison for them doesn’t score it up either.”

Grill had only been on the police force for about four years in 1982, when Walton died from a gunshot wound he sustained while trying to thwart a robbery while working off-duty as a security guard.

Losing Walton was “pretty devastating,” to what was then a much smaller department, Grill said. About half of the officers worked off-duty at then-Mounds Park Hospital, where Walton was killed.

"What I remember most was the difficulty of trying to just keep proper focus on doing the day-to-day job while this was occurring," Grill said.

Walton was an outstanding officer and a good role model, he said.

“You get all the clichés about somebody had a real passion for this,” Grill said. “For him, at least it seemed to be that was really true. This was something he really enjoyed doing, and he was really good at it.”

He handled every call—no matter how big or small—to the best of his ability, Grill said, trying to seek resolution and justice for those involved.

There’s a memorial to Richard Walton on a patch of grass in parking lot, however the Oakdale Police Department is hoping to construct a larger memorial in conjunction with the veteran’s memorial planned on the city hall property.