Dan Bender, who served as the public information officer at the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office for 37 years, died on July 4 after losing his battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 74 years old.
Bender’s loved ones and colleagues remembered him as a friendly and humorous man whose lighthearted nature concealed a fierce commitment to the community, extending to a willingness to risk his life in the line of duty.
“He was my hero, he was larger than life,” said Jon Bender, Dan’s wife. Throughout Bender’s nearly four decades as the friendly face of the Sheriff’s Office, he also helped hunt down police killers, became stranded in a San Juan wilderness snowstorm during a search and rescue, and narrowly dodged the shrapnel from a pipe-bomb explosion, to name a few of his escapades.
The various hats Bender wore during his time with the Sheriff’s Office included search and rescue coordinator, search and rescue K-9 handler, SWAT team member, training coordinator, emergency management liaison and public information officer. He served under four different sheriffs.
Jim Ezzell, an investigator for the Sheriff’s Office, worked alongside Bender for the entirety of his career in Durango.
Ezzell said Bender will be remembered for his dry sense of humor that could “keep the place on an even keel during the stressful situations” and the importance he placed on his fellow officers' safety and well-being.
“He made sure everyone got the training they needed, the equipment they needed, anything that they needed – physically or emotionally,” Ezzell said.
Beyond his bravery, Bender’s myriad contributions to the Sheriff’s Office over the years included instrumental roles in establishing the K-9 unit, raising some of the Sheriff’s Office’s first police dogs in his own home, and the SWAT team, which he served on for 21 years.
“He always said that he had the job that let him do the things that every 10-year-old boy would want to do – mountain climbing, going to fires, riding in helicopters and airplanes,” Jon said.
She said her husband’s kindness and courage stemmed from his love for people.
“He made fast friends with people,” Jon said. “A lot of people would say he was kind, and treated you with dignity.”
And the people he loved most were his family. Bender met Jon in their hometown of Findlay, Ohio, where they were married in 1972. They would move to Durango in 1980, where they raised their two daughters, Rachael (Mike) Latham and Rebekah (Sam) Eggleston, who went on to provide them nine grandchildren: Dasha, Danya, Rebekah, Grace, Barry, Daniel, Sienna, Bud and Cody.
Jon recalled first meeting Bender when she was 19 and he was in his early 20s, introduced to him by his sister who was her roommate and co-worker at a hospital in their mid-sized Ohio town. Jon said she was instantly drawn toward Bender’s great sense of humor, intelligence and sincerity.
When they met, Bender was a recently discharged Vietnam War veteran, who had enlisted at age 18 and saw active combat serving in the military police for the Army. Jon said Bender always told her that his time in the military shaped him into the man he became.
“He would say, ‘The first semester I was in college I was on the dean’s list, the bad list. Then when I came back from Vietnam and graduated, I was on the dean’s list again, the good one this time,’” Jon said.
Jon and Dan were married not long after meeting, and she remembers her husband as a devoted family man who passed down his best qualities to their children and grandchildren.
“He liked rocks, he liked nature, he took lots of pictures of small things,” she said. “And he encouraged our kids when they went hiking to stop and look and listen for those things.”
Jon shared another memory from Bender’s years helping to raise and train police dogs, one that she said the whole family and any friend who knew him during that time would look back on fondly.
“If they came over to visit, he would ask them if he could bury them in the snow so that the dogs could find them,” she said.
Bender also had a love for literature. He liked to write down his war stories from Vietnam, and funny anecdotes from his years at the Sheriff’s Office. He also wrote children’s Christmas stories, which Jon said he never intended to publish, but have been turned into print versions for family and friends to share with their own children. of all, his favorite books were the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, like “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” which Jon said he must have read dozens of times, including several times out loud to her.
“He would read to me at night because it would help me fall asleep, and he would use different voices for each character,” Jon said. “Recently, he’d been reading ‘Pickles’ to me, the comic strip.”
Bender’s favorite hobby though, was photography, bringing his camera with him to many police scenes and taking countless nature shots over the years off-work and during his retirement. Since leaving the Sheriff’s Office, photography was one of the main ways he enjoyed spending time.
Jon recounted a story Bender had told her about how after he received his first camera at the age of 7, he biked miles from home, all the way out of town, to photograph airplanes taking off and landing from their local airport.
Such was the sense of adventure Bender carried with him throughout life: from the pages of “Middle Earth” to the jungles of Vietnam, from fatherhood to the San Juan wilderness. And wherever Bender’s adventures took him he did what came naturally, helping people and saving lives, cracking jokes and serving smiles along the way.
Services for Bender are scheduled for 10 a.m. Saturday at 10556 U.S. Highway 550, south of Durango.
