A few minutes before 9 a.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, Garrett Swasey would walk into the pros' room at the Sertich Ice Center in Colorado Springs in street clothes, open his locker, pull out a pair of battered black skates and tuck his police badge and gun in their place. Then he'd lace up and get ready to guide his 78-year-old student through the 22 steps of the "Westminster Waltz."
Marilyn Roe has skated most of her life and still has goals. Swasey, her part-time ice dancing instructor for the past 16 years, helped her meet them.
A shoulder problem limits Roe's range of motion in her left arm. She couldn't place it on Swasey's shoulder in the correct position for one of the basic dance holds. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, that bothered her. Swasey would move with her through patterns, adjusting, trying different things. Sometimes he would ask two-time British ice dance world champion and longtime coach Doreen Denny to take his place and lead Roe, then stand back and watch, trying to solve the problem. He always found a way to keep her going.
"I could hunt everywhere and I couldn't find anyone else who would take that much time and care," Roe said.
She says he is irreplaceable.
Swasey was killed on Nov. 27 after responding to a shooting outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. He was a 44-year-old native of suburban Boston, a husband and father of two, a church elder, a University of Colorado-Colorado Springs police officer, and the 1992 U.S. junior ice dance champion.
His death was abrupt and ugly, accompanied by earsplitting gunfire, wailing sirens, shattering glass and frantic radio transmissions from other officers pinned down behind their cars. Two civilians died and another nine, including five police officers, were wounded. Social media erupted with political polemic. A suspect was arrested and charged after a five-hour standoff.
Swasey's skating contemporaries prefer to summon a different image set to an upbeat soundtrack from 25 years ago: a boy with a huge, engaging smile that entered the room before the rest of him, a teenager who felt music keenly all the way through his long legs.
The description of his career path that surfaced in public tributes bridged two ostensibly incongruous concepts, an ice dancer-turned-cop. Yet, as some in the sport maintained this week, why not? Both vocations, performed well, require discipline and steadiness. Both rely on split-second reactions.
His childhood friend, Nancy Kerrigan, remembers standing perfectly still as her introductory applause faded, waiting for her musical cue, the one moment she would be able to hear a voice apart from the crowd. "Go, Yuk!" Swasey would yell, using the nickname he gave her, whose origin she can't pinpoint because they knew each other from when and forever.
Kerrigan stood in a noisy airport days later and tried to control a slight tremor in her voice as she reminisced. They'd leave school early so Swasey's father, David, could drive them to practice -- two live wires jostling, joking, juggling homework with ice time. All those shared hours, irretrievable now. She had lost touch with Garrett but not with his parents, who called her last week so she wouldn't hear about his death from strangers.
"You always think you're going to have more time," Kerrigan said.
'More Than Words' ...
Swasey's junior partner, Christine Binder-Fowler, can feel him gently tugging her blonde hair into a French braid before they went out on the ice, and hear his assurance, after they finished a forgettable last at the national championships in 1991, that they would come back the next year and win.
After the compulsory portion of the 1992 competition, Swasey spiked a fever. In grainy footage of the free dance that clinched their title, his cheekbones appear to have a healthy glow, thanks in part to rouge strategically applied to conceal his pallor. The show had to go on.
"He was so easy-going, so confident," Binder-Fowler said this week from her home in Southern California. "Sometimes I didn't have it, and he gave it to me."
The two moved to Colorado Springs to train with coach Sandra Hess-Gerathy when Swasey was 17, tagging along with their good friends and future Olympians Peter Breen and Rachel Mayer. Hess-Gerathy assembled a support team for her skaters that included an Air Force Academy strength coach and a mental training coach. Swasey was put on a 5,000-calorie-a-day diet to fill out his slender frame. He earnestly followed orders.
Hess-Gerathy once searched for Swasey when he went missing from practice and found him prone on a training table, moaning audibly after having gorged himself at breakfast. "He was intelligent and serious and a sponge," she said. "You gave him a task and he would do his utmost."
Swasey, who roomed with Breen back then, often noodled on acoustic and electric guitars. "He played everything from James Taylor to Dream Theater, Jimi Hendrix and old blues guys," said Breen, a physical therapist and athletic trainer who works with top skaters in the Detroit area.
One of Swasey's favorite songs to cover was Extreme's "More Than Words," the mega-hit ballad whose chorus begins:
What would you do if my heart was torn in two?
More than words to show you feel
That your love for me is real ...
In a sport that attracts its share of theatrical personalities, Swasey was a self-sufficient, no-drama athlete with a self-deprecating sense of humor, his friends say. But he had no problem channeling sentimental lyrics or expressing ardor on the ice. That served him well as a skater.
"A lot of guys are technically good, but it's hard to get them to reach down and tap into the emotive part," Breen said. "He was primed for that. That was his gift."
'My kid'
Swasey liked to feel useful and he didn't like sitting still, which may be part of the reason he carved time out of a crowded life to help a woman in her 70s move purposefully around the ice at a municipal rink. That, and it kept him connected to his old lyrical self and all the partners who came before.
On Tuesday morning, Roe and Denny met at the Sertich rink at the usual time and talked and cried. Denny has left Swasey's skates, which she said he kept chronically unsharpened, in his locker for now. He helped her coach many older students. "They all felt like they were 'Dancing with the Stars' with Garrett," Denny said.
Swasey worked with Roe in back-to-back 20-minute sessions, for which he charged $20 apiece until a couple of years ago, when Denny pretty much forced him to ask for a $5 raise. Roe, the wife of a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who has no children of her own, called him "my kid." On occasion, when her constant self-critique got to him, Swasey would sass her, saying "Shut up and skate."
He gave her updates on his son's football and his daughter's artwork. She and her husband had dinner with him. Roe always told Swasey to be careful. He always told her he'd see her next week. In all those years, it didn't occur to Roe to get a snapshot taken with him. She'll have to take comfort in muscle memory.
"I'm having a hard time right now," Roe said softly. "I just really enjoyed my lessons."