Details were sketchy at 6 AM when I heard the breaking news on CNN that an Oklahoma County sheriff’s major was shot while working an off-duty job at Cattlemen’s Steakhouse. More facts are gradually emerging throughout the day. The sheriff major’s name is John Waldenville. John is 60-years-old and is a 25-year veteran of the sheriff’s office. He was walking the deposit to a nearby bank when he was shot.
Cattlemen’s Steakhouse has an address of 1309 S Agnew Ave. and is located in the historic district of Oklahoma City called Stockyard City. I was having a little trouble picturing what it looks like in its natural setting. All I could see on the news footage was wall to wall squad cars, red cherries flashing, and yellow crime tape draped on light- poles.
Somewhere buried in the footage were some nice restaurants, bars and nightclubs, but you’d never know by the seriousness and bustle of investigators or detectives, charged with the duty of a solving a violent crime committed on one of their own officers. John Waldenville is in a critical condition in the hospital, and was supposed to have surgery today on his jaw and his facial area.
I haven’t heard whether there were any eye-witnesses, but I have heard the entire crime was captured on surveillance cameras. Also, it’s reported that there were two suspects and they were both black males wearing sweatshirts with hoodies. One suspects by this account that there were witnesses, unless they learned the descriptions of the robbers from the video.
There was supposed to be a news conference at 3 PM today, but I didn’t detect any sign of it on the internet. That would be a local story, but if there had been a news update at 3 o’clock, you’d think at least the Oklahoman would have posted something by now. Let’s hope officer Waldenville will be okay. The shooting happened just after midnight. John turned around just as the assailants approached him and was shot once in the face.
I’m making a call when I say robbery was the motive, but I feel safe in making this call since John was taking the Cattlemen’s bank deposit over to the bank around the corner. Waldenville had been moonlighting for this steakhouse for several years, but I wonder if he had also been hand-walking these night deposits on a routine basis?
If this is true, I suspect that these crooks had been watching him for some time, looking for his patterns of behavior, his habits, and possibly noticing when the trendy steakhouse was having a particularly big night. One might also deduct that these two curmudgeons thought nothing of adding murder to the felony of armed-robbery.
These types of crimes are so commonplace these days, we tend to harden ourselves to the violence. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but could this possibly be an inside job? That is, someone who worked in the restaurant would be privy to important information, such as how big the drawer was for Friday night. The insider would call the robbers on their cell phone and let them know when officer Waldenville was departing with the loot. Let’s hope it didn’t go down in just this way.