(Beaver Dam) The Beaver Dam Police Department has many responsibilities including keeping the community safe, taking criminals off the streets, and death investigations. Lieutenant Jeremiah Johnson says that the department is involved in those types of investigations almost daily.
“I didn’t realize that going into law enforcement [that] is something that we do,” says Johnson. “A lot of the times things happen, and it doesn’t get talked about [because] a lot of these are private matters that don’t affect the public.”
Johnson says it is the department’s job to investigate any unwitnessed deaths, but sometimes they do have to investigate a witnessed death. Johnson says a perfect example of this is a welfare check for people who live alone.
“We will try our best to contact the person,” Johnson says. “If there’s a loved one calling and saying ‘hey, I haven’t talked with this person in a day or two, they’ve got some medical issues, can you go check on them?’ [A] majority of the time we knock on the door, or we get in somewhere, we check on them, and everything’s fine.”
The lieutenant says those cases are usually a misunderstanding where a cellphone was not charged or that the person did not want to talk to anyone.
