Memories of fallen Cedar Rapids officer still strong

25th Anniversary of Officer's Death on June 8, 2009 By Jeff Raasch The Gazette If there was a prank to pull, Bret Sunner pulled it. The easygoing boy from Clear Lake was asked to baby-sit his little sister when he was in high school. Turn on “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or something, his parents said as they walked out the door. His sister spent the night duct-taped to a chair, watching “Kung Fu” instead. Once he became a police officer in Cedar Rapids, he convinced a girlfriend that spaghetti grew out of the ground. He was known to rile up an employee at Donutland by snatching the short woman’s jacket. He’d toss it on the street sign out front and cackle as she jumped to try to retrieve it. “He was a jokester and liked to get everybody laughing,” said Gail Sunner, his youngest sister. Monday marks the 25th anniversary of Bret Sunner’s death. He was shot and killed on June 8, 1984, while responding to a domestic disturbance on Hamilton Street SW, making him the most recent of six Cedar Rapids police officers killed in the line of duty since 1885. It was dark and drizzly the night Sunner walked up behind a house. He and his partner had been told a man was in the backyard with a gun, and the officers were using available cover. Officers suspect Sunner’s pant leg caught on a garage, and he clicked on his flashlight to take a look. The glow apparently outlined his figure and gave Leonard Berg, 55, a clear shot. A slug from a 12-gauge shotgun struck Sunner in the forehead. Sunner’s girlfriend, a police dispatcher named Jackie Henderson, heard the gunshot as she drove to work. At age 25, Sunner was gone in an instant. Berg fired another shot that tore a 3-inch hole in the driver’s door of a patrol car, causing shrapnel to be lodged in the thigh of Officer William Hanse, who recovered. Berg later was convicted of first-degree murder and is serving a life sentence at the state penitentiary in Fort Madison. Twenty-five years later, Bret Sunner’s mother, Bonnie, said it still hurts. She thinks about him every day, even when she doesn’t notice his badge in her bedroom. “They think eventually you can get rid of that, but I don’t know how you ever would,” Bonnie Sunner said. “They call it closure, but there is no closure.” [Continue reading]