Back when John Elway led the Denver Broncos, Monica David-Vickery had a little chat with one of his teammates.
The intoxicated player was leaving a restaurant at that late hour when everyone who’s been drinking heads home. He was on his way to his car when he ran into David-Vickery, a Denver police officer.
“I told him, you know, ‘This is crazy. Don’t you dare get behind the wheel. You guys can afford to get a limo and just go wherever you’re gonna go,’ ” she said. “…I told him, ‘You’re not going to drive now, are you?’ And he goes, ‘Uhhh.’ And I go, ‘Get back in there and start drinking coffee and call for a cab.’ ”
He did that, and a few years later, while David-Vickery was transporting a man to jail after he’d urinated in the washing machines at a laundromat, a call came in over the radio for her to meet someone around Colfax Avenue and Ogden Street. When they pulled up, she spotted a long limousine.
What looked to be the entire Broncos’ defensive line piled out.
“Here comes the guy, and he gives me a hug, throws me in the air,” David-Vickery said. “He’s saying, ‘Thank you so much. You really saved all of us. We always take limousines now.’ …Then one by one, they’re all hugging me and throwing me in the air.”
She can’t remember the player’s name now, but to be fair, it was a long time ago. Much has changed in Denver since Elway was quarterback, but one thing hasn’t: David-Vickery is still a member of the Denver Police Department.
The 78-year-old completed 46 years of service on Saturday and is the longest-serving Denver police officer on the force. She’s a sergeant now, and she’s finally wrapping it up in her 47th year on the job, with plans to retire in September — just a few years ahead of her son, Denver police Cmdr. Mike O’Donnell, who has put in his own three decades on the force and now heads the department’s Special Operations division.
“If somebody had told me when I came on the job that I was going to stay 47 years, I would have told them they were crazy,” David-Vickery said.
Path to the police force
She started out with plans to be a nun.
David-Vickery joined a convent and spent two years studying to be a nun in a semi-cloistered order before realizing she was too outgoing to be hidden away like that. She left, went on to work at the Bull Ring Restaurant and Lounge for former state Sen. Don Sandoval and then as a Denver Public Schools bus driver.
Then she saw an ad in the newspaper for Denver police reserve officers — volunteer positions. She served as a reserve officer from 1976 to 1979, then joined the force as a full officer on Feb. 1, 1979. O’Donnell was 11 at the time.
David-Vickery joined just a few years after a 1972 gender and racial discrimination lawsuit from Carole Hogue and the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado forced Denver police to hire one woman for every four men.
Women on the force were still a novelty back then, David-Vickery said. And some men didn’t like it. They’d ask David-Vickery to go back to the kitchen. To cook them some dinner.
She responded with unprintable language, she said.
“I was well known for some very, very fluent street French,” she said.
She spent much of her career on patrol, amassing an arsenal of memorable moments on the job: the time she responded to a car that had been pancaked by a garbage truck and was sure the driver would be dead, only to find she was miraculously just bruised; the time she and another woman officer arrested a man who’d assaulted his girlfriend, even though he punched David-Vickery in the throat; the time she was shot at; the time a driver who was “drunker than 10 skunks” slammed into her police car, bruising her liver and kidney, and tearing up her back.
But she really treasures the times she was able to do good for victims of crime. Sometime in the late 1990s, she responded to a call to find a man holding a knife to a woman’s throat and sexually assaulting the woman as she screamed for help. David-Vickery and her partner broke down the door and grabbed the guy, stopping the assault.
She didn’t have much to do with the woman after that, but years later, as she responded to a call about a disturbance at a bar, a woman approached her.
“Taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Do you remember me?’ And, you know, that’s a difficult question for a police officer. Because we deal with so many different people. and you go, ‘Gee, was this somebody that I saved or arrested? Are they mad at me?’ ”
But this woman was the one who’d had the knife to her throat that night years before. She told David-Vickery that the officer had saved her life.
“And to me, that was what everything about this job is about,” David-Vickery said. “To see the victim, who is now recovered, and to have her tell me she felt I saved her life, (it) meant a lot.”
Closing out a chapter in life
David-Vickery has for decades kept a room of toys in her basement to hand out to people in need around the holidays. When her grandson was young, he discovered the room and was convinced she was Santa.
She has an encyclopedic knowledge of Denver’s streets and can rattle off the intersections of decades-old calls. The last four digits of her cellphone number are her badge number: 7940. She tries to avoid driving by locations where she answered the worst calls and saw the really bad stuff. It’s just stressful.
She worked nights on patrol until about six years ago, when she moved to the department’s juvenile intake division on West Colfax Avenue for 12-hour, overnight shifts.
She might have retired when she hit 25 years on the force back in the early 2000s, but her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and they needed health insurance. After he died in 2005, there were huge bills to pay. So she stayed on.
She also might have retired when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but she couldn’t leave when the police department was so stretched thin and short-staffed.
“A lot of officers were struggling with the 2020 year: ‘Do I really want to continue in law enforcement?’ ” her son, O’Donnell, said. “And it affected the police department. We’re still recovering with staffing. But to see kind of that old-school mentality, old-school loyalty that, ‘I’m staying until we’re in a better place.’ That’s that’s just who she’s always been.”
His mother is generous and genuinely cares for crime victims, he said.
David-Vickery has changed as the department has evolved, though sometimes with hesitance: She held onto her six-shot revolver until the mid-’90s, six years or so after the department made the switch to semi-automatic weapons.
O’Donnell finally bought her a new gun for Christmas, he said.
“Cop family Christmas is a little different,” he said.
She was quickly sold.
“It’s far superior,” she said. “You know, I have to admit, my son was right.”
With retirement a few months away now, David-Vickery is looking forward to climbing into an RV and driving across the country. She wants to raise money for cancer research. And she’s still got that room full of toys.
“If I’m out there as a civilian, and I see an issue where I can help somebody, I will,” she said. “I just feel like it’s the completion of a chapter of my life. And I’m graduating. So now I can start the next chapter of my life.”
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