SUNDRIDGE – It’s not everyone who can remember the day they met their brother, but Mike Thompson can.
It was about 30 years ago in the town of Elmira where he lived with his parents Dan and Terry, who had just agreed to take in a young boy about two years older than six-year-old Mike.
“We were hanging out in the backyard playing by ourselves getting to know each other and I guess trying to figure out the pecking order. I remember he drop-kicked me in the head from the fence in the backyard. We didn’t fight very much after that,” said Mike.
That’s how he met Vu Pham, who is now known to almost every Ontarian as Constable Vu Pham who was fatally wounded in the line of duty on March 8 just outside of Winthrop, about 80 kms north of London, Ontario.
Pham and Thompson were born on different sides of the planet, but soon grew to be brothers no different than younger siblings Christina Hurrell and Bryan. Pham was born in Vietnam in 1973 just as the American-led conflict there was coming to a close. Just a few years later the American pullout was complete and Pham was sent from his home country by his mother Men Nguyen for a better life in North America. He was eventually taken in by a couple at the church Dan Thompson served as pastor of in Elmira. A year later though, the couple’s youngest child was getting married and they worried about the young boy, then about six-years-old, growing up an only child to an older couple. The young Thompson family took him in.
Pham grew up as a Thompson spending the summers with extended family in Michigan, enjoying times outdoors and adapting for his own the family’s distinctive sense of humour as they moved from Elmira to Tottenham and eventually to Sundridge, where each of the children met their spouses. But they didn’t think it was such a great move at first.
“That was kind of a joke, that we were moving to a one-horse town where the only radio station played nothing but country music, which we’ve since come to love,” said Bryan.
Most disappointed, say the Thompson siblings, was brother Vu, who had a lot of friends in the Tottenham area and had only a year of high school to go before college.
“When he was here he said he hated it here and couldn’t wait to get to the city, Then he got to the city and hated that. He called it a ‘concrete jungle.’ When he graduated he said, ‘All I want is a nice, quiet lake,’ ” recalls Mike.
Pham didn’t hate everything about the Almaguin area. He did meet the love of his life Heather Weber – daughter of Roger and Mary Anne Weber, then of Trout Creek – and would marry her in 1995. That same year he enlisted with the OPP and started out in West Parry Sound. A few years later he was transferred to the Cochrane detachment where his love of the outdoors bloomed, as did his family.
“It was in Cochrane where he really started to go hunting, fishing and bought a snowmobile and boat,” remembers brother-in-law Troy Hurrell.
Troy and his wife Christina say they visited a number times with Vu and Heather and their then two sons in Cochrane and were amazed with how many friends he made so quickly up there.
“Even after they moved from Cochrane to be at the Huron County detachment, they went back regularly to see people,” said Christina.
Troy remembers one time going out snowmobiling with Pham and coming across a RIDE program being operated on the trail by Pham’s colleagues.
“He didn’t lift his visor or anything he just pulls up and before his machine stopped he leaped off and tackled one of the officers off his snowmobile and wrestled him to the ground,” said Troy, who kept a safe distance. “. . . They eventually snowed him pretty good and filled his helmet with snow. It was all in fun.”
The comradeship Pham had with his fellow officers the Thompsons knew about. But it wasn’t until his tragic death that they learned how deep it ran.
“I have a new respect for police officers,” said Christina after the OPP funeral on Friday with more than 5,000 officers in attendance, the majority of who stood at attention for more than two hours outside. “They were sharing our grief because they lost a brother too.”
Mike says it was overwhelming leaving the arena in Wingham, Pham’s hometown, and seeing, “a sea of blue and red.”
“It’s definitely a big family,” said Bryan. “You don’t realize how one person’s death affects so many.”
Mike also points out that many officers for other OPP jurisdictions volunteered to come in on Friday and serve in place of Huron County officers that day so they could attend their colleague’s funeral. He said the efforts from the police community to show support for the family were greatly appreciated.
The Thompsons are also offering their own support to a family that has no doubt been hit hard by the tragic circumstances on March 8.
Just before sitting down with the Almaguin News the Thompson siblings attended a visitation for Fred Preston – the Sundridge man accused of shooting and killing Pham.
“We went to show our support. We hold no animosity towards that family,” said Bryan, who lives in Sundridge.
“It made it easier to forgive because it is not an unknown person,” said Christina, who lives in Trout Creek. “. . . Our heart goes out to them. Our death almost makes sense, like it had a purpose. There’s must be so much harder.”
Mike, who also lives in Sundridge, had a different reason.
“I don’t want them feeling like they have to avoid us. . . They have nothing to be worried about,” said Thompson.
It appears the Preston family has the same hopes. The death notice for Fred Preston states that his family requests any donations made in his memory be made to the trust fund in support of Pham’s three sons.
Even with reconciliation, there is no doubt the Thompson siblings will miss their older brother.
Asked what they admired most about Pham, Mike answers first. “I most admired his ability to connect with people. Vu had no enemies. Of all of us, Vu made friends the fastest and kept them the longest. . . His friends from Elmira and Tottenham were at the funeral. That says something about how important friendship was to him.”
Bryan takes a different tact, saying, “Being an OPP officer was the perfect fit for him. Growing up, if I was picked on he would say ‘Pick him out.’ And he’d go tune the guy in.”
Christina admired Pham’s appreciation for having fun.
“Growing up I knew I wasn’t going to get in the most trouble because Vu had already gotten in more. . . He broke the ice.”
Recalling time in his teen years when Pham was making a habit of either sneaking out of their house to be with friends. Christina says her mother Terry finally confronted him.
“My mom said, ‘Your friends are welcome to come over any time, but they have to use the front door.’ ”