MINNEAPOLIS _ Lost in the news about the heartbreaking death April 19 of Department of Natural Resources (DNR) conservation officer Eugene Wynn of Pine City, Minn., has been the tragedy's cumulative effect on the agency's enforcement division, which, with Wynn's loss, has registered four field-officer deaths in eight months.
Wynn's fatality was particularly heartrending because he died in the line of duty while helping a deputy sheriff respond to a report of a body possibly floating in a lake near Pine City.
Wynn and the deputy were thrown into the water after launching a boat, according to reports. The deputy was rescued by bystanders. But Wynn slipped beneath the surface before he was reached.
Wynn, 43, had been a conservation officer 18 years.
Deaths of the three other DNR conservation officers who have died recently date to last summer, when Kyle Quittschreiber, 26, was killed Aug. 24 while operating a skid-steer loader at his home in Frazee.
Quittschreiber was an unlikely victim of such an accident, because he made a hobby of buying old tractors and similar equipment and repairing them for resale.
A conservation officer for three years, Quittschreiber worked out of the DNR's Detroit Lakes station.
Ed Picht, 40, was a conservation officer 11 years, living in and working out of the agency's Montevideo station when he died Oct. 1. The cause was suicide.
Picht was well-liked in the DNR and in his community. He also recorded a number of noteworthy fish- and game-violation busts, and once walked a long way across a plowed field to check a pheasant hunter's license _ that hunter being me.
Picht and I had a few laughs about the fact that I had my license and was otherwise legal, so he had no pinch. But I had no birds. So we both came up empty.
Subsequently, Picht pointed on a map to a public hunting area not far away, where he had seen a few roosters that morning. "You might want to give it a try," he said.
Conservation officer Chelsie (Leuthardt) Grundhauser, 30, meanwhile, died Dec. 7. She had been with the DNR four years and was a southeast metro regional training officer living in North St. Paul when she succumbed to complications from breast cancer.
A western Minnesota native, Grundhauser suffered her first bout with the disease shortly after graduating from the DNR conservation officer academy. She won that round and eventually returned to duty, where her supervisors described her as "a hard-charger who didn't want to take her uniform off." She was married to a St. Paul police officer when she died.
