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Remembering Linda Huff

| June 16, 2018 1:00 AM

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Huff

By RALPH BARTHOLDT

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Idaho State Police Trooper Linda Huff was an exemplary officer, a mother and wife when she was gunned down 20 years ago in the Idaho State Police parking lot in Coeur d’Alene.

More than 75 community members including police officers, family and friends attended a ceremony Friday on Huff’s behalf near the place she was shot to death on June 17, 1998, by a man on a bicycle.

When she died an hour before midnight, after being shot 17 times, Huff, 33, a mother of three, was the first female law enforcement officer killed in the line of duty in Idaho.

She was posthumously awarded the first Idaho Law Enforcement and Firefighting Medal of Honor.

“Her life and legacy remains with us today,” said Cpt. John Kempf of state police Region 1 where Huff worked when she was murdered. “Death cannot kill her name.”

Many of the troopers and officers in attendance were early in their law enforcement careers when Huff was killed. And a handful in attendance, some of them retired, took part in the investigation.

Capt. Vern Handcock was a sheriff in southern Idaho when he recruited Huff, a dispatcher, to a career in law enforcement. They both eventually joined the state police.

“She loved to smile, she loved to laugh, she loved to have a good time,” he said. “She absolutely loved her family.”

Huff had served for 14 months with the state police when she was shot and killed by Scott Yager, a 35-year-old Rathdrum man, who had ridden to the police headquarters on a bicycle and met Huff walking in the parking lot. Yager emptied one magazine and reloaded, shooting Huff at close range in the head. Huff was pronounced dead at the scene.

Yager, who was shot twice by Huff, was arrested a short time later walking in a nearby neighborhood. A Kootenai County jury deliberated 214 hours before finding Yager guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life without parole.

At the 3 p.m. ceremony on the west side of the former ISP headquarters on Prairie Avenue, Kedrick Wills, the agency’s colonel, called Huff a professional whose purpose in life was to make a difference.

“It’s so important we are here, and we don’t forget people like Linda Huff,” Wills said.

The new Region 1 facility on west Wilbur Avenue is named after Huff.

Huff is survived by her husband, also an Idaho State Police trooper, and the couple’s children.