told ABC10 San Diego.<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cLauren thought so much of the difference between those two that she said right then and there, I want to dedicate my life to being that good cop for anybody who needs me,\u201d the grieving father said.<\/p>\n
Debris and destroyed cars sit in the middle of the highway, the morning after the fatal crashes on Oct. 21, 2025. NBC<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought, damn, you just turned your biggest fear into a source of motivation. Nothing\u2019s gonna stop you, and it didn\u2019t,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Craven joined the Las Mesa Police Department in February 2024 after going through the police academy twice to achieve her goal of becoming an officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has always been my passion to serve others and there has never been a doubt in my mind being a law enforcement officer is what I was meant to do,\u201d Craven wrote during the hiring process with the LMPD.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s who Lauren was and that\u2019s how she served and how she will be remembered,\u201d La Mesa Chief of Police Ray Sweeney said at a news conference Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The cause of the initial crash is being investigated by the California Highway Patrol. NBC<\/p>\n
The highway was shut down for the rest of the night as police investigated the crashes. NBC<\/p>\n
Craven last spoke to her family in Oregon as she drove to work the night she died.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s gonna be hard for a long time, but I\u2019m doing this conversation with you because I want people to know what was in Lauren\u2019s heart and the compassion that she showed everybody she came in contact with,\u201d David Craven said.<\/p>\n
The grieving father recalled the moment two Bend, Oregon, police officers knocked on his door in the middle of the night to break the news of his daughter\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey said, can we come inside? And I said, is this about my daughter Lauren? He said, yeah. I said, is she dead? They said, unfortunately, yes. So where do you go from there?\u201d David Craven asked.<\/p>\n
The elder Craven, who called his daughter his best friend, has mixed emotions on the police tests she took.<\/p>\n
\u201cHad she failed that test? I\u2019d still have her,\u201d he said. \u201cBut she would not have achieved her dream. A lot of people never get to a place where they\u2019re loving what they\u2019re doing and doing what they seem to be born to do. She did.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A heroic California police officer was struck and killed as she rushed to help the victims of a…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":325673,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5134],"tags":[5229,1582,276,5303,5416,17953,3549,7264,67,586,132,5230,68,1154,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-325672","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-san-diego","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-car-crashes","12":"tag-deaths","13":"tag-police-officers","14":"tag-san-diego","15":"tag-sandiego","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-united-states-of-america","18":"tag-unitedstates","19":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","20":"tag-us","21":"tag-us-news","22":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115421793757376270","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=325672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/325672\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/325673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=325672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=325672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=325672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}