NORTH TEXAS — For as long as he can remember, Kyle Koiner wanted to be a police officer, even if he didn’t quite understand why.
He joined the Richardson Police Department’s Explorer program at 14 and eventually became an officer for The Colony police department, always feeling a bit like the odd man out in his family.
“A lot of people in my family thought that too. Why do you want to go down this path?” he recalls. “Family history as far as I went back is farming, ranching, and then computer engineers and science engineers. No law enforcement that I knew of, at all.”
That is until two weeks ago when he got a call that the Dallas Police Department was looking for him.
“At first we thought it was a scam,” he said.
The department, he learned, was seeking out descendants of William Riddell, one of the first Dallas officers to lose his life in the line of duty, way back in 1892.
“From their research found out he was my great-great-great-great grandfather. Pretty wild!” he said.