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He met his future wife, Suzanne, just
before he began his enlistment with the Marines. After returning from active duty, Gray landed a job as a big rig truck driver
up in Northern California. By then, his long distance relationship with Suzanne had taken off and he was looking for a more
stable employment opportunity so they could get married. Gray was accepted into the LAPD police academy, completing twenty-eight
years of service with them before he was hired at the Escondido Police Department, working there for fourteen years. D.E.
Gray is the author of The Warrior in Me.
According to the book description of True to the Blue,
“D. E. Gray’s first book, The Warrior in Me, was a collective memoir of his forty-two-year career in law enforcement,
twenty-eight years with the Los Angeles Police Department, and fourteen years with the Escondido Police Department in the
North San Diego County. Even though his new book titled True to the Blue is a work of fiction, it is based in part on a true
story, along with actual events that the author experienced or witnessed while on the job. Many of the characters portrayed
in this story are patterned after real people who have either worked or crossed paths with D. E. Gray during his forty-two-year
career as a street cop.
This story begins in early 1999 and follows the hardships of Sergio Ortega, a
six-year veteran of the LAPD who is assigned to the elite CRASH1 gang unit of the Operations Central Bureau. It follows Ortega’s
struggle to be the best at what he does, getting the bad guys off the streets while staying true to his badge and the blue
uniform that he wears and that represents cops in every city.
With the infamous LAPD Rampart scandal about to break wide open and Chief Bernard
Parks’ hard-line approach with his officer accountability policy, Ortega eventually discovers that being a good cop
is more than he had bargained for. When he is faced with protecting the identity of an “ELA Dukes” gang member
who has turned confidential informant for an LAPD Hollenbeck Division detective, he finds himself in trouble with the department.
He soon realizes that the Hollenbeck detective would turn his back on him only to protect his own career. Ortega’s 1
Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, usually known by the acronym CRASH, was an elite but controversial special operations
unit of the Los Angeles Police Department.
His hard work and dedication to the job would destroy his marriage and alienate
his friends and partners who would abandon him in his time of need. Ortega would have to dig deep into his past to come to
grips with his downward spiraling life to try to salvage it from the disaster it had come to be.”
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