David Brewster, Star Tribune
Last update: October 10, 2008 - 5:39 AM


As a car barreled down a county road in the wrong direction, heading straight for him and six cars behind him, Elko New Market police officer Steve Malecka had only seconds to decide what to do.

A drunken driver was aimed at them like a missile, speeding through the icy December darkness. And Malecka could see on his radar gun that the driver was actually speeding up.

"I hit the lights on my squad, all the overheads and the spotlights, to get his attention, but he was still climbing into the 60s," he said Thursday.

What Malecka chose to do next earned him a Medal of Valor for extraordinary bravery in the line of duty.

He slid his brand-new cruiser out across both westbound lanes of County Road 2 to protect the people behind him, and, without any time to leap outside, braced for a direct hit into the driver's side. It was a traffic cop's answer to a Secret Service agent's leap into the path of an assassin's bullet.

"Steve, in his usual personality, downplayed it," said his boss, Police Chief Rick Jensen. "But I'm like, 'Good God, man! You know you could have gotten out of the way. No problem. No one would have said anything.'"

The 39-year-old husband, father of two and stepfather of one is alive to tell the story because, in his chief's words, "something clicked" in the booze-soaked brain of the driver of the junky Saturn.

"By the grace of God," Malecka said, "he stopped about 6 inches from the front of my car."

Malecka doesn't remember any feeling of shock, any profound reflections upon the dangers of the job even in a seemingly bucolic small town at the fringe of the metro area. "I just thought, 'Wow, I almost got hit.'"

As far as he knows, none of the people behind him ever grasped the magnitude of what happened, and he has no idea who any of them are. They swerved around the scene and continued on their way.

Saturns aren't junky!!