10:10 p.m. —

In his first two-and-a-half years of service at the ASU Police Department, Officer Daniel Gaughan has already earned a reputation for being a trouble magnet.

This could be because of his self-admitted penchant for high-risk situations, particularly when they involve finding stolen vehicles.

“You see that?” Gaughan said, pointing to a black pickup truck with a back window fashioned out of duct tape and cardboard.

“I’m always on the lookout for stuff like that. It looks like someone broke into that back window and didn’t have time to fix it,” he said as he weaved behind the vehicle and followed it into the Vista Del Sol parking lot on the Tempe campus.

The truck parked, and upon running its license plate number, Gaughan realized that the last time the vehicle was pulled over it resulted in an arrest.

“That guy probably has a warrant,” Gaughan said, “I would have pulled him over if he would have given me any reason at all.”

His magnet was working.

10:20 p.m. —

Gaughan saw a car with one headlight make a wide right turn from Rural Road onto University Drive.

It was a pizza delivery driver; Gaughan pulled him over but let him off with a warning.

Officer Brandon Curro had just pulled up for backup when Gaughan, who was walking back to his car, noticed a truck with no taillights driving on University Drive. He pointed it out to Curro, without noticing that it was the same truck he’d seen at Vista del Sol just 10 minutes earlier.

Gaughan was in the middle of a sentence when Curro’s voice came through on his earpiece, and for a second he froze.

Suddenly, Gaughan is streaking down University Drive with a brooding look on his face.

When he pulled up behind Curro’s car and the black pickup truck, an apartment security guard was doing his best to keep traffic moving in and out of the busy complex’s obstructed entrance.

Fear and awe filled the faces of gawking passers-by, whose intrigue was sparked by glimpses of flashlights, rubber gloves, breathalyzers and the hypnotic pulse of blue and red police lights.

Curro originally pulled the vehicle over after Gaughan noticed that it had no taillights, but the odor of marijuana coming from inside the vehicle gave him probable cause for a search. With three men in the car, he called Gaughan for backup.

A search revealed marijuana, which was packaged for sale, several pipes and bongs, a digital scale and some pharmaceutical medication, Goughan said.

The driver of the vehicle, like Gaughan predicted earlier, had a felony warrant out for his arrest. He admitted the items were his and was arrested.

One of the other men received a minor in consumption citation, while the third man said he was completely unaware of any illegal items in the car and walked away with nothing but a story.

11:30 p.m. —

An 80-year-old Mesa man ran a series of red lights while lost and driving without his glasses. Gaughan let him off with a warning, on the condition that he relinquish the driver’s seat to his wife.

12:30 a.m. —

Another warning, this time to a transient man who, according to Gaughan, had been arrested for trespassing at least four times and warned another six times.

1 a.m. —

Gaughan gave his fourth warning of the evening to an intoxicated 19-year-old woman who was lying in the Vista Del Sol parking lot.

Gaughan let her know that she could have easily been ticketed and fined for being a minor in consumption of alcohol. Then he contacted her roommates to make sure that she had a safe ride home.

His actions lent sincerity to his words.

“I’m not trying to ruin people’s lives,” Gaughan said.

“I know people hate cops,” he said, but Gaughan never let that, or anything else, come between him and his boyhood dream of becoming a police officer.

“I truly cannot stand when bad things happen to good people,” Gaughan said. “There are some truly evil people out there, and a lot of terrible things happen even with us out there.

“Can you imagine what it would be like without us?” Gaughan said, as he pulled into the parking structure on Rural Road and Lemon Street.

2 a.m. —

Gaughan followed his ears and zipped around the Rural Road parking structure, desperately trying to hone in on and locate a car that was using its horn to summon for help.

By the time he got there, it was too late. The back passenger window had been left open about halfway and there was a purse in the backseat with its contents strewn about the floor of the vehicle.

A woman parked her car next to the one with the engaged alarm, and said she saw a man with a black hooded sweatshirt jump out of the back seat and dash toward the staircase moments before Gaughan pulled up.

“Sometimes it’s literally a matter of seconds,” Gaughan said as he pulled out of the garage. “You just can’t be every----,” he stopped mid-sentence.

“He is hurting her right now?” he asked dispatch.

2:30 a.m. —

“Arizona State Police Department, open up!” Gaughan shouted, with two officers and a sergeant there to back him up. Dispatch received a call less than five minutes earlier in regard to physical violence in progress at Vista Del Sol.

A man and woman emerged from an apartment and it was apparent from their puffy eyes that they had both been crying. Sgt. Mark Aston immediately took the woman down a few flights of stairs while Officer Luqman Khalid searched and questioned the man in the hallway.

The man was so intoxicated he could barely speak, and when police told him that a roommate and several other residents called police to report what sounded like a physical altercation, he launched into an animated rant.

Slurring his S’s and talking in circles, the man would have continued for as long as the officers would have allowed, but they cut him short. The woman, questioned separately, also denied that any physical violence occurred.

“When me and my friend Officer Khalid here go out drinkin’, no one ends up crying. So why are both you and your friend crying?” Aston asked the man.

The man said he had thrown up after drinking too much and claimed that sometimes he cries when he throws up.

The woman’s roommate, who called 911 in the first place, told Gaughan she could hear her roommate being choked, and said she clearly heard her roommate say, “Hit me again, I dare you … See what happens if you hit me again.”

Since both parties denied the allegations, with neither admitting that any violence had occurred, all the officers could do was tell the man to leave the property and not return for the evening.

After Gaughan and Khalid denied the man’s request for a handshake, he got on an elevator and the woman went back to her room.

“Fun stuff, right?” Aston said, raising his eyebrows and forcing a smile.

Leaving the scene, Gaughan admitted his disgust at the situation.

“Sometimes the law only lets you go so far,” he said. “But we made it over here and stopped anything else from happening to that young lady — that’s part of why I love what I do.”

When calls come in, officers never know what the situation will be like, he said.

“You flip on the siren and lights and step on the gas and suddenly that adrenaline rush hits you,” Gaughan said. “That’s the other reason I love being a cop.”

Reach the reporter at npmendo@asu.edu