Officer Becomes First in SC History To Graduate Academy With Above-the-Knee Prosthetic Leg

Columbia, SC—At 40, Alva Williams was a little older than most of the other graduates from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy Friday. But there’s a good reason his journey to becoming a police officer, something he had always thought about, took much longer than expected.

“Football injury in ‘86,“ he explains. “Dislocated my knee and I destroyed my arteries, and I caught a bone infection, which ended up leading to the amputation.“

His right leg was amputated above the knee. The original injury and his recovery meant he spent his 17th and 18th birthdays in the hospital.

But he still tried to pursue his goal of becoming a police officer. He took the test in New York in 1996 and failed, putting his dream back on the shelf again.

After moving to South Carolina, he learned there was one job opening at the Travelers Rest Police Department. He was one of 72 applicants.

But Chief Lance Crowe says Williams immediately stood out. Instead of dropping off his application, he asked to meet the chief. Chief Crowe was out, so the department’s captain met with Williams. Alva then sent personal thank you notes that arrived the next day.

“You know, you feel good after Alva’s been around,“ Chief Crowe says. “He enters a room, brightens it up, makes people feel good and he leaves and you still have that feeling. He’s very encouraging.“ The chief says Williams told him about his artificial leg during the interview, but once Williams said he could do whatever any other officer could do, it was no longer an issue.

But getting the job was just the first step. He still had to make it through the Criminal Justice Academy.

On the first day, recruits have to pass the Physical Abilities Test. It’s an obstacle course set up in the gym. Recruits have to run around the outside of the half-court twice, then hop over two 18-inch obstacles, climb up a flight of stairs, down the other side then turn around and go up and down again, crawl under a pipe that’s three feet off the ground, jump over a 6-foot-wide “ditch”, jump over a 4-and-a-half foot fence, and then climb through a “window” that’s about 4-and-a-half feet off the ground, then drag a 150-pound sandbag, finishing with another lap around the perimeter. And they have to do all that in under 2 minutes and 6 seconds.

Williams failed that first day, missing the required time by 32 seconds. His reaction? “Anger. Mad at myself. I knew I could do it and I just had to readjust,“ he says.

Recruits who don’t pass that first day go through an additional three weeks of conditioning at 5:00 every morning, and can then take the test again.

Williams failed again, this time missing the mark by 10 seconds. There’s a reason this had never been done before by an above-the-knee amputee, but he wasn’t going to quit. Instead of being angry, now he was focused on his wife Kendra and their daughters, 13-year-old Brittany and 9-year-old Marisa. “I knew they counted on me and I had to get it done,“ he says.

But now he had to wait for another class of recruits. While he waited, he got special coaching in defensive tactics and met with two other amputees, one of whom is a triathlete. He fitted Alva with a running prosthetic and taught him how to use it.

When he went back to the academy for his third attempt at the test, he passed, finishing 17 seconds faster than required. With that behind him, he sailed through the nine weeks of training.

But he certainly didn’t sail through quietly. His personality, attitude and determination had endeared him to not only his classmates, but to the recruits in the first class that he hadn’t been able to stay with. When he made his third attempt at the test, members from his original class went to the gym to cheer him on along with his current classmates.

Criminal Justice Academy leadership were so impressed with Williams’ determination that they created a new “Courage Award”, at Friday’s graduation giving him the first-ever statuette of an eagle flying.

Class leader Matthew Anderson, a deputy with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office, said before presenting the award, “He has never complained, never had an excuse. He always gave a hundred percent.“

As Anderson handed Williams the award, the entire class of new graduates stood to applaud, then broke out into cheering, bringing the entire gymnasium to its feet.

Williams says he’s looking forward to starting work as an academy graduate Monday morning. His motto throughout training: failure is not an option.

“When you see an obstacle, you can go through it, over it, under it, but you get by it. And that’s all I’ve done.“