The Baltimore Retired Police Benevolent Association on Wednesday night named a city homicide detective, 40-year veteran Randy Wynn (left, in a picture taken by the Baltimore Sun's Chiaki kawajiri), officer of the year for investigating the tragic suicide of a fellow cop who had no friends and family.

It was a touching ceremony at Heritage Gardens in Parkville that brought veteran cops to tears. Wynn told the group he had done nothing special, "I did what I felt needed to be done." But his Baltimore police colleagues disagreed -- the story of Patrolman Edward William Eldridge, who shot himself in the head in January and was buried without family or friends, spurned a new movement among cops to help their retirees.

Wynn had responded to the shooting in Northeast Baltimore but didn't know the victim was a fellow officer until a day later; the condition of the body made it hard to immediately identify. Eldridge (left) was having financial problems -- he had lost much of his $550,000 savings to the stock market, and couldn't find anybody to wait for him at a hospital for simple knee surgery.

"His way of dealing with this was to pick up a .40 caliber Glock and put two bullets in his head," Wynn told those gathered. Wynn spent days picking through Eldridge's things but could not find a friend or a relatives. All his phone numbers, listed on his fridge and programmed into his cell phone, went to an accountant, a take-out pizza place, a video rental store, a repairman for his house. He spent his time polishing his gun collection and watching movies; he had been robbed in a home invasion a few years earlier and he kept a hunting knife in each room and had black garbage bags covering all his windows.

"He was as paranoid as you can get," Wynn said.

Eldridge was buried with police honors; people came who never even knew him to pay their respects and Wynn tried but failed to find a relative. One did finally surface just a few weeks ago, but only after a probate firm hired to dispose of the dead officer's estate found a cousin. Karen Zglobicki told Wynn that she would use money from Eldridge's estate to help the retired officer's fund.

Wynn came to the ceremony with his wife and boss, Maj. Terrence McLarney, head of the homicide unit. One of the heads of the retirement association, Richard D. Nevin, spoke of Wynn's hard work that brought attention to a long-hidden problem.

"There is compassion," Nevin said. "There is kindness and mercy. He could've just written the reports and left. Nobody would've known and I don't think anybody would've cared, because there were no family members involved. He sat down and went through this man's history."

Nevin said he was heartened that "the department let him" take the time to investigate a case that could've easily been closed. "It shows there are some thinkers still in the department."

Nevin told the group that he started getting calls about Eldridge the morning the story appeared in the Baltimore Sun, before he even had seen it, and that calls kept coming all day. I got more than 100 e-mails about this topic, more than I've ever gotten throughout my 20-year career.

Wynn prepared well for his speech. He researched suicide on the Internet and couldn't believe that he found a manual on how to kill yourself, published just a few years ago in Japan. "One million people have bought this thing," he told me over dinner. He then went down a long list of various ways to take your own life. I asked how many of these he had seen in his career. He paused, read through the list and said, "Well, I just had a freezing the other day."

The detective warned the retired cops that they are in a high-risk category for sucide -- over 65, male and in law enforcement. He urged them to reach out to friends and old partners, "They're not going to ask you for help. Edward Eldridge wouldn't have asked for help if he was on fire."