LEWISTON – Twenty years ago on the last day of March, State Police Detective Giles Landry sat in his cruiser speaking to a woman about claims of child abuse.

It was the kind of routine investigation millions of police officers around the globe engage in every day. But on that morning outside a mobile home on Roger Sumner Avenue in Leeds, routine turned deadly.

Landry, a 36-year-old from Lewiston, was shot and killed as he sat behind the wheel of his police cruiser. The woman he had been speaking with was gunned down in the passenger seat.

Moments later, the gunman turned the .44 caliber rifle on himself. Three people were dead in the span of seconds after what had been just another call in a busy day of a cop’s life.

For police everywhere, outcomes like this one serve as a horrific reminder: Any situation, big or small, has the potential to turn bad in an instant.

But for Maine State Police and officers at departments across the area, the death of Landry carries an additional emotion and a more personal one: Pain and remembrance for a fallen comrade.

“Every year at this time, I think of Giles and his family,” retired state police Maj. Tim Doyle said. “It’s been a long time, I guess. But to me, it feels like yesterday.”

In 1989, Doyle was a trooper patrolling Greene and the surrounding area. The morning of the shooting, he was called to assist Landry on Roger Sumner Road. When he got to the scene, the officer and two others were dead.

Every year on the anniversary of that grim date, Doyle stops in for coffee at a store run by Landry’s brother. Police in Lewiston recall the date because Landry was from here, an officer who was rising swiftly in the ranks of the state’s top department. They keep a plaque on the wall of their station as a reminder.

Yet with all the solemn remembrance of Landry’s passing, most officers also keep hold of the lesson it imparted, as well. In a newsletter circulated by Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Stephen McCausland is a reminder that most police officers do not like to utter for fear of evoking some irrational jinx: Landry was the last police officer in Maine to be killed by gunfire.

At the time of his death, Landry was living on Pauline Avenue with his wife and daughter. He had spent most of his police career patrolling the Maine Turnpike after joining the state police force in 1976. A year before his death, Landry had been promoted to detective.

“He was at a significant point in his career,” Doyle said. “I know he was proud and his family was proud of the fact that he had made detective. It was a new lifestyle for them.”

The morning of March 31, the task before him was among the most common in police work: He was to sort through a laundry list of domestic complaints between 36-year-old David Grover and his girlfriend, Barbara Wells.

It was Grover who fired the deadly shots and Wells who died beside the police officer.

Doyle said a lot has changed over the past two decades in the way police handle domestic complaints. Officers are more likely to double up on calls. New laws and policies have been put into place. Technology is better, too.

But with all of those safeguards in place, the death of Landry is a reminder to most officers that they work in what is unquestionably one of the most violent and unpredictable professions.

“It’s a reminder of how quickly things can go bad in that line of work,” Doyle said.

When Landry was killed, he became the second officer to die in the line of duty in the area in less than a year. The previous July, Lewiston police Officer David Payne was shot and killed when he followed a suspect into the woods near River Road.

“That was a rough time for law enforcement,” Doyle said. “The deaths of those two officers left a big hole in the community.”