Danville’s longest-serving police chief responded to one of nation’s worst crashes

KEN SANDY, DANVILLE’S first and longest-serving police chief and a Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Deputy from 1965 until his retirement in 1992, died Dec. 24 in Walnut Creek from complications of COVID-19. He was 83.

As a sheriff’s deputy, Sandy was directly involved with several major incidents in Contra Costa County, including the plunge of a school bus from Yuba City off of the Interstate 680/Marina Vista off-ramp in Martinez in May 1976 that killed 28 students and an adult adviser (the second-worst bus disaster in U.S. history), and the March 1969 bombing of a Shell Oil fuel pipeline crossing San Leandro Creek near the unincorporated community of Canyon, southwest of Moraga.