Monday afternoon, a stone carver showed up at the police and fire memorial on Wells Street and went to work cutting the name of a man who has long been dead into a stone at the memorial.

The memorial carries the names of nine police officers and 16 firefighters who have died in the line of duty in Allen County, their names ordered according to the dates they died.

The name etched into the memorial on Monday, though, was out of order. It was the name Donald R. “Charley” Knepple, who was killed on the job in 1997 but wasn’t recognized for years and even eligible to be on the memorial.

It was 14 years ago that a former juvenile corrections officer who had been convicted of attempted child molesting pulled out a gun during a meeting with Knepple and a counselor, Steven Tielker, and shot both men dead and then fatally shot himself.

The shooting, which took place at a Family & Children’s Services center on South Calhoun Street, stunned the city for several reasons. Three people were dead, but one of them, Knepple, 48, was a probation officer. People didn’t shoot their probation officers, especially someone like Knepple, who was widely viewed as a compassionate, understanding man.

It was never publicized, but it also turned out that because Knepple was a probation officer working with criminals, and though he died while on the job, his death was not regarded as a “line of duty” death. He wasn’t viewed as a law enforcement officer, and therefore his wife and two children were not eligible for death benefits normally available to families of police and firefighters who died in the line of duty.

In the next year and a half, the Indiana General Assembly quietly addressed that issue. It changed the law to say that probation officers, if authorized by a judge and properly trained, were authorized to carry firearms. It also designated their deaths on the job as line-of-duty deaths. It was made retroactive to the day before Knepple was killed.

Knepple’s widow did receive a death benefit, but his children still weren’t offered benefits given to children of regular police.

Still, Knepple’s name wasn’t recorded on any memorial. When the Law Enforcement/Firefighters Memorial was begun in 2005, the organization’s board of directors set up bylaws saying that only safety workers whose deaths were in the line of duty could have their names on the memorial.

Knepple’s death still wasn’t sufficiently recognized on the state and federal level as a death in the line of duty. So, his name didn’t go on the memorial.

Jerry Vandeveer, president of the memorial, was well aware of Knepple’s murder, but the bylaws prevented his name from going on the memorial.

“His name isn’t anywhere that I know of,” Vandeveer said. (Knepple’s name has been placed on a memorial in Indianapolis, however.)

Not until recently did Vandeveer learn that state and federal authorities had recognized Knepple’s death as being in the line of duty.

“I didn’t know until this year,” Vandeveer said.

So Monday afternoon, a special masking was applied to the stone in preparation for etching Knepple’s name onto the memorial. The mayor, who had worked with Knepple in the late 1970s, showed up and helped peel away the stencil exposing his name.

Sometime today, the stonecutter will go to work. Just a few days before the memorial’s official dedication, which will take place at 11 a.m. Saturday, Knepple’s name will go down on the memorial as having died in the line of duty.