Andrea Heath, a former police officer in Desert Hot Springs, California, died three years ago at forty-four years of age. Her untimely death was indisputably the result of trauma she suffered in the line of duty. Yet she was not the subject of an elaborate state funeral, nor was her name inscribed on the Officer Down Memorial Page. She was an authentic victim of what can legitimately be called a war on cops – specifically, the unending war waged within law enforcement against whistleblowers who cross the Blue Line.

Heath died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head on October 8, 2012 in the apartment she shared with Desert Hot Springs Police Officer James Henson and the couple's daughter.

Attorney Jerry Steering, who represents Heath's family in a federal lawsuit, describes her suicide as the culmination of an unremitting campaign of harassment by the police department and the bankrupt Desert Hot Springs municipal government in retaliation for her involvement in a federal civil rights investigation.

"They didn't pull the trigger, but they drove her to it," Steering asserts. "She told the truth and in response they retaliated by driving her out of the department, driving her out of her mind, which led to her suicide."

In October 2011, Heath, who had been cooperating with the FBI, testified before a federal grand jury regarding criminal misconduct by fellow officers and cover-ups undertaken by their superiors. The most egregious episode of that kind took place on Febuary 25, 2005, when a thugscrum led by Sgt. Anthony Sclafani beat, kicked, tased, and pepper-sprayed a handcuffed, intoxicated woman named Angelica Vargas and her boyfriend, Jamal White.

According to Heath's testimony, which eventually led to Sclafani's conviction on federal charges, the sergeant and several other officers "took turns kicking, stomping, and tasing [Vargas]… until she was unconscious and convulsing on the floor of the station, and when she crawled away from the officers, they pepper-sprayed her and continued to torture her." Sclafani would later insist that this was appropriate treatment for a person he characterized as "a piece of sh*t" who "was banging on the jail wall."

On previous occasions, recounts her lawsuit, Heath had "witnessed several other DHSPD police officers falsely arrest, beat, tase, pepper-spray, and otherwise torture detainees and arrestees." One of those incidents involved a man named Edward Moore, who made the tragic mistake of calling the police to report a hit-and-run in front of his home. When Moore tried to hand Sgt. Sclafani a note containing the license plate number of the vehicle, the officer – as if by reflex – responded by pepper-spraying and punching him.