BONNE TERRE, Mo. — Bonne Terre is a small, tight-knit community.
The police department only has about 10 officers on staff.
The impact of Officer Lane Burns' loss feels like losing a loved one to this community.
His fiancé Shannon Chasteen spoke emotionally at the scene Thursday morning.
"I just want to give him a hug, and I want someone to tell me that he's OK, but he's not," Chasteen said.
Chasteen heard the call from the dispatch app on her phone that lead to her future husband's death.
"I texted him be safe and about 3-4 minutes later I heard the third officer yelling for help on the radio that he needed back up because two officers had been shot," Chasteen said.
She found out later at the hospital that one of those shots took Burns' life.
"He loved what he did, he loved the department that he worked for most of all and from what I've been told from the hospital and from the other officers he went down with a fight," Chasteen said.
"It's a shock for everybody at this point because he was such a great person to be around," Former Leadington Mayor Dustin Winick said.
Winick met Burns back in 2014, when Burns was just starting his law enforcement career on the Leadington Force.
"It makes this such a tragedy for everybody, because you're not losing one officer for one department, you're losing one officer from three or four departments," Winick said.
With Bonne Terre officers and the neighboring departments working together, Burns loss is felt throughout the entire community.
"He loved the officers that he worked with. he loved his Chief. He told me that if he were to ever get out of law enforcement he would never work anywhere other than Bonne Terre," Chasteen said.
"It's heartbreaking to know that he went into this just thinking he's going in to check on a disturbance to see what's going on and he loses his life over it because of nonsense," Winick said.