Officers of the Week- Off. Igor Soldo and Off. Alyn Beck

by Dan Samaria
Publisher/YC
June 14, 2014

Editor’s Note: We at the Chronicle, will never forget those police officers, who have given their lives on a daily bases to protect us all.. Each week we will honor one with their stories.

This week we are honoring: Police Officer Igor Soldo and Police Officer Alyn Beck

Both officers were shot and killed from ambush while eating lunch at a pizza restaurant in the 300 block of North Nellis Boulevard. Two subjects, a male and a female, approached them at their table and shot them execution style without warning. Despite being wounded, one of the officers returned fire before being incapacitated. The subjects then stole both officers’ weapons and ammunition and ran to a nearby Walmart, where they shot and killed a civilian. Responding officers followed the two into the Walmart and exchanged gunfire with the two. The male subject was killed by rifle fire from a responding officer and the female then committed suicide. Officer Soldo had served with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for eight years.

 

Bio & Incident Details

Age: 31
Tour: 8 years, 2 months
Cause: Gunfire
Incident Date: 6/8/2014
Weapon: Gun; Unknown type
Suspect: 1 shot and killed; 1 committed suicide

 

Bio & Incident Details

Age: 41
Tour: 13 years, 10 months
Cause: Gunfire
Incident Date: 6/8/2014
Weapon: Gun; Unknown type
Suspect: 1 shot and killed; 1 committed suicide\

Officer Beck had served with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for 14 years.

 

Source: Odmp

Editor’s Note: We would like to know what you think dsthebugman@bellsouth.net

Officer of the Week – Police Officer Glen K. Pettit

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Glen K. Pettit
Shield 3815
Police Academy Video Production Unit
12/09/2001

 

 

 

 

 

by Dan Samaria
Publisher/YC
November 14, 2009

Police Officer Glen K. Pettit
Shield 3815
Police Academy Video Production Unit
(recovered)

Glen Pettit took on a lot and never let it slow him down. In addition to being a New York City police officer, he was a TV news cameraman, a freelance photographer, a volunteer fireman and a devotee of Irish tradition and music.

Then there was the endless flood of gifts: from care packages of Skippy peanut butter for friends in East Asia to the prized seat he arranged for his mother at a Christmas Eve mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, just a row from the mayor and police commissioner. “If he loved you he loved you completely, and he was going to take care of you,” recalled Tara Felice, one of his six siblings.

Officer Pettit, 30, had joined the department’s video production unit, which makes training and promotional videos. “His greatest love was being behind a camera, composing a shot,” said his partner, Officer Scott Nicholson. The video unit responded to the World Trade Center attack hoping to get footage for an annual promotional tape it makes called “Heroes.”

“Glen was telling us, ‘I’m gonna get in close; you stay and get the establishing shots, get the rescue workers responding,’ ” Officer Nicholson recalled. “I looked over and Glen was running past me, camera in hand, heading toward the towers.”

– The New York Times 12/09/2001

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the Week – Police Officer John W. Perry

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer John W. Perry
Shield 3266
40 Precinct
(recovered)
2/7/2002

 

 

 

 

by Dan Samaria
Publisher/YC
November 5, 2009

Police Officer John W. Perry
Shield 3266
40 Precinct
(recovered)

John Perry knew he had only one life to live, and so he immersed himself in many.

He was a New York City police officer, a lawyer, an actor, a linguist, an active libertarian, a social worker helping abused children, a philosopher searching for his religion, and a softhearted soul who opened his wallet and his home to near strangers.

“He was the kind of person who enjoyed life,” said his mother, Patricia Perry of Seaford. “He was a libertarian who thought some rules weren’t necessary. Whatever he believed in, he followed.”

Perry, 38, was last seen helping a woman out of a trade center tower when it collapsed on Sept. 11. His original mission that morning had been to turn in his badge, file his retirement papers and embark on a new career. Instead, he retrieved the badge and rushed off with fellow officers to help evacuate people from the towers.

“Apparently John was too slow carrying this woman,” said Arnold Wachtel, Perry’s close friend. “But knowing John, he would never leave that lady unattended. That was just like him to help people.”

Perry’s generosity was boundless. His two-bedroom apartment in a public housing complex near Lincoln Center was known as a free bed and breakfast. Vladimir Azbel, a longtime friend, said he once called Perry because he had $1,700 in parking tickets. “He said, ‘Yeah, don’t worry. Just don’t get anymore tickets,'” Azbel said. “Later on I found out that he just paid them.”

Perry was diagnosed with a learning disability in the first grade and only learned to tie his shoes and read by the age of 9. But he overcame those difficulties. His love affair with learning foreign languages was sparked in the eighth grade when he began studying French.

He was outgoing, unafraid to approach a native speaker and attempt to speak the language, said his mother. The list of languages he spoke included Spanish, Swedish, Russian and Portuguese.

Perry studied law at New York University Law School, practiced immigration law with a friend after graduating and then went to the police academy. Eventually, he took a position investigating and disciplining police officers’ minor infractions.

In his spare time, Perry took parts as an extra in movies and TV shows such as “NYPD Blue.” He volunteered as an investigator for the Kings County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. He also was a board member of the Nassau Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“At board meetings … he sort of out libertarianed us,” executive director Barbara Bernstein said. “If someone thought it wasn’t the right timing or [a case] wasn’t winnable, he was an idealist. He made us justify what we were doing.”

Perry also had explored many religions, attending various services and reading about each extensively. He was converting to Judaism and often attended the Actors Temple in midtown Manhattan, where Rabbi Noach Valley talked about Perry for his Rosh Hashanah sermon days after the tragedy. “He was never bored, because his life was brim-full of holy service to others,” Noach told his congregations. “Here was a onetime atheist living a life of kedushah, of closeness to God.”

– New York Newsday Victim Database 2/7/2002

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the Week – Police Officer Brian G. McDonnell

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Brian G. McDonnell
Shield 6889
ESU-1
9/15/2001

Police Officer Brian G. McDonnell
Shield 6889
ESU-1

Police officer Brian McDonnell wanted to change the world, and he’d do anything to save a life. A member of New York City’s emergency service unit, his squad was among the first to respond to the World Trade Center disaster Tuesday.

“He thought about others before himself,” said Glenn Gering, a close friend who grew up with McDonnell, 38, in Wantagh. “He wanted to change the world,” Gering said.

The Emergency Service Unit is made up of about 350 men and women who risk their lives to save others. Fourteen members of the unit are unaccounted for.

McDonnell, who has been a police officer for more than 10 years and was a member of the armed forces before that, is a devoted husband and father of two, Gering said.

McDonnell was supposed to go to Gering’s house tomorrow for cake and coffee. “Unfortunately, because of our schedules, we didn’t get together as often as we would have liked,” Gering said.

“I hope all of America will never forget this horrific act of terror,” Gering said in a letter to Newsday, vand more importantly, never forget my friend, Brian McDonnell, an American hero.”

– New York Newsday Victim Database 9/15/2001

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the Week – Police Officer Ronald Kloepfer

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Ronald Kloepfer
Shield 22403
ESS-7
11/22/2001

Police Officer Ronald Kloepfer
Shield 22403
ESS-7

Within the tight fraternity of the New York City Police Department is an even tighter fraternity ‹ the 25 men, from officers to lieutenants, who wear the blue jerseys of the department’s lacrosse team. Ronny Kloepfer, 39, a sniper with the Emergency Service Unit, was their leader. He was founder, coach and midfielder of the six-year-old team, which had a 4-2 record in the annual charity game against its arch-rival, the New York City Fire Department.

Officer Kloepfer, who played for Seewanaka High School and then Adelphi University, somehow fit the team into a schedule that included his elite police position, a side job as a contractor and the demands of a young family. His wife, Dawn, and three children Jaime, 11; Taylor, 9; and Casey, 5 were always on the sidelines, as Officer Kloepfer was when his two daughters played their games. Casey was still too young, Mrs. Kloepfer said, but had his own stick from the day he was born.

From March to May, the team practiced two or three times a week, from 5 to 7 p.m., at an abandoned junior high school near Officer Kloepfer’s home in Franklin Square, N.Y. Now that he is gone, three teammates will run the team, a task Officer Kloepfer managed alone. “We don’t know how he did it,” said Detective Craig Carson. “We took him for granted almost.”

– The New York Times 11/22/2001

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the Week – Police Officer Robert Fazio

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Robert Fazio
Shield 6667
13 Precinct
3/24/2002

Police Officer Robert Fazio
Shield 6667
13 Precinct
(recovered)

At 41, Robert Fazio Jr. was still single. People would ask him when he was going to marry. But the pressure of society’s conventions, said his sister, Carole Lovero, could not affect his decisions.

“He was a happy person, he was happy within himself,” she said. “He would have gotten married if he had found the right person, but he was happy doing what he was doing.”

What he was doing, outside of his job as a patrolman for the New York Police Department, was working on motorcycles, cars, boats and houses for anybody who needed a hand. “Half my neighbors, he fixed their cars,” said Officer Fazio’s father, Robert Sr. Shortly after he got his driver’s license, Robert Fazio Jr. could be seen on the weekend in front of the family’s house in South Hempstead, on Long Island, hoisting engines in and out of cars with the help of a sturdy tree limb.

He had worked for the Police Department for 17 years and was called from his precinct in the East 20’s on Sept. 11 to help people out of the shopping plaza beneath the World Trade Center. He had less than three years to go until retirement, his father said, and planned on setting up a motorcycle and car repair shop somewhere near his home in Freeport, N.Y., with a friend from junior high school, Gino Lanza. But though he had no children of his own, he spent as much time as he could baby-sitting for his nephew, Michael Lovero, and friends’ children, who nicknamed him the Tickle Monster

– The New York Times 3/24/2002

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the Week – Police Officer Mark J. Ellis

 
Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Mark J. Ellis
Shield 11441
Transit Bureau, District 4
12/28/2001

Police Officer Mark J. Ellis
Shield 11441
Transit Bureau, District 4
(recovered)

Just a couple of weeks before the World Trade Center attacks, an off-duty Mark Ellis was visiting another fellow police officer and his wife at their Commack home.

He held their days-old baby girl in his arms and, moved by the tenderness of her new life, decided to put his plans in fast forward.

Ellis, 26, told his girlfriend of six years, Stephanie Porzio, that he wanted to marry her and have a family of his own. The next week, they would go shopping for rings.

They went to a jewelry store, but did not settle on anything because they wanted something that would properly symbolize what they felt for each other.

“He really just had a love for me, and I had a love for him that most people don’t find,” Porzio said.

That same Sunday, Ellis rode for the first time on the fishing boat he had purchased from his uncle. Other relatives were there, and Ellis was nervous about handling the 24-footer, but he drove it seamlessly on Long Island Sound.

With marriage plans under sail and his law enforcement career on track, Ellis felt he was about to create the life he wanted, surrounded by his friends and relatives.

But Ellis, a transit officer in downtown Manhattan’s fourth district and a lifelong Huntington resident, was on Delancey Street two days later with partner Ramon Suarez, when they got frantic radio calls.

They commandeered a taxicab and arrived on time to help terrified people out of the World Trade Center buildings. Ellis’ partner was caught in a news photograph sometime before the tower crashed, helping someone to an ambulance. Ellis sacrificed his life also, in the quiet and heroic way that relatives admired about him. His body was recovered before the Christmas Eve weekend, not too far from where his partner had fallen.

“Mark was making his plans to climb the career ladder, sail the Seven Seas on the boat, and God called him. He answered God’s call, and he answered that call while helping others,” said his uncle, Kenneth Nilsen, 40, who was among those who eulogized Ellis.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani attended the standing-room-only funeral Monday at the Dix Hills Evangelical Free Church, praising Ellis’ courage. Ellis, who had received four medals for excellence, is the youngest New York City police officer to have been killed in the attacks.

Ellis’ parents, Elaine and Joseph Ellis, and a sister, Tammy Gardella of Georgia, survive him.

In the weeks after he was missing, the call he had been waiting for came from the Secret Service, accepting him as a candidate to the elite force. Relatives saw that as a posthumous recognition to his dedication and valor.

A 1999 criminal justice graduate from SUNY Farmingdale, Ellis graduated from the police academy in 1998. Formerly an auto mechanic, he liked cars and the outdoors. But he was also a prankster at the station house, where he often walked around shaving with his electric razor before going on duty.

Once, to effect a funny revenge on other officers who had played a prank on him, Ellis bought glue and sealed the offenders’ lockers shut. Another day, he conspired with his partner to stick fake bullet holes on the cars of other officers. By the same token, Ellis was willing to help whenever his colleagues, friends or relatives needed him.

“He was very fair and kind. and he was always there for me,” said Eric Semler, his partner for more than three years. ” … He was a good cop, a very good cop.”

– New York Newsday Victim Database 12/28/2001

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the week – Police Officer Vincent G. Danz

Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Vincent G. Danz
Shield 2166
ESS-3
10/27/2001

Police Officer Vincent G. Danz
Shield 2166
ESS-3
(recovered)

Vincent G. Danz was a member of the New York Police Department’s Emergency Service Unit’s third squad in the Bronx. The elite unit’s officers are experts in areas like psychology, rappelling, scuba diving, first aid and marksmanship. Officer Danz liked the excitement and challenge of the E.S.U.

Officer Danz, of Farmingdale, N.Y., was also a husband, and a father of three daughters, including an 8-month-old. With the two older girls, he liked to watch “SpongeBob SquarePants,” a Nickelodeon cartoon.

“He was a special breed,” Felix Danz said of his brother, who at 38 was the youngest of nine children. “I’d always ask him if he had any good jobs lately. He’d say, ‘Yeah, I had this subway “pin job,” ‘ where some poor soul was taken out by the subway, or even worse, still alive.”

“The E.S.U. guys are the ones who go on the tracks, find some way to lift up the train and get those people out,” Mr. Danz continued. “He wasn’t boastful. He wasn’t one of those guys with the swelled chest at the bar. He loved his work and the guys that he worked with. They would die for one another. I think that goes globally for the N.Y.P.D. My brother and his partner went into the trade center without any questions. They knew what to do and how to do it. Unfortunately, this thing was bigger than either of them.”

– The New York Times 10/27/2001

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the week – Police Officer Jerome M. Dominguez

Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer Jerome M. Dominguez
Shield 10003
ESS-3
1/11/2002

Police Officer Jerome M. Dominguez
Shield 10003
ESS-3

Jerome Domínguez had gone diving off the coast of Long Island with some police pals who were also his friends outside the job.

After exploring the chambers of a shipwrecked boat, they glided up slowly and started popping up, one after another, to take their places on their boat.

But they noticed one of them, another police officer, was missing. And, without much hesitation, Domínguez was the one to jump right back in the water.

Returning all the way to the bottom, Domínguez found his friend lying unconscious inside the dilapidated ship with insufficient oxygen left. Pulling him up, Domínguez swam toward the light of the surface, alternatively taking on and off his oxygen mask to share it with the unconscious man.

Risking his own life, Domínguez saved his pal’s more than two years ago.

But it was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that the decorated New York City cop offered all he had for the sake of others. In fact, Domínguez did it regularly, whenever he encountered people in danger or on duty as a member of the department’s elite emergency services unit.

Domínguez, a West Islip resident who grew up in the Pelham Bay section of the Bronx, was at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and, according to reports from colleagues to his family, was making his way upward in the building when the north tower collapsed. He remains missing.

One of two sons of devout Catholic parents who spend much of their time trying to spread the faith, Domínguez, 37, had his own sense of mission.

” I once told him, ‘Jerome, don’t strain yourself so much’,” recalled his mother, Gladys Domínguez of the Bronx. ” And he said, ‘Look, Mommy, you save souls and I will save bodies.'”

After graduating from Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx, Domínguez entered the police academy in the mid-’80s. Following his July 1985 graduation, he became a patrol officer for a local precinct in the Bronx. Two years later, Domínguez, also in the Air Force Reserve, joined the highway division.

During the following years, he became committed to his job of helping people on the roads. Even when off duty, Domínguez carried power-cutting and other tools in his vehicle to help stalled drivers or to extricate victims at accident scenes, his relatives said.

Once, while heading to Texas for Air Force training in 1999, Domínguez encountered an overturned school bus with several children inside. He quickly took charge and rescued more than a dozen children before the bus burst into flames. His feat earned him praise, and he appeared on a television news showand was mentioned in newspapers that day. The Air Force offered him a permanent job, but he preferred an offer he got from the NYPD to join the emergency unit.

” He enjoyed himself helping people in some way, morally or physically,” said his father, Geronimo Domínguez, a physician who hosts a bible reading television program in Spanish. ” … He was very courageous.”

Besides diving, Domínguez left time to cruise on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, sometimes along the Eastchester Bay coast near his parents’ house, formerly a waterfront home and fishing retreat of New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

In his last conversation with his father, some days before Sept. 11, Domínguez discussed the idea of a heavenly place for souls to rest in happiness after death. His parents find comfort in their strong belief that Domínguez is already there. ” He loved helping others, and there isn’t in the Bible or anywhere else a greater love than that, giving your life for others,” his father said.

– New York Newsday Victim Database 1/11/2002

Source: NYP Angels

Officer of the week – Police Officer John D’Allara

Remember September 11, 2001
Angels Among Us

Police Officer John D’Allara
Shield 4011
ESS-2
September 15,2001

Police Officer John D’Allara
Shield 4011
ESS-2
(recovered)

John D’Allara, a member of the New York Police Department’s emergency service office in Harlem, was a rescue specialist on the scene at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. During his 14 years on the job, he pried, cajoled or otherwise extracted a broad array of life forms from danger, dealing with a menagerie of exotic animals. Spider monkeys. Bats. Squirrels. One time, he saved an iguana. But he helped plenty of people, too.

“One time, we had a kid trapped in an elevator, with his head trapped between a beam and the elevator,” said Sgt. Lee Hom, who worked with Officer D’Allara for five years in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. “He kept the kid calm, and we got him out.”

A physical education teacher before he joined the Police Department, Officer D’Allara, 47, who lived with his wife and two sons, Johnny, 7, and Nicholas, 3, in Rockland County, intended to go back to teaching. “He loved the Police Department,” said his brother, Dan. “But he was counting his paychecks to retirement.” – The New York Times 1/29/2002

Source: NYP Angels

Next Page »