Ceremony in Century Center provides comfort
to those who provide
By LAUREEN
FAGAN
South Bend, IN, Tribune Staff Writer
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A memorial service Wednesday at the Century Center in South Bend honors police officers killed in the line of duty. For each name read during the ceremony, state police officers from Indiana, Michigan and Illinois placed a flower on a candlelit altar. Tribune Photo GENE KAISER |
SOUTH BEND -- Four came from Ohio. Three were from Illinois. Four more were from Michigan. Five came from Indiana.
But none of them were there.
Not Patrolman Douglas Adams, an Elkhart officer who died in an on-duty vehicle accident last March.
Not Fort Wayne police officer Bradley Matteson, who died in another accident last October.
But in a subdued ceremony of hymns, bagpipes and candlelight, their names -- and the names of other law enforcement officers who have died in the line of duty since July 2000 -- were honored Wednesday at South Bend's Century Center.
The memorial, held as part of this week's International Conference of Police Chaplains event, also honored those chaplains who have died.
"It's of the upmost importance to remember them," said Molly Winters, whose husband, Greg, was shot in 1990 while on duty with the Muncie Police Department.
"The ultimate fear of survivors is that the things (their loved ones) did will be forgotten," said Winters, now national president of the Concerns of Police Survivors organization.
Winters' speech to about 500 chaplains came after Cpl. Fred Eyster of the South Bend Police Department led the color guard contingent, and Imam Waliyyuddin Beyah, a South Bend chaplain, read the invocation.
"Why did God let it happen?" Winters said as she described her searching questions, anger and confusion in the wake of his death.
"How could my God let someone put five bullets in the back of my husband's head? How could my God let us live in a world where such blatant disregard for life and hatefulness exist?" Winters asked.
It's those questions that police chaplains now help people explore, she said.
"Ten years ago, the chaplain program was nothing like it is now," she said. "People have come to see how necessary it is."
That need was familiar to three U.S. Border Patrol officers who attended the event. In 1998, the border patrol lost eight officers in one year, said Patrol-Agent Chaplain Jim Stout of the Tucson, Ariz., sector.
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Molly Winters addresses police chaplains from around the world who attended the memorial service. Winters lost her husband, Muncie officer Greg Winters, after he was shot by a prisoner he was transporting in late 1990. Winters is now president of the Concerns of Police Survivors group. Tribune Photo GENE KAISER |
The agency's formal chaplaincy program was born as part of their response to those crises.
"We developed plans to meet the needs of families, to do peer support," Stout said.
For fellow agent Brian Henderson of San Diego, the need for law enforcement chaplains mirrors the larger society's trend toward accepting life's spiritual dimensions.
The agents came to honor not only the humanity of their fallen comrades, but the sacrifices that their families have made, said Patrol-Agent Chaplain Francisco Lopez Jr., of the Del Rio, Texas, sector.
"It's a show of unity," Lopez said. "Despite faith background, or economic status, or anything you could possibly construe as a source of division -- here, it's not."
Rabbi Dov Klein came from Evanston, Ill., to honor the memory of Lt. Robert Heytow, whose on-duty death from natural causes was the department's first since the 1930s.
At the time, Klein sought to create a sense of closure for his officers, who found comfort -- even though they're not Jewish, he said -- in the funeral tradition of each person placing a handful of dirt at the graveside.
But Wednesday, Klein sought closure for himself. "It was a powerful ceremony," he said.
The Rev. Jim Wieging, an FBI chaplain in Detroit, comes to honor the officers. In some years, it's because he knew them personally and has already said their funeral Mass.
Still, he remembers one Detroit chaplain who also died in the line of duty, after a barricaded subject agreed to talk but shot the chaplain instead.
Like Wieging, Phyllis Poe thinks the chaplains need the memorial service, too. Poe, a Southern Baptist, serves as police chaplain for the Oklahoma City Police Department.
She worked 21 straight days after the April 19, 1995, bombing there. Six years later, Poe said, she is still working the same incident.
"We developed compassion fatigue," Poe said. "It's a secondary trauma when you've absorbed so much of everyone else's grief."
This year, two Oklahoma City police officers died. Poe attended the memorial service to honor them.
"It seems like all we do is bury people," she said. "And when they died, it was like it all came back."
But Poe, like the other chaplains, found the memorial a comfort.
"We ministers and chaplains are just as human," she said .
Staff writer Laureen Fagan: lfagan@sbtinfo.com (219) 235-6054