◆ An off-duty police officer
who was killed in the Las Vegas shooting is honored with a posthumous promotion to Army first sergeant during a funeral service.
HENDERSON, Nev. — An off-duty police officer who was among 58 people killed in the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history was honored with a posthumous promotion to Army first sergeant during an emotional funeral service Friday.
Hundreds of police officers in uniform packed the Henderson church as pallbearers guided the casket of Charleston Hartfield, 34, which was draped in a U.S. flag.
Central Christian Church Pastor Mike Bodine told more than 2,000 people at the funeral that Hartfield, a Vegas police officer and U.S. Army Service member, had provided instructions ahead of time to be read at his memorial, which read in part: “If you’re reading this, then I’ve been called home.”
Along with heartfelt messages to his family, it also said people should not express sorrow about his passing but “enjoy themselves” and remember him for who he was. “The truth only,” it said. “None of that stuff about how great I was.”
Friends, family members and police and military officials then spent more than an hour breaking his rule — including Brig. Gen. Zachary Doser, head of the Nevada Army National Guard, who praised Hartfield, who served in Iraq, as the epitome of everything good about being an American, and posthumously promoted him to first sergeant.
The motorcade stopped traffic through downtown and along Las Vegas Boulevard, where people crowded pedestrian bridges beneath casino marquees as the blockslong procession passed the site of the Oct. 1 massacre at an open-air concert venue
near the Mandalay Bay resort.
Some saluted as a phalanx of more than 50 police motorcycles with lights flashing led a pickup bearing the flag-draped casket on a sunny and breezy day that had palm trees waving in the wind.
Fallen Las Vegas police officers have been honored with processions on the Strip at least since the February 2006 on-duty slaying of Sgt. Henry Prendes, who responded to a domestic disturbance call at a home and was killed by a man wielding an assault rifle. His funeral was also held at Central Christian Church, which can seat 4,500 people.
Hartfield, 34, was offduty when the shooting started at the Route 91 Harvest Festival country music concert, but department officials said he died trying to help others escape.
He was an 11-year police veteran, a married father of a son and a daughter, who served in the Army in Iraq and the Nevada Army National Guard. He worked in recent years as an instructor in the police bodycamera deployment program and coached youth football in his hometown of Henderson.
Hartfield recently authored a book about life as a police officer, called “Memoirs Of A Public Servant.”