Newlywed with six kids among victims
FIVE OFFICERS SLAIN
Authorities say five officers were killed and at least seven others wounded in the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
❚ Brent Thompson, 43, had worked as an officer with the Dallas Area Rapid Transit authority for the last seven years. There he found love, marrying another transit officer within the last two weeks.
Thompson had six grown children from a previous marriage and had recently welcomed his third grandchild, according to Tara Thornton, a friend of Thompson’s daughter, Lizzie. “He loved being a police officer. He had a passion for it,” Thornton said.
❚ Patrick Zamarripa had an urge to serve — first in the Navy, where his family said he did three tours in Iraq, then back home as a Dallas police officer.
“Patrick would bend over backward to help anybody. He’d give you his last dollar if he had it,” his father, Rick Zamarripa, said.
Zamarripa, to have turned 33 next month, was married with a toddler and schoolage stepchild. He joined the Navy after high school in Fort Worth, serving eight years on active duty and then in the reserves, said the Navy.
“He went over there (to Iraq) and didn’t get hurt at all, and he comes back to the states and gets killed,” his father said.
❚ Michael Krol always wanted to be a cop. After high school, he took a job as a security guard at a Michigan hospital then parlayed that experience into a job working in the Wayne County jail system.
The Michigan native finally achieved his goal in Dallas. His Michigan family crowded around to watch him hoist a certificate saying he had graduated from the Dallas Police Academy. It was April 25, 2008.
❚ It was hard to miss Lorne Ahrens.
The 6-foot-5, 300-pound former semi-pro football player could turn heads just by showing up, said his father-in-law, Charlie Buckingham. “He was a big ol’ boy,” Buckingham said. “Big as he is, just walking down the street he cut a real figure.”
Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens was a 14-year veteran of the department who may have quelled a lot of potential resistance with his bulk, a shaved head and heavily tattooed arms.
❚ Sgt. Michael Smith was an officer who received outstanding performance awards, including a “Cops’ Cop” award from the Dallas Police Association.
Married almost 20 years, with two children in their young teens, he had joined the police force in 1989 after earning a business degree.
“He loved his job and the guys on the force, and he loved his wife and kids,” Vanessa Smith, a family friend, told The Dallas Morning News.