Services planned this week for police officer, utility worker
Waltham police Officer Paul J. Tracey and National Grid worker Roderick Jackson, the two men killed when a hit-andrun driver crashed into a work detail last week, will be remembered in funeral services this week.
Mourners can pay respects to Tracey, a 28-year veteran of the Waltham Police Department, at Our Lady Comforter of the Afflicted Church on Trapelo Road in Waltham from 3 to 8 p.m. Thursday, according to a notice posted on the website of Brasco & Son Memorial Funeral Home.
A funeral Mass for Tracey will be said at 10 a.m. Friday at the same church, according to the notice. He will then be buried with police honors at Mount Feake Cemetery in Waltham.
The notice said Tracey “was killed tragically while doing what he loved most, protecting and serving the citizens of Waltham.”
Tracey made headlines several times in his career, including in August 2018 when, while on vacation, he helped save the life of a woman experiencing a drug overdose at a beach in South Yarmouth, according to media reports from the time.
Last week, Jim Tracey recalled his brother as a “tremendous husband, father, uncle, and brother, and loved by everybody in the community.”
“Anybody who knew him, his laughter, his compassion — it will be missed,” he said.
Tracey, 58, and Jackson, 36, of Cambridge, were killed in the crash, which injured two other workers.
Jackson’s brother Manuel Asprilla-Hassan said the family is planning to hold memorial services on Saturday, though they were still working out details when he spoke to a reporter.
Asprilla-Hassan said people knew Jackson as “Kito.” Their mother, Norma, who’s from Panama, nicknamed him a shortened version of the Spanish “Poquito” — meaning “small” — when he was a child. Though Jackson ended up being a 6-foot-5, 205-pound basketball and football player at Framingham State University, the name stuck, he said.
Asprilla-Hassan, 30, said Jackson grew up quickly, helping their single mother look after him and their two younger sisters, now 27 and 24.
“The day I was born, he was taking care of everything,” he said. “He grew up early. He wasn’t really a child.”
He added, “We didn’t just lose a family member — we lost everything.”
The alleged driver in the crash, Peter J. Simon, 54, was ordered held without bail Thursday at his arraignment in Waltham District Court on two counts of manslaughter and other charges in connection with the crash. He has pleaded not guilty.
Authorities say Simon carved a trail of chaos through Waltham on Wednesday afternoon, first causing a car crash as he tried to make an abrupt Uturn. He then allegedly sped off and crashed his pickup truck into the work detail, prosecutors said, killing the two men and injuring the others. He fled on foot and banged on the door of a nearby house, yelling about police, according to authorities.
When a police officer showed up, Simon allegedly pulled a knife and “essentially stole the cruiser and led the police on another high-speed chase” before crashing, a prosecutor said in court.
‘Anybody who knew him, his laughter, his compassion — it will be missed.’
JIM TRACEY, recalling his brother, Waltham police Officer Paul Tracey