Thousands pay respects to Dallas’ fallen
Less than a week after Dallas police officers were ambushed near the end of a protest march, thousands held hands Wednesday, coming together in separate services to honor three of the five men killed that night. Officer Brent Thompson, 43, had married a fellow Dallas Area Rapid Transit officer two weeks before his death. He was the first transit officer killed since the agency’s police force was founded in 1989. Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, 48, of the Dallas Police Department had a wife, a detective he met while on the force. Police Sgt. Michael
Smith, 55, had a 14-year-old daughter who recently celebrated her eighth-grade graduation at the same church where parishioners recited a private Mass of Christian burial.
At Ahrens’ funeral at Prestonwood Baptist Church here, Pastor Rick Owen called on the family, friends and fellow officers who had gathered to repeat after him: “We can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us.”
Individually, Owen called on Katrina Ahrens, Lorne Ahrens’ wife, and his children, Sorcha and Magnus, to say those words, the body of their husband and father a few feet away.
At The Potter’s House in Dallas, Thompson’s wife, Emily, addressed hundreds of officers who had gathered, delivering a message of strength to her fellow officers sitting in the megachurch that celebrity Bishop T.D. Jakes calls home.
“To the coward that tried to break me and my brothers and sisters, know that your hate made us stronger,” she said of Micah Johnson, 25, who injured nine other officers and two civilians Thursday at the end of a Black Lives Matter protest. Johnson was killed when Dallas police detonated an explosive delivered by what had been one of the department’s bomb-defusing robots.
Dallas officers Michael Krol, 40, and Patrick Zamarripa, 32, will have their funerals Friday and Saturday, respectively. Smith will have a public service Thursday at a Dallas church.