{"id":46792,"date":"2021-05-11T22:26:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-12T04:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/law-enforcement-honor-those-lost-in-line-of-duty\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:34:26","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:34:26","slug":"law-enforcement-honor-those-lost-in-line-of-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/law-enforcement-honor-those-lost-in-line-of-duty\/","title":{"rendered":"Law enforcement honor those lost in line of duty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A screenshot from the Farmington Police Department\u2019s Facebook page shows the memorial service law enforcement helped put on to honor fallen officers.<\/span>Courtesy of Farmington Police Department<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

FARMINGTON \u2013 San Juan County, New Mexico, law enforcement, including the Sheriff\u2019s Office, Farmington Police Department and Aztec Police Department, celebrated police memorial week Monday with a candlelight vigil to honor fallen officers.<\/p>\n

Sheriff Shane Ferrari said close to 50 people showed up at the Lions Wilderness Amphitheater to memorialize the fallen officers. Off to one side in the stands were rows of American flags with the blue stripe to honor officers killed in the line of duty.<\/p>\n

Alex Yazzie, a Navajo Police Department officer, was recognized as having been the last officer in the area to have died in the line of duty March 19, 2015.<\/p>\n

Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe said this was the eighth memorial service local law enforcement has put on in Farmington. The memorial did not happen last year because of COVID-19.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this community, we\u2019ve had several officers killed from several different agencies up here, defending San Juan County and defending our citizens,\u201d Hebbe said in a speech at the event. \u201cOur job isn\u2019t to get shot or stabbed, that isn\u2019t the job. The job is to do their very best to protect our communities every day, and I believe that our officers from all these different agencies are doing just that.\u201d<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just shootings or stabbings that are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of law enforcement officials all over the country, Ferrari said. COVID-19 was what Ferrari called \u201can invisible enemy\u201d for law enforcement.<\/p>\n

\u201cCOVID wasn\u2019t going to be something that was going to skip law enforcement and our occupation of dealing with people out in the street,\u201d Ferrari said. \u201cUnfortunately, we lost a lot of officers to COVID, and as a result, deaths in the line of duty went up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of the close contact law enforcement has with the public, Ferrari said officers who contracted COVID-19, most likely as a result of their duties and died, were considered to have died in the line of duty.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery day, our brave men and women in law enforcement put on their uniforms, kiss their families goodbye and walk out their doors not knowing if they will return,\u201d Ferrari said in his speech. \u201cThe sacrifice and hardships they endure should never be underappreciated. Let us never forget those law enforcement officers who died in the line of duty to make our community safe and protect the freedoms we enjoy.\u201d<\/p>\n

mmitchell@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

County Sheriff Shane Ferrari gives keynote address<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":46793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[799,28,29,443],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-46792","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-farmington","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter","tag-san-juan-county-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46792","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46792"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46792\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87031,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46792\/revisions\/87031"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/46793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46792"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=46792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}