On Tuesday, as a cold rain fell and hundreds of mourners gathered to pay their respects to the slain officer, Detective Joseph Seals, the mood in this city of a quarter million residents had shifted to one of collective grief.
Around 10 a.m., the streets fell silent as the hearse bearing Seals’ coffin made its half-mile journey from the McLaughlin Funeral Home to St. Aeden’s Church, where the detective’s funeral Mass was held. As part of the procession, about a dozen police officers on horses and hundreds of others on flashing motorcycles led the way.
A troop of bagpipers walked in front of the hearse, while behind it marched a riderless black horse draped in a white blanket embroidered with Seals’ name. As legions of officers accompanied the car, the only audible sound was the steady beat of a drum guiding their steps.
Along Bergen Avenue, the main route of the procession, columns of officers bearing flags and ceremonial rifles lined the sidewalks. A flag, at least three-stories tall, was suspended from a crane.
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When the hearse came to a stop, the officers stood at attention, their arms raised in salute. The coffin, wrapped in an American flag and covered with plastic to protect it from the driving rain, was carried past Seals’ family and into the church.
Some of the police officers assembled came from as far as Baltimore; Fort Worth, Texas; and Boston. Others, from closer to home, streamed toward the church all morning, bringing traffic to a standstill.
All of them were there to stand shoulder to shoulder under gray skies to honor a fellow officer.
“We’re here to pay respects,” said Lt. Frank Todd of the Edison Police Department in New Jersey. “This is something we all face. Any day, it could be any one of us.”
Officer J.R. Faigin of the Fort Worth Police Department, who arrived from Texas early Tuesday, added: “It’s important to stand up. To stand for our brothers and sisters, so that their families feel our support.”
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Attorney General William Barr was also in attendance, but those gathered were not just law enforcement officials mourning a fallen brother. Members of four mosques in Jersey City had set up a tent between the church and the funeral home and were offering officers coffee and doughnuts.
“We thought, something simple to show our support,” said Yasser Abduaalla, manager of a nearby mosque, Masjid As-Salam. The mosque’s imam, he said, was at the funeral itself.
Annette Benitez, 52, has a 29-year-old son who is a Jersey City police officer. She and her daughter were outside St. Aedan’s.
Her son was friendly with Seals, she said, and, as a mother, she wanted to be present at the funeral procession.
“If you don’t walk in these shoes, you wouldn’t be able to understand,” she said about having a child on the force. “The long late nights. The phone rings. The worry. My heart goes out.”
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Seals was killed last week in a confrontation that began a chain of events in which five more people, including the two attackers who gunned him down, died in what officials say was an anti-Semitic attack on the kosher grocery store.
The others who were killed — Leah Mindel Ferencz, who helped run the market; Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student who was there shopping; and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, an immigrant who worked at the store — have been mourned at separate services.
Before Seals’ funeral, on Monday afternoon, several hundred people gathered for a wake at McLaughlin Funeral Home, waiting in the cold to pay tribute.
Alex Lalaoui, a local youth soccer coach, did not know the slain officer, but he nonetheless felt compelled to attend the wake out of respect for the police force.
“When something happens to them it happens to my family,” Lalaoui said. “Between today and tomorrow, to me it is a national moment of honoring our officer.”
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Inside the two-story brick funeral home Monday, Seals’ body was laid out in a half-open brown coffin. A pair of white gloves and a police hat sat on a table to the left. His wife and several of the couple’s five children shook hands with each mourner who passed by.
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Next to the coffin were photos of the Seals family on vacation. Flower arrangements — including one sent jointly by the New York City Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration — filled two rooms, adding splashes of color amid the beige walls and dim lights.
A framed picture in a hallway showed Seals and a partner outside a store on Martin Luther King Drive. Above that was a framed front page from The Jersey Journal of Dec. 27, 2008. “Rape Foiled. Hero cops save woman from sex attack,” the headline said.
Seals joined the Jersey City Police Department in 2006 after spending several years with the Hudson County Corrections Department. He was born in Jersey City, graduated from high school in Bayonne, just to the south, and lived with his wife and children in North Arlington, about 8 miles north and west of the streets he patrolled.
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He had been promoted to detective in November 2017, and he was most recently assigned to a citywide initiative geared toward reducing shootings and making gun arrests.
“He was our leading police officer in removing guns from the street,” Michael Kelly, the city’s police chief, said last week. “Dozens and dozens of handguns he is responsible for removing from the street.”
On the day he was killed, Seals was apparently on his way to meet a confidential informer at a cemetery in Jersey City’s Greenville neighborhood, about 3 miles from the funeral home where friends, family members and colleagues gathered Monday.
He had been exchanging text messages with his mother about Christmas presents for his children, but he had stopped replying by around noon.
It was around that time, officials said, that Seals noticed a U-Haul van in Bayview cemetery. He was not in uniform and it was unclear whether he called for backup. He confronted a man and a woman who were in the van, whom authorities have identified as David Anderson and Francine Graham. They shot and killed him.
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From there, Anderson and Graham drove about a mile to the JC Kosher Supermarket. They stormed into the store, unleashing a fusillade and killing one of the store’s owners, an employee and a customer.
In the firefight that followed, the armed couple exchanged rounds with law enforcement officers from Jersey City, New York City, the state police and the FBI. When an armored police vehicle ultimately drove into the market, Anderson and Graham were found dead.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
