BATON ROUGE, La. – Vice-President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch are scheduled to speak Thursday at a Baton Rouge vigil honouring the three law enforcement officers who were killed by a lone gunman during a shootout outside a convenience store.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards and relatives of the slain officers also are expected to speak during the ceremony at Healing Place Church, where a funeral was held last Friday for 41-year-old Baton Rouge police officer Matthew Gerald.
Gerald, 45-year-old sheriff’s deputy Brad Garafola and 32-year-old police officer Montrell Jackson were shot and killed July 17 by 29-year-old Gavin Long, an Army veteran from Kansas City, Missouri. Long also wounded three other officers before a SWAT officer gunned him down.
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Sheriff’s Deputy Nicholas Tullier was critically wounded and has remained in a hospital since the shooting.
Authorities said Long was targeting police when he ambushed the officers in Baton Rouge, where racial tensions had been mounting amid protests over a deadly police shooting. Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was shot and killed during a struggle with two white police officers July 5.
Jackson, a corporal, was a 10-year veteran of the Baton Rouge Police Department. He was married and had a 4-month-old son. Days before he was shot to death, Jackson posted a message on Facebook about the difficulties of being both a black man and a police officer in the tumultuous aftermath of Sterling’s shooting.
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“Please don’t let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better,” wrote Jackson, whose funeral was Monday.
Garafola, whose funeral was Saturday, is survived by a wife and four children: sons ages 21 and 12, and daughters ages 15 and 7.
Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said Garafola “went down fighting,” with surveillance video showing him firing at the gunman as bullets hit the concrete around him.
Gerald was a former Marine and Army veteran who served three tours in Iraq before joining the police force nine months ago. His wife, Dechia Gerald – now a widow with two young daughters – called him “my blue-eyed rock” in a written tribute. She expressed hope that his legacy will “bridge the gap and foster peace in the country he lived, loved and died for.”
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