Syracuse Police Officer Michael E. Jensen and Onondaga County Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Hoosock went to work on Sunday and did not come home. They died in a shootout while investigating a car chase in a quiet Salina neighborhood.
Their loved ones, their colleagues and the wider Central New York community are thunderstruck by grief at their random, senseless deaths. A routine call went horribly wrong. It could happen on any call, on any day.
“There’s nothing routine out there in this day and age, at all, for law enforcement,” Police Chief Joseph Cecile said.
“We’re chasing cars every day,” Sheriff Toby Shelley said. “Every day.”
In just moments, the commonplace became the extraordinary — the first line-of-duty deaths by gunfire since undercover Syracuse police officer Wallie Howard was gunned down 34 years ago in the Valley. In 2003, Deputy Glenn Searles was struck and killed by a vehicle on Interstate 481.
Because it happens so rarely, those of us who are not part of law enforcement don’t give a thought to the dangers police officers face every time they report to work. If they or their families think about it, it doesn’t show. Day in and day out, they answer the call to protect the community.
This peculiar condition of employment — not knowing if any one day will be your last — sets professions like police officer and firefighter apart from almost any other job. Only other members of the fraternity get it.
That impulse explains the hundred or so first responders who rushed to SUNY Upstate Medical University Hospital Sunday night. There was nothing they could do to help the doctors and nurses inside the emergency room to save their friends. They felt the pull to be present, to bear witness, to pay respects, to grieve their private loss publicly.
The deaths of Jensen and Hoosock are the community’s loss, too. We depend on the police to be there when we or our loved ones are in trouble. With resolve and poetry, Cecile pledged the slain officers will never be forgotten:
“More than just remember them, we will honor them, too, honor their sacrifice by doing what cops do, by holding the line between lawful and unlawful, between chaos and calm, between order and disorder,” he said. “We will honor these fallen officers by picking up this badge and holding that line.”
That Jensen and Hoosock died heroes is cold comfort to the loved ones they leave behind. We owe them our respect and gratitude.
Words fail at such times. So let us simply be present, like those first responders at the hospital. As a community, we can bear witness to the sacrifice of these two officers and their families and lift them up in their grief.
— syracuse.com via TNS
