Mourning Loss of a Hero in a Half-Empty World

The fatal shooting of Officer Russel Timoshenko has me so beside myself I can barely concentrate on finishing up the paperwork for the job at hand, an elderly diabetic man we just dropped off at Kings County Hospital, the same place where the young police officer died while doing the often mundane but sometimes heroic job of protecting such helpless members of society.

Police officers routinely place themselves squarely in the path of killers, rapists, drug dealers, ex-cons — the violent, the deranged. They protect us from career criminals, or die trying. I am sad, angry, and disgusted, and have been talking all morning in non-sequiturs, which Bronson has been answering with sympathetic silence.

"He was a good kid, still lived with his parents," I say, leaning against the nurse's station.

Bronson rips off the bottom page of our paperwork and hands it to the desk nurse. "My parents did until they got married."

"So did mine. I thought it was a 1950s thing, but maybe morality is making a comeback."

"Or just the high price of real estate," he says.

"My husband's cousin waited until she got married. I think families are sticking together now. The ‘me' generation is over."

Bronson walks away with a "Yeah, right" attitude, but this is precisely why I believe the public is so outraged at Timoshenko's death. "He stands for everything good this country offers, to both immigrants and natives," I say. "The opportunity to follow your dreams. That's why his death touched so many that never had the honor of knowing him personally. Because of what he represented. Everything good about America."

"Shot down by everything bad," Bronson says, getting into the ambulance. "Want lunch?"

I seethe. "Lowlifes. Rap sheets a mile long. One took part in the gang-rape of a teenager. All of them out on parole." I try to put the pieces together in my head. "Did they think they were going to get away with it?" I shake my head.

"The Poconos?"

"Just an egg roll," I add. I haven't been eating well since the shooting. Bronson drives to a Chinese takeout place.

"It doesn't make any sense," he says, "so stop trying." I bite my egg roll. It's greasy. I put it down and imagine what the mother feels, and shake my head in sympathy from one mother to another. "She's young. She'll have to live this nightmare for the rest of her life."

Bronson points to my egg roll. "You done with that?" He takes it and gobbles it down.

We're near Flatbush and it's around noon, so we park and walk to the I.J. Morris Funeral Home for the procession. The street is thick with thousands of officers standing in the hot, hazy sun in dress blues. Strains of Russian Orthodox chanting come over the loudspeakers, similar to the Greek services I grew up with. Then the eulogies begin, by Mayor Bloomberg, Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and family members.

"We always knew him as a hero," a cousin says, "now the rest of New York does, too." The girl is young, her speech unpolished and heartbreaking. In the background, I hear weeping, probably the officer's mother. Then a dry funeral drum, and the officers from the 71st Precinct, where Timoshenko worked, file out and stand in rank formation, the sun glinting off their black-banded shields.

A woman leaning against the barricades is holding Sean Bell flyers, complete with misspellings about "police brutality." After that incident, certain militant factions of the population called cops racists, but easily more than half the officers before me are black or Hispanic, and a good number are black women. They're standing at attention now, a sea of blue, not removing their whitegloved hands from salute to wipe away their tears as the casket comes out and taps is played. Four New York Police Department helicopters fly overhead in a cross formation.

Although this brotherhood is impressive, I'm glad my husband is retired from the NYPD, a dangerous and stressful job where anything can go wrong at any moment on a seemingly routine patrol. Still, for his 21 years working places like Brownsville and East Flatbush, he's less jaded, less cynical than I am.

I think of what people say about Timoshenko's personality, and realize it was the same as my husband's. Like my husband, he apparently was an optimistic, big-hearted fellow who faced each day at work with a clean perspective, working a rough neighborhood but never quick to make snap judgments about who was a lowlife and who was decent folk. I resolve to try to be more like that.

Bronson says, "You see the cup as half empty."

"I do," I admit, knowing as I speak that my resolution will fail. "I can't help it."

The pallbearers load the flagdraped coffin of the slain young officer into the hearse as his fellow officers break rank and file into the buses that will take them to the cemetery.

I shake my head in disbelief at this scene of senseless loss. "It is half empty. It is."

Ms. Klopsis is an emergency medical technician on an ambulance in Brooklyn. This column details her observations and experiences. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of patients.