By Jennifer Brown
The Denver Post
HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. — Gracie Parrish rose from her seat in front of her husband’s flag-draped casket and climbed the stairs to the church stage, his badge hanging from her neck over a black dress. Then she read him her final love letter.
“You are my once in a lifetime,” she said of Douglas County Sheriff’s Deputy Zackari Parrish before thousands of mourners, several hundred of them law officers, and the governor. “I’ll never forget slow-dancing with you in the kitchen or the way you held my hand.”
“Babe, you were an amazing father and loved your girls so well,” she choked out during the funeral service Friday for the fallen deputy, shot to death while responding to a disturbance call on New Year’s Eve morning. “You are my rock and my heart and my soulmate and I am so proud of you.”
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The sanctuary that holds 5,000 at Cherry Hills Community Church in Highlands Ranch was filled. More watched from an overflow room across the street at Valor Christian High School. For more than an hour beforehand, a motorcade of several hundred law officers weaved through the streets following a hearse with Parrish’s remains. People who never met him lined University Boulevard and Wildcat Reserve Parkway, where the evergreen trees were tied with blue ribbon, holding American flags and handmade signs.
A bagpipe and drum band made up of law enforcement played a melancholy tune as they marched ahead of the processional toward the church, beneath a giant, billowing American flag held by two fire truck ladders. Motorcycles led the motorcade, rounding the church’s circular drive with lights flashing, and stopping in front of hundreds of mourners. Law officers stepped from their vehicles to salute as others responded to the call of an honor guard commander to remove the coffin. Gracie Parrish, an officer on each arm, led a line of relatives along a path to the church’s front door.
“Their world changed,” Douglas County Sheriff chaplain Tim Ralph said of Parrish’s family, as he opened the service. “That world changed not only for every person in this room, but every law enforcement person across the country.”
Ralph was on his way to Littleton Adventist Hospital last Sunday morning when he got the call that he instead needed to drive to Parrish’s home. The deputy had died. As he walked into Parrish’s house, among the first things he saw was a scripture on the wall: “Lord, I cannot. But you can.”
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Zack Parrish, 29, was deeply religious, a man who prayed about whether to give up a career in banking to follow his passion and become a law enforcement officer, family and friends said. He had a zest for life, “no off switch,” was courageous and bold, loved his music loud, and got the phone number of the woman he would marry because he listened to her give it to another guy.
As a Castle Rock police officer, Parrish once pulled money from his wallet to buy a hotel room for a man with nowhere to sleep, said his former boss, Castle Rock Police Chief Jack Cauley. Parrish once held a child in his arms so the child wouldn’t see the handcuffs officers were placing on a parent. He had a gift, Cauley and others said, to use humor to deescalate tense encounters, including the time a driver in a vehicle he approached called out that he had a concealed carry permit and a weapon. “You don’t move yours and I don’t move mine. We got a deal?” Cauley recalled Parrish saying.
The morning he died, Parrish was in front of other deputies calmly talking through a door to a man who had barricaded himself in his apartment bathroom. Douglas County Sheriff Tony Spurlock, who listened to body camera audio after the ambush, told mourners he had never heard a calmer voice in such a situation.
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“Not once did I hear Zack Parrish use a foul word. Not once did I hear him raise his voice. Not one time,” the sheriff said. “Up until the moment Deputy Zack Parrish died, he was pleading with the man, begging him, ‘Let me talk to you. Let me help you. Please.’ And then the killer killed him.”
Spurlock said he was mad, that he wanted to “strike out” in his eulogy, but after spending time with Parrish’s family, he scratched the angry words from his notes. At the hospital, when he held Gracie Parrish’s hand and told her “I’m sorry, we lost Zack,” she squeezed his hand back and said, “It’s going to be OK. Zack loved his job,” the sheriff recalled.
Parrish was a Castle Rock police officer for two and a half years before joining Douglas County seven months ago. Other officers traded their shifts so they could ride with him, said the sheriff, who will award him the medal of valor for bravery. People who knew him described a “magnetic force” that pulled him toward law enforcement.
“He just knew he had something in him,” Spurlock said. “Everyone around him knew it.”
The family’s motto, said Parrish’s father, also Zackari Parrish, is now “Go blue. Live like Zack.” His father recalled Parrish’s love of baseball and music, the time at his sixth birthday party when he thanked every single boy who came to Chuck E. Cheese’s, the time he called, after two dates with Gracie, to say he had met “the one.”
The scar on Parrish’s eyebrow, noticeable in the photograph on the church stage and the funeral program, came from a fall down the stairs when Parrish was 14 months old, said his father, standing in front of flowers near Parrish’s beloved baseball bat and his guitar. “He enjoyed life,” the elder Parrish said more than once.
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Troy Kessler, a Colorado State Patrol trooper, became Parrish’s best friend after the two met in a small group class at church before either of them entered law enforcement. They worked out together before dawn, went skydiving once, and talked about Kessler buying the house across the street from Parrish so they could build an underground tunnel. People teased them about their “bromance,” Kessler said, and if they hadn’t hung out in a while, Parrish would call and say, “I miss your face.”
Parrish’s energy and drive were infectious, Kessler said, recalling that Parrish “could have sold anything” and when he discovered something new — whether a post-workout protein, a new sauce for a quesadilla or his beloved pickup truck — he wanted everyone to have it. “Phenomenal,” he would describe them all.
“I want a house next door to you in heaven with a tunnel in between,” said Kessler, one of so many law officers in uniform, including most of those injured the morning Parrish was shot to death. “Until we meet in heaven, I love you brother. I’ll miss seeing your face.”
The funeral closed with a salute of 21 bell chimes. Then officers, under the orders of the honor guard commander, folded the flag draped over the coffin, knelt before Gracie Parrish, and placed it on her lap.
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