By Janet Frankston Lorin
Associated Press Writer
JERSEY CITY, N.J. -- A little more than a year after two Jersey City police officers drove off an open drawbridge to their deaths, their mothers embraced during a memorial service Friday that included a ceremony on the bridge from which they fell.
Officers Shawn Carson and Robert Nguyen plummeted from the fog-shrouded bridge into the icy Hackensack River on Christmas night in 2005. The two were remembered during a memorial Mass attended by family, friends and several hundred city police officers in dress uniform.
“Everyone is still trying to face the fact,” Tahirah Carson, a niece of Shawn Carson, said before the Mass. “We’re happy that he’s being honored in a good way.”
Mason Nguyen, a brother of Robert Nguyen, said after the service that the holidays, and especially his brother’s birthday on May 13, were trying for his family.
“We’re used to having him here,” Nguyen said. “Getting through this first year helps a lot.”
Later, at a brief ceremony on the bridge, family members silently dropped flowers one by one into the Hackensack River as nearly 50 police officers looked on.
Rain this past Christmas night reminded some of last year’s accident, said Stephen Sansevere, a retired Jersey City police sergeant and police chaplain.
The officers had been called to the bridge that night to help place flares to warn motorists because a bridge barrier had been hit by a truck and disabled. A second traffic safety gate and alarm bells also were broken.
Before the officers headed back over the bridge, it opened to let a tugboat pass underneath and the two men sped off its end. The accident remains the subject of lawsuits.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, are working to add Nguyen and Carson’s names to the state-owned span that takes Routes 1 and 9 over the river, said Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy.
“It would be a fitting honor,” he said. “They left too soon.”
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.