By Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post
Relatives, friends, and colleagues paused Friday to honor the 16 Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies killed in the line of duty.
On a warm morning, at the memorial garden at sheriff’s headquarters, photographs of the 16 stood at a table in front of the Fallen Deputy Memorial Wall, which lists their names.
Deputies, black stripes across their badges, stood at attention. Loved ones sat under a giant tent.
The event was linked to next week’s observance of National Police Week. Sheriff’s Capt. Greg Richter noted that 116 law enforcement officers were killed nationwide in 2009, nine of them in Florida. While none was from Palm Beach County, local deputies killed between 1921 and 2007 “will not be forgotten,” Richter said.
He called them “a reminder of the prices paid so that we can live in a free and peaceful society.”
The U.S. flag was lowered to half-staff. A sheriff’s pipe and drum corps played Amazing Grace.
Relatives stood as each name was spoken.
The largest contingent was for James S. Fogleman, 27, killed in 1963 when his cruiser flipped into a ditch on a rain-slicked road as he raced a dying infant and the baby’s grandmother to St. Mary’s Hospital.
A park in West Palm Beach’s Northwood Estates neighborhood is named for him.
The first name: George C. Douglass, killed Aug. 27, 1921. The last two: Donta J. Manuel and Jonathan Wallace, struck by a patrol car Nov. 28, 2007, as they removed Stop Sticks from a road near Pahokee.
As each name was read, a deputy lit the emergency lights of a cruiser or motorcycle and saluted.
Then an honor guard fired three times and a deputy played taps.
Overhead, seven helicopters from the sheriff’s office and other agencies performed a “missing man” flyover.
And across the county, deputies heard on their radios a dispatcher call for a “10-7" moment of silence.
Then doves were released. ...and the deputies went back to work.
Copyright 2010 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.