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One by one, police cars pulled into the Warsaw Community Church parking lot on Tuesday.
Some came from Portage, South Bend, Mishawaka and Evansville. Others came from as far away as Illinois and Tennessee.
Some came out of respect and honor. Others came to heal or to grieve. All came to enact a tradition they’d never hoped to perform: honoring a fellow police officer who died in the line of duty.
Sgt. Jeffery Bryant Shaw, a father of two young children, died Thursday when his sheriff’s department cruiser was struck by an oncoming flatbed truck that swerved into his lane on Indiana 14.
Shaw, 40, was the third officer in the Kosciusko County Sheriff’s Department to die in the line of duty and the first to die in the last 15 years.
A flag flew at half-staff outside the sprawling church, where more than 400 police officers, friends and family members gathered to celebrate Shaw’s life. The church lobby was bedecked with pictures showing Shaw laughing with his wife, Angie, and playing with his children, Nicholas, 9, and Isabella, 7.
Shaw was born on a farm in Atwood on July 20, 1969 – the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He was a graduate of Warsaw Community High School and had wanted to be a police officer since he was a little boy.
Kosciusko Sheriff Rocky Goshert called Shaw, a 15-year sheriff’s department veteran, a “great teacher,” who took the young officers on the second shift under his wing.
He said Shaw was one of the most loyal and respectful people he’d ever met, and the kind of person who let his “actions speak louder than his words.”
Goshert recounted Shaw’s commitment to family and told his children how often he’d spoken about their involvement in activities like pee wee football and gymnastics.
Former Sheriff Alan Rovenstine, who hired Shaw, described him as a doting father who loved Doberman pinchers, Bill O’Reilly and his wife, Angie, whom he met one day on the sheriff’s department shooting range.
Angie Shaw kept her arm around Nicholas throughout the service, holding him closer during Rodney Atkins’ “Watching You,” a country song about a father and son that the family had chosen. During “Brown Eyed Girl,” the final song, Angie and her children took flowers to Shaw’s casket. When the family sat down, an officer knelt in front of Nicholas and gave him his father’s badge.
Sgt. Chad Hill, a pallbearer during the service, said Shaw’s death has been tough on the 36 members of the sheriff’s department.
“We’re all really tight,” he said. “We did a lot of stuff together off duty.”
Hill recounted how he and Shaw had twice gone to the National Law Enforcement Memorial in Washington, D.C., in May to pay tribute to fallen police officers – including a Kosciusko County officer who died in 1954.
“It’s been difficult,” he said. “We went out honoring those people and now, this May, I’ll go out to honor him.”
After the service, officers assembled in rows and waited silently for the pallbearers to bring out the casket. Then the processional moved slowly toward Oakwood Cemetery.
Before arriving, the hearse stopped at the sheriff’s department, where a voice over the radio made a final 10-42 announcement, indicating that Shaw would no longer return to duty.
