Kathie Hurley scoured her mother’s attic for a photo of her grandfather, Patrolman Patrick Shea. She found the photo — and it’s ended up on a refurbished memorial to city cops killed in the line of duty.
Shea was killed in 1919, when Hurley’s mother was only two years old. Officer Shea himself had been a U.S. citizen and New Haven cop for only three years.
Wednesday morning Hurley saw her grandfather’s photo in the newly unveiled memorial at police headquarters, among the 19 New Haven police officers killed in the line of duty in the long history of the department. She was not only intensely proud. She saw a lesson for today in her grandfather’s story.
“He’d come to America in 1910,” said Hurley, who knows a thing or two about research in her capacity as director of public information at the New Haven Free Public Library. “He became a citizen in 1916, and almost immediately a New Haven cop.
“On Oct. 19th of that year, when he’d been a cop for three years, he was stopping to help someone on the Kimberly Avenue Bridge, at Kimberly and Howard Avenue, in the Hill. It was during Prohibition. I think someone who was driving a truck carrying liquor hit him, and killed him. He was decapitated. And they killed someone else later, too.”
A version of Shea’s story and a kind of sketch were on the wall. Hurley said that police department’s now-retired historian, Tony Griego, researched the whole incident in the Register and other sources, beginning back in the early 1990s. Hurley provided the photo, which turned out to be Patrick Shea’s wedding photo.
Nineteen photographs grace the professional-looking wall of remembrance in the lobby of 1 Union Avenue. It was designed by city capital projects director William MacMullen. The photos include an image of the first officer, Thomas Cummins, “killed (in 1855) in the line of duty from injuries sustained after attempting to quell a disturbance at a local dance.” Tthe most recent photos are of Dan Picagli (2006) and Robert Fumiatti (2007).
MacMullen said the wall is uneven, with one spot vacant. “We hope there will never be a need to fill it.”
MacMullen said he wasmoved by his association with the project, especially in distilling the biographies of the 19 so each story is told as a unique example of, in his words, “precisely what ‘Above and Beyond the Call of Duty’, means.
“I’m a city employee, but when I go to work everyday, I’m reasonably sure I’ll be safe. These officers never know if they will be coming home at the end of each day. The wall is a reminder of how noble, and precarious their work is.”
He added in brief formal remarks to a lobby thronged with officers and relatives of the fallen cops, “Let’s think of these 19 as still out there, on patrol in the city.”
Kathy Hurley said her relatives, many of whom still live in Patrick Shea’s native County Kerry, Ireland, will now be able to come and to see an image of their grandfather.
“I was telling the mayor,” she said, “that it’s the same thing today with the Latino immigrants and the waves of people from other countries that we see using the library. Coming to America, becoming citizens, giving themselves over to their adopted country, and city. And I’ll tell you this too: Patrick looks exactly like my brother.”