On Thursday, a sniper opened fire at police officers during a peaceful rally against recent police violence. Five police officers were killed, making this attack the deadliest for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001. Here are their stories.
Officer Patrick Zamarripa 32 years old
(Courtesy of the Zamarripa family.)
It had been 12 hours since he’d lost his son to one of the country’s worst mass police shootings, and he still couldn’t understand why.
Dallas police officer Patrick Zamarripa, 32, had survived three tours in Iraq, one of the world’s most dangerous places, his father, Rick Zamarripa, said Friday. And then this.
“He comes to the United States to protect people here,” his dad said. “And they take his life.”
Rick was watching television Thursday night when news broke that someone had opened fire in downtown Dallas around 9 p.m. at the end of a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in the city. He knew that his son had recently begun working as a bike officer in the downtown area, an assignment he enjoyed.
“Hey Patrick,” his father texted. “Are you okay?”
Rick had asked his son that question before, because he knew Zamarripa’s job was perilous. The response usually came quickly: “Yes, dad. I’ll call you back.”
Not this time.
“I didn’t hear nothing,” Rick said.
[The acts of heroism during a deadly night in Dallas]
He contacted Zamarripa’s longtime partner, Kristy Villasenor, who was at a Texas Rangers game with their 2-year-old daughter, Lyncoln.
Not long before, she’d taken a photo of her and Lyncoln’s feet propped on a railing high above home plate. They both wore matching Rangers-red Converse tennis shoes. She posted the image to Facebook and tagged Zamarripa in it.
“Glad Pat is there,” a friend wrote, “and not in Dallas right now… .”
“He’s not here,” she responded. “I just tagged him so he’ll get the pic.”
Soon after, Villasenor received word that she should head to the hospital.
Rick sped east from his home 40 miles outside the city. He was the first family member to arrive.
“How’s Patrick?” he asked an officer.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” Rick said. “He had that look on his face. I knew.”
Patrick Zamarripa’s entire adult life had been devoted to service. He entered the Navy soon after high school, his father said, and saw combat while working for the military police in Iraq. When he got out about five years ago, he joined the Dallas Police Department.
He just liked to help people, his father said.
Greg Wise, 48, knew him a decade ago when they worked together at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. Zamarripa was focused and professional, Wise said, even as he talked about leaving the military before serving 20 years.
Wise would often counsel young sailors who considered walking away before reaching retirement age. Many wanted to quit for the wrong reasons. But not Zamarripa.
“For him, he was just tired of being away from the people he loved,” Wise recalled. “He wanted to go back and serve his community.”
Zamarripa, he said, had long known he would do that as a police officer in Texas.
“I’ve been around the military for 30 years. I’ve seen a lot people come and go. A few stand out as being some of the good ones,” Wise said. “And he did.”
A friend, Rick said, had recently asked Zamarripa if he was interested in a job with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He declined.
“No, I want to stay,” he said. “I love doing this.”
Both his Facebook and Twitter profiles are rife with salutes to other fallen officers and soldiers: “Rest in Peace” in honor of two New York cops killed in 2014; a blue stripe across a black image of Texas; the drawing of an eagle surrounded by the words, “Home of the Free Because of the Brave.”
My deepest prayers from Dallas for my brothers and sister of#NYPD
His interests, outside of an avid devotion to the Rangers and Dallas Cowboys, were few.
But he adored his children.
He tweeted a video of himself with his stepson, Dylan, yelling “Go Cowboys” together in 2013. The next year, he posted a photo of his boy, flashing a toothy grin, on the opening day of first grade.
“My buddy,” Zamarripa called him.
Late last year, he shared a video of Dylan pulling his daughter in a little red wagon.
“Where you going?” he asked, as they strolled past. She smiled and cooed.
“It’s the simple things that bring joy to my life,” Zamarripa posted.
Lyncoln, he liked to write, was his “#princess.”
He tweeted photos of her on the day after she was born in 2013.
“Daddy’s got you,” he wrote. “My new reason for… life.”
Lyncoln Rae. 12-14-13, 7.15 lbs 20 1/2″.
My new reason for for life. #daddysgirl #princess
He dressed her in miniature Rangers outfits, tiny Texas flags and a No. 88 Dez Bryant jersey (with a tidy blue-and-white bow in her hair).
On Thursday night, Rick said, the family was briefly allowed to see his face through a glass window.
Lyncoln, Rick said, called out for her father.
“Da da,” he heard her cry. “Da da.”
Officer Lorne Ahrens 48 years old
(Via WFAA)
It was hard to miss Lorne Ahrens, in uniform or out.
The 6-foot-5, 300-pound former semi-pro football player could turn heads just by showing up, according to his father-in-law, Charlie Buckingham.
“He was a big ol’ boy,” Buckingham said Friday, the day after Ahrens was killed in the sniper attack on Dallas police officers. “Big as he is, just walking down the street he cut a real figure. I’m sure it helped him in his work.”
Buckingham had been watching the events in downtown Dallas unfold from his home in Burleson, Tex., a few miles from where Ahrens lived with Buckingham’s daughter Katrina and the couples’ children, a 10-year-old girl and 8-year-old boy.
He knew his son-in-law could be there. He knew his daughter, a Dallas police detective, was still asleep. She had gone to bed early in order to be up by 3 a.m. for an early shift. Buckingham and his wife decided to drive over.
“We got there just a few minutes after the…police knocked on her door,” Buckingham. “They told her she should come down to the hospital with them.”
Katrina Ahrens dressed quickly and left with the officers, Buckingham said. He and his wife stayed with the children, who were still asleep. According to Buckingham, Ahrens was already out of surgery when Katrina Ahrens got there. But then something went wrong.
“They had to take him back in,” Buckingham said with an exhausted voice. “She said he didn’t make it.”
[What we know about the attack on police in Dallas]
Dallas police said Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens was a 14-year veteran of the department. He worked for a time in a unit serving warrants, Buckingham said, an assignment where danger can come with any door knock. Ahrens may have quelled a lot of potential resistance with his bulk, a shaved head and heavily tattooed arms.
In one 2003 incident, according to court documents, Ahrens, with his lineman’s build, sprinted fast enough to tackle a suspected cocaine dealer running away from a bust. According to testimony, the suspect had dropped a .38 caliber pistol and an SKS assault rifle was found in the house.
The couple had an understanding about their chosen careers.
“She was fine with it,” Buckingham said. “She was a police officer too.”
Earlier, Ahrens had been an officer in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, according to a state database, policing in one of the country’s biggest metro areas from 1991 to 2002. It was home for him, according to Buckingham. Ahrens had grown up near Los Angeles and still has family in Simi Valley. He played a few years of semi-professional football in the state.
The couple was married at a ceremony in Lake Tahoe shortly before they moved to her home region of Dallas, Buckingham said.
Ahrens may have been big, but he had a soft touch with children, according to his father-in-law. He rolled on the floor with them gleefully and liked to take them fishing and to the movies. More than once, he went in uniform to his daughter’s school to talk about policing and safety.
“He loved it here,” Buckingham said. “He found it just a slower, easier-going part of the world.”
Officer Michael Krol 40 years old
(Courtesy of the Krol family.)
He’d worked difficult jobs, waited for years and moved more than 1,000 miles, but finally the day had come: Michael Krol was officially a cop. He stood there before the cameras, goofy grin and all, as his Michigan family crowded around to watch him hoist a certificate saying he had graduated from the Dallas Police Academy. It was April 25, 2008. Krol, then 32, still had a cherub face. And he seemed to have a long career ahead of him.
It came to a tragic halt Thursday night, when a sniper took aim at Dallas officers at a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest, killing five of them, including Krol, 40. The news of his death reached his mother’s doorstep in Redford, Mich., outside Detroit, early Friday. Ever since, the family has been struggling to reconcile the gentle manner that they say defined Krol’s life and the violence of his death. He never wanted to hurt anyone. He wanted to protect people. How could this happen?
“He was a big guy and had a big heart, and he was a really caring person and wanted to help people,” said brother-in-law Brian Schoenbaechler, 44, a management consultant in Atlanta. “It doesn’t seem real. His mom’s had a difficult time.”
Krol’s mother, Susan Ehlke, couldn’t bring herself to talk about her son’s death. “Can we end this call?” she said after a brief phone interview. “It’s just a very difficult time.”
[Officer Patrick Zamarripa survived three tours in Iraq before being killed in Dallas]
Krol always wanted to be a cop. It was just a question of how he was going do it and where. After high school — where he excelled at basketball and towered well over 6 feet — he took a job as a security guard at a Michigan hospital. There, Schoenbaechler said, his brother-in-law’s two passions — caring for and protecting others — coalesced.
His brother-in-law remembered the way Krol tended to one sick older patient.
“I don’t remember who it was,” Schoenbaechler said, “but he stayed with that person and provided them with care and helped them to use the bathroom and stuff that most guys wouldn’t do. And I was just like, ‘Wow, that’s powerful that he can help others in that way.’”
But that job was also a means to achieve his true goal. He parlayed his security experience into a job working in the Wayne County jail system. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but he thought it was the only way he’d find a way to patrol the streets. “It was an opportunity for him to go from being a security guy to being a cop,” his brother-in-law said.
[What we know about the attack on police in Dallas]
He worked there for years, and Wayne County colleagues remembered his service. “We are saddened by the loss of the dedicated officers in Dallas — one of whom was a former member of this agency — and also the wounding of the other officers,” said Sheriff Benny Napoleon in a statement Friday morning.
In his free time, Krol played pick up sports with friend Dan Seiger, who recalled him as “one of the funniest people” he knew. “He was also fond of lording his massive height over me,” Seiger said. “He was taller by nearly a foot. … Whenever we played football, he’d try to cover me by putting his hand on my head.”
Then came 2007 — and an opportunity in Dallas. The police force there was hiring. So Krol gambled. For the chance to become a cop, he left his community, family, everyone he knew and moved 1,100 miles south to a city he barely knew, Schoenbaechler recalled. “He said, ‘This is something that I wanted to do.’” So he did it.
And he kept on doing it, graduating from the police academy, making a new life in Dallas, meeting a significant girlfriend, while remaining close to his family. When Krol’s sister, Amie Schoenbaechler, had surgery a few years ago, he came and stayed with her family for two weeks in Atlanta and took care of the kids, her husband said. When they got together, Schoenbaechler would tip a few beers and listen to Krol tell “crazy” stories of life as a Dallas cop. But Krol himself, his sister remembered, never drank.
He was always in control. Always the calm one. Always the one to defuse chaotic situations.
Until he became the victim of one.
Officer Michael J. Smith 55 years old
(Todd Wagner/The Washington Post)
Michael Smith was the one always standing guard by the tree fort in the vast lobby of Watermark Community Church in Dallas, where he worked as a uniformed security officer in recent years, greeting parents and kids and ushering them on to their Sunday programs. On the church’s Facebook page Friday, members recalled him handing out Dallas police department stickers to their kids, or running after them down the hallway, or showing them his police cruiser.
[Five Dallas police officers were killed by a lone attacker]
“He was outgoing but also very tender and unassuming,” said Wes Butler, the director of family and children’s ministries at Watermark. “He was just there, you know? People naturally engaged with him. He was one of the good guys, the one you’d hope your kids would go to if they ran into trouble.”
One member recalled how Smith mentored him when he was deciding to become a police officer, and later, too, when he decided to leave the force.
Another member, Bob Crotty, said Smith “lived out his faith in Jesus Christ,” and exuded a warmth and genuineness that drew people to him.
“He was a guy who really cared about other people,” he said. “As a result other people loved him, too. It breaks your heart.”
Smith, 55, was a former Army Ranger who joined the police force in 1989, according to Texas television station KDFM, which spoke with his sister. He had two daughters, ages 14 and 10, with his wife of 17 years, Heidi.
[Patrick Zamarripa survived combat in Iraq before being killed in Dallas]
“All of the Smith family, friends and acquaintances are devastated and are trying to figure out how to help the family navigate through these times,” a friend wrote on a gofundme page set up to raise money for the Smith family.
Smith’s pastor, Todd Wagner, described him as a “friend and faithful servant” who “understood the power of love.”
“Even when serving here as part of his job he understood that loving people was the best way to protect and serve them,” Wagner said in a statement. “Mike wasn’t just concerned with safety and security at Watermark or in Dallas. It genuinely troubled him when he saw people treated as objects or when protocol got in the way of personal care. He never compromised his responsibilities, but he never walked away from a compassionate response.”
Another member tried to imagine what it would be like at church this Sunday, when thousands of members realize that the officer who always greeted them was among those killed in downtown Dallas Thursday night.
“I promise you his presence will absolutely be missed in that one spot” by the tree fort, said Nathan Wagnon, who works in the men’s ministry. “Probably a lot of people are going to know we lost five police officers, but probably they are not going to know he was one of them. I promise you on Sunday when people show up, they’ll feel that punch in the gut.”
Office Brent Thompson 43 years old
(DART/European Pressphoto Agency)
When Brent Thompson saw you in church, said Sandra Hughes, he’d wrap you in a hug.
When his children were in Hughes’s classroom, he’d ask how he could help, and what he could do.
And when he became a grandfather, Hughes said, he “just lived for those little kids.”
“He’s just was an incredible guy,” said Hughes, a retired teacher in Texas. “And I know those are words that describe everybody. I wish I could just think of a word to describe Brent because he was just, I don’t know how to tell you this, he was just wonderful.”
[Officer Patrick Zamarripa survived three tours in Iraq before being killed in Dallas]
Thompson, a 43-year-old Dallas Area Rapid Transit police officer, was killed in Thursday’s mass shooting in Dallas, the agency confirmed on its website and Twitter feed. He was one of at least five officers killed by sniper gunfire after a peaceful protest against police shootings in the downtown streets.
“When I’m just sitting here thinking about him and talking about him, it makes me want to be so emotional, because I’ll just never understand why somebody like Brent would have to go,” Hughes said in an interview Friday. “Because he’s just, he was in every way, every way, that you would want your son, and that you would want someone that you knew, to be like. You’d want him to be like Brent. Because Brent, he was just that special.”
Hughes, who has known Thompson for years, described Thompson as kind, the type of guy who would go out of his way to be friendly and help others. In the wake of his shooting, she struggled for the right words to describe the man she called “just the perfect kid, to me.”
“He was just precious,” Hughes said. “Precious, precious to the bone.”
Hughes described the transit officer as calm and down-to-earth, someone who never got excited or agitated. She never heard him utter a curse word, she said, and she “never heard anything ugly.”
#Dallas victim Officer Brent Thompson was recently married in the last 2 weeks says DART Chief James Spiller
When she thought of Thompson, she found herself wishing that everybody could “be like Brent, in one way or the other,” Hughes said.
“Not the whole enchilada,” she said. “I’m not talking about that. Just, if somebody could just take a part of him, and be that part, our world would be a better place. That’s how he was.”
[Police chief lost his son, former partner and brother to violence]
Thompson was always smiling, said DART Police Chief James Spiller, and always had a kind word to say.
“Very friendly, courteous, polite, professional,” Spiller said. “Engaging, but yet able to fully execute his duties as a police officer, and didn’t always necessarily resort to the police-type approach.”
His death marks the first time a DART officer has been killed in the line of duty. Thompson joined DART police in 2009, according to the transit agency, which established a police department in 1989.
“As you can imagine, our hearts are broken,” DART said on its website. “This is something that touches every part of our organization. We have received countless expressions of support and sympathy from around the world through the evening. We are grateful for every message.”
Thompson on Thursday night was working as a patrol officer in an area of downtown Dallas known as the Central Business District, according to Spiller. He, along with other officers, were focused on Rosa Parks Plaza, a transfer center, and a station.
Not every transit officer is well-suited for that assignment, said Spiller.
“It takes a special person to be down there, we have a lot of persons with different attitudes, and, you know, it’s just a different group of people that hang out around that area,” he said. “And Brent could handle it very well, and he did it well, and that’s why we had him down there.”
DART officer Brent Thompson, killed in #Dallas, had just gotten married to another officer. http://cnn.it/29n6YI7
Military records indicate that Thompson served in the Marines during the early 1990s. He graduated from the Navarro College Police Academy in 1997, according to a spokeswoman for the school, which is located in Corsicana, Tex.
“Navarro College is deeply saddened by the loss of Brent Thompson and the additional police officers who were killed and injured in the Dallas shooting,” she wrote. “Brent was a great guy, excellent police officer and was always eager to participate in additional training to best serve his community and country.”
Thompson had married just a few weeks ago, according to Spiller.
“I’d like to point out, Brent was recently married to another transit officer in the last two weeks,” Spiller said during an appearance on the “Today” show. “So this is very heartbreaking for us.”
On CNN, he said that Thompson was in “great spirits from his recent marriage.”
“She’s holding up about as well as to be expected,” he told The Post in an interview Friday.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed to this report, which has been updated.
