Thousands honor slain New Jersey police officer at funeral

As rain poured down Tuesday, thousands of police officers lined the streets of Jersey City to honor a detective killed last week in what authorities are calling a domestic terrorism attack that also left three other civilians dead.

Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old married father of five, was lauded as a model officer who helped get guns off the streets of a city of 270,000 that sits across the Hudson River from New York City. Seals was shot last Tuesday in a cemetery about a mile from a kosher market by two attackers who went on to kill three others at a kosher deli before dying in a shootout with police.

Jersey City Director of Public Safety James Shea last week called Seals “the ultimate detective or officer we would point to to tell young officers, ‘This is how you should behave.’” In 2008, Seals was credited with saving a woman from a sexual assault inside her own home on Christmas eve.

Police officers from towns nearby and throughout the country line up 12 deep for blocks in anticipation of the funeral procession Tuesday. Sgt. Brian Lowe is among four members the Kingston police department, which is about an hour north of New York City, who came to show support.

“You think of all the people who responded, and then of course, you think of the family aspect,” he says.

Former Jersey City residents Matthew and Eileen McGinn drove in from the suburbs to stand in the rain across from the church to pay their respects. Both have close ties to the police force through family — Eileen McGinn said her sister-in-law’s family “are all Jersey City cops” — or familiarity.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Matthew McGinn says. “You can’t come from Jersey City, be active in the community and not know police, especially being Irish.”

US Attorney General William Barr was expected to be among the speakers at the ceremony at St. Aedan’s Church.

— AP