Tuesday, September 2, 2008 5:55 AM EDT
By William Kaempffer, Register Staff
NEW HAVEN — They died doing their jobs, every one of them.
So their colleagues and a city engineer envisioned a police memorial more fitting to their sacrifice.
In the lobby of police headquarters, the department has spent $15,000 reinventing the wall of honor recognizing city officers killed in the line of duty.
The wall will be unveiled Wednesday at a formal ceremony attended by department and city dignitaries, as well as relatives of some of the officers.
The most recent to lose their lives were Daniel Picagli, who was killed when he was struck by a sport utility vehicle while directing traffic in 2006, and Robert Fumiatti, who died in 2007, four years after being shot in the face during an attempted drug bust. His cause of death was cardiac sarcoidosis.
“When I came in as assistant chief, we really wanted to resurrect the memorial,” said Assistant Chief Stephanie Redding, and a group of police supervisors, current and retired, formed an ad hoc committee to get it done.
They started fundraising, but the effort never got traction.
When Picagli and Fumiatti died in close succession, “We felt a renewed urgency to get this back off the ground,” Redding said.
What they did was adorn a lobby wall at 1 Union Ave. with a hodgepodge of old pictures of different sizes and a bronze plaque to which names were gradually added over the years.
Kathie Hurley’s grandfather was among them, although it took about 70 years to happen.
The Irish immigrant had three years on the job and preparing to return to the station to end a shift in 1919 when he stopped to help a woman change a flat tire in the Hill neighborhood.
He was struck and killed by a drunken driver.
Because of questions about whether he was actually struck a few minutes after his shift would have ended, it wouldn’t be until 1990 when the department would add his name to the wall, and even then it was without a picture.
The monument project was reborn when the department secured money to overhaul the front lobby and reserved $15,000 of the capital improvement funds to re-do the wall.
It just so happened that Bill MacMullen, who works in the city engineering department, had experience.
While he helps design libraries and other projects in Boston, he for years was in charge of the naval ship building museum and, through that, had worked on several naval memorial projects.
On another occasion, he organized an 1864-style burial for a Civil War soldier who had never been buried.
“I sort of by accident have fallen into doing this,” he said.
Now in New Haven, he was put in charge of redesigning the police memorial, showed a model to the mayor and got approval.
“People gave their lives. We can do a little bit better for them than what was there,” he said.
He had pictures of all but four of the officers when he showed his model to some employees at the library, where Hurley works.
She went home and dug up an old picture of her grandfather and gave it to MacMullen.
She credited now-retired Sgt. Tony Griego with doing the research to add her grandfather to the list and looked forward to seeing the new memorial.
“I’m glad that they’re re-doing it,” she said.
“To our generation, the second-generation who grew up without a grandfather, it’s great, even if it means going down and staring at a picture on the wall.”