JERSEY CITY Jersey City Police Chief Mike Kelly remembered Joseph Seals as one of the cop stars, who like other police officers who died before him in the line of duty gave the ultimate sacrifice, and whose pictures are kept on the wall of his office. No matter what angle that you stand in my office, you see cop stars and it motivates me every day, every single day. And Joe Seals was no different, Kelly said.
Police and other officials marked the anniversary of last year s mass shooting that killed four people, including Jersey City police Detective Joseph Seals with a ceremony Thursday near the cemetery where Seals was killed.
As Jersey City Police Chief Michael Kelly deployed officers and assessed how to dislodge two heavily armed killers from a kosher grocery in last December s deadly mass shooting, he faced a major problem.
One of Kelly s officers managed to peek inside the shooters U-Haul van, which was parked on Martin Luther King Drive across from the grocery and in front of the Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school. Inside a backpack that had been strapped between the driver s and passenger s seats, the officer spotted a large pipe bomb.
The officer took the bomb from the backpack and laid it on the passenger seat of the van, police said. But the officer could not disarm the bomb. That delicate job fell to a team of bomb experts a task made all the more difficult because it had to be done amid a raging gunbattle.
One year after slaying, Jersey City honors memory of Police Det. Joseph Seals
By Daniel Ulloa/Hudson County View
One year ago, the mass shooting, later deemed an Anti-Semitic, domestic terrorist attack, took the life of Seals, Leah Minda Ferencz, Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, and Moshe Deutsch.
Fulop thanked the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, Port Authority police, and officers from other municipal police departments for attending the ceremony at the Bayview cemetery – the location where Seals was fatally shot while meeting an informant who then reacted by creating a violent standoff with police.
“Today serves as a reminder of the sacrifices and commitment law enforcement make every single day because they choose to. Joseph Seals serves as an example of that,” Fulop said.