The Middlesex County Chiefs of Police Association will unveil a new memorial next week that honors the 27 police officers that have died in the line of duty in the county since 1856.
EDISON -- The Middlesex County Chiefs of Police Association will unveil a new memorial next week that honors the 27 police officers that have died in the line of duty in the county since 1856.
The "Remembering the Fallen" memorial will be unveiled Nov. 12, 2015, at the Middlesex County Police Training Center in Edison, according to Prosecutor Andrew Carey and South River police Chief Mark Tinitigan, who serves as president of the association.
Carey said Friday the memorial, displayed in a hallway of the training center, consists of a full-color wall mural listing the name and agency of each officer. He said adjacent to the memorial, which measures 7-feet 7-inches high and 9-feet wide, is a service tray containing a booklet that details the biological information and circumstances of the death of each of the officers.
"People who choose policing as a profession become part of a larger family," the prosecutor said. "Whenever members of that family are lost in the performance of their duties, the loss has an immediate impact upon those who served them."
Carey said memories fade, but "we feel it is extremely important that we never forget the sacrifices that they made."
"With this memorial, we have created a way of perpetuating their memories with the officers who served with them, with those officers currently on the job, and for those officers who will enter the profession in the future."
Tinitigan said he hopes the memorial "will also give the surviving family members some solace that we have not forgotten, and we never will."
The chief added that "27 is a significant number that I hope never increases."
Carey said the first officer to die in the line of duty in Middlesex County was Officer William Van Arsdale of New Brunswick due to drowning in 1856. The most recent was Thomas E. Raji of the Perth Amboy Police Department who was the victim in 2008 of a vehicular homicide.
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