rusty's
funeral
The sun was scorching Saturday when the lone piper and the riderless horse led
the black hearse down Spring Street, and it was a good thing, because Rusty
Stalnaker hated the rain.
It was almost 80 degrees when the massed ranks of officers
from all over metro Atlanta snapped to attention and saluted the hearse,
escorted by kilted members of the Police Emerald Society. The strains of
"Amazing Grace" floated away on a light breeze.
Russell Travis Stalnaker, who grew up with the Atlanta Police
Department and never wanted anything more than to wear the badge, got a hero's
funeral at the age of 24.
He died in the rain Wednesday night, shot to death in a
struggle with a man who allegedly erupted in anger because officers didn't want
him pushing his disabled truck along downtown streets. Kimani Atu Archie is
charged with murder.
After a wrenching, deeply emotional funeral at the H.M.
Patterson & Son, Spring Hill, funeral home, a police motorcade miles long
escorted the beloved young officer's body to a grave near Stockbridge in Henry
County.
Only a few hundred people could be crammed into the small,
elegant chapel at the funeral home, and they were limited to Stalnaker's family,
members of his Police Academy class, police and city dignitaries and those who
worked closest with him in Zone 5 --- downtown Atlanta.
As many as 700 other officers stood in five rows in the
middle of Spring Street to hear the ceremony broadcast outside the chapel.
Time after time during the hour-long funeral, the wail of
working police sirens could be heard far away in the city.
"Everybody loved him dearly," sobbed Stalnaker's
supervisor, Lt. Debbie Reece, in a brief but searing eulogy.
"I've been to a lot of police funerals," she said,
but when the dead officer's mother asked, " 'Debbie, have you ever done
this before?' I said, 'No, I've never done this before.'
"This is mine. I've never buried one of my own
before."
"Rusty didn't like the rain," Reece said, her
broken voice almost dreamlike. "He didn't like to drive in the rain."
She recalled how she rushed to the scene upon hearing that
shots had been fired, "and I saw there was an officer down, and I asked who
it was, and they said, 'It's Rusty.'
"My heart broke."
The next day at the mobile precinct where she and Stalnaker
worked, she said, "I was leaning against the wall, waiting for my watch to
come in. Rusty hadn't come in yet.
"He still hasn't come in."
Stalnaker's widow, Dana, read a short, gravely eloquent note
to "Dearest Rusty."
"I was writing you a love letter for your Easter basket
when they came to tell me you were gone," she said, her voice low but
strong. "I never dreamed I would be writing a letter for your funeral.
"I knew the risks," she said, "but in my heart
I never fathomed the reality."
She spoke of their plans for the future --- golf lessons,
trips, children --- and said, "Words cannot express the fullness of my love
for you."
Stalnaker's uncle, retired Atlanta police Capt. Ron Shaw,
delivered the longest eulogy, alternately crying and laughing at memories of his
nephew. After Stalnaker's father was gravely injured in an accident when Rusty
was a boy, Shaw virtually became a father to him.
"He grew up in the Police Department," Shaw said,
"and that was my fault. I worked parades and I held him on my shoulders to
see the clowns. I used my police influence to get him extra candy.
"Rusty was a party," Shaw said. "You need to
know this, because if you didn't know him, you missed something wonderful.
"He was the 'Turtle,' " Shaw said, using the
nickname Stalnaker was given in the Police Academy. "He never gave up.
"We'll never get over it," Shaw said, his voice
cracking again. "Never. Y'all pray for him."
Chief Beverly Harvard said, "We will go on because it's
what we have to do, what we must do. . . . We're proud of who we are, proud of
what we do. We owe it to Rusty to go on working to make the world a better
place. We will forever remember him. He will forever be a part of our
history."
Stalnaker is the 55th Atlanta police officer to have died in
the line of duty.
Harvard formally presented the widow with the flag from his
coffin at a brief graveside ceremony at Fairview Memorial Gardens that ended
with the traditional missing-man flight of helicopters, just as the last of the
miles-long motorcade was arriving.
Dana Stalnaker hugged the flag to her chest and sobbed as two
buglers sounded taps.
Members of his recruit class, No. 157, presented the widow with a plaque and a
videotape at the chapel.
"Rusty was the youngest member of our class,"
Officer Tracy Whaley told the young widow. "He was only 20. He was like a
younger brother. We drew strength from him."
The videotape, he said, was made at the swearing-in ceremony
for the 31 officers who graduated in 1996.
"When you see Russell getting his badge, and how he was
received . . . you'll understand what he meant to us."
On the cracked sidewalk behind the ranks of officers on
Spring Street, a young woman stood alone, crying quietly, during the ceremony.
Asked if her husband was an officer, she said no.
Asked if she knew Officer Stalnaker, she said no. Asked her
name, she said, "Tina. Just Tina."
Asked why she was there, she said, sobbing:
"I had to come. They're willing to risk their lives for
strangers. I just had to come." -- Atlanta Journal Constitution,
April 4, 1999
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