Amid a sea of thousands of uniformed officers gathered in New York in January 2015, a Mobile County Sheriff’s Office deputy stood to pay his respects to a fallen NYPD officer, drawing a line back to a debt he felt Mobile owed New York from nearly a decade earlier.
Deputy James Gazzier made the trip north alongside a Mobile County Sheriff’s Office reserve deputy to attend the funeral of NYPD Officer Wenjian Liu, who was fatally shot alongside his partner, Officer Rafael Ramos, while sitting in their patrol car in a Brooklyn neighborhood in December 2014. The two officers’ deaths, which came amid a period of heightened national tension between police departments and the communities they serve, drew law enforcement officers from across the country to New York for a series of funeral services.
Gazzier described a powerful sense of solidarity among the assembled officers, despite most having never met each other before. He recalled standing near a group of Syracuse, New York, police officers and quickly finding common ground, saying the shared experience of loss and purpose made total strangers feel like family within minutes of introducing themselves.
Before joining the Sheriff’s Office nearly five years earlier, Gazzier spent more than three years with the Mobile Police Department. He currently works in the Sheriff’s Office’s special operations unit. He said his decision to make the roughly 1,000-mile trip was rooted partly in gratitude toward New York’s first responders for their assistance to the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a storm that killed nearly 2,000 people and devastated much of the region, including parts of Mobile and Baldwin counties.
The Fire Department of New York had sent personnel and resources to help the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Katrina, an act of mutual aid Gazzier said stuck with him and shaped his decision to show up for New York’s own first responders during a moment of tragedy nearly a decade later.
Liu and Ramos’s deaths on Dec. 20, 2014, prompted an outpouring of national mourning and renewed debate over officer safety, with tens of thousands of law enforcement personnel from across the country converging on New York for the funerals in the weeks that followed. Gazzier’s trip reflected a broader pattern of departments nationwide, including smaller agencies far from New York like the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office, sending representatives as a gesture of solidarity within the law enforcement community.
For Gazzier, the trip served as both tribute and reciprocity, honoring officers he had never met while repaying, in his own way, a debt of gratitude tied to one of the darkest chapters in Gulf Coast history.