One Wedding and a Funeral

Kresha Richman Warnock

Officer Lexi Harris

Word Count 1614

In late May of 2021, my son and his bride said their vows under a huppa, then celebrated with a reception on a refitted ferry docked on Elliot Bay across from the Space Needle in Seattle. Since David is a police officer, it was a cop wedding. We had two hundred donuts instead of a dazzling white cake, the center ones spelling out “Mazel tov!” Afterwards, we  dropped the leftovers of the buffet–Northwest salmon, roasted vegetables, sourdough rolls– at David’s precinct for the shift of police who weren’t at the wedding. The couples’ old friends danced to the DJ together, even the ones who had called the cops “pigs” the summer before, during the George Floyd protests.

A month later, there was a cop funeral. Lexi Harris worked in the same unit as our son. On her way home from work, while off-duty, she had stopped to help a motorist pulled over on the freeway. Another driver hit her, instantly killing the thirty-nine- year-old policewoman.

Like my son, Lexi patrolled downtown Seattle on a sturdy mountain bike, pedaling through the crowded metro area, moving more easily through traffic than a car, covering more area, getting to criminals more quickly than they could on foot. Years before, when Seattle experienced thousands of people rioting during the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings, the Bicycle Squad was trained in crowd control and that continued to be part of their responsibility.

During the protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, my son, Lexi and dozens of other bike cops had been on the front lines as some of the protests turned to riots. For weeks that summer, cries of “Justice for George Floyd” turned to “Defund the Police.” Businesses were destroyed and sneers of “All Cops are Bastards” filled the air. Some rioters threw projectiles such as bricks or  frozen water bottles at the police; many yelled obscene insults. Threats to the East Precinct building, including arson attempts, lead the city leaders to remove all police from the site for a few weeks. 

Even out-of-town progressive friends told me, “Seattle is a shit show.” In our polarized country,  President Trump used Seattle as a political football, calling out the lack of law and order as proof of the total failure of his progressive enemies. A writing teacher once told me that in order to write about my son, I had to prove that cops are not intentionally hired as white supremacists. I can’t prove that. I can only tell the story of Lexi’s funeral.

My husband and I attended out of respect. Seattle police officers wear street clothes to work and home, so we had never seen our son in his bike cop uniform before that day. Wearing navy shorts, navy shirt, protective vest, gun, badge, and all the cop paraphernalia required of an on-duty police officer, he showed us our seats in T-Mobile Stadium, the home of the Seattle Mariners. The dome was open. The sun shone.

The bike squad had ridden to the funeral site together, a somber indigo crowd, escorting the black hearse that carried Lexi’s coffin. Lexi’s empty bike lead, balanced between the two-wheelers of a pair of pedaling officers. Each rider was muscular, strong legged, able to ride for hours over Seattle’s hilly terrain. Each of them was mourning the loss of a sister. By the time my husband and I entered the field, Lexi’s coffin, draped with a large American flag, was in place on a platform to the left of where the catcher would squat, on the third base side of home plate.  Next to it, resting, was her empty bike. 

Jim and I sat in section T-423, above the field and the coffin. The civilian section. We were dressed for a Seattle funeral, I in a black patterned cotton dress and a cardigan; my husband in his clerical black Episcopal priest shirt and khakis. There was a row of young men dressed in suits, no tie– lawyers, techies, family friends.  Above us, a middle-aged woman sat in a brightly colored dress, wearing a tie-dyed “Fuck Trump” mask.  Not sure this was a particularly Trump-hating crowd, but we were in the Pacific Northwest, and Lexi came from a liberal family like ours. Who knew everyone’s politics?

Section 421, to our right, behind home plate, was dark blue, filled with Seattle police officers and visiting law enforcement from around the state. Spouses were seated with them, so we could pick out our son from the back, only because we could identify his new wife’s mass of ginger-colored curls.

Uniforms do provide a form of group identity. We’d had other times when we couldn’t distinguish our son from his cohort.  Years before, at the massive Army training camp in Georgia where David graduated from boot camp, ready to start his four-year Army Infantry deployment, we sat in the stands of another large stadium.  We could not identify our eighteen-year-old in his sand-colored, camouflage uniform in that crowd. They would go off to war as part of a unit. If they came home in a flag-draped coffin, those left behind would mourn together. Families would mourn alone.

The summer before Lexi’s funeral, the George Floyd summer, we’d watched the officers night after night on TV and Twitter. We couldn’t pick out our son. Each officer wore the same protective riot gear, helmets with visors, protective vests, the words “Police” etched in white on their dark uniforms, bikes used as blockades. Those of us watching from our couches at home knew they were scared, but would try to keep each other safe. Parents didn’t go to sleep until the text came in at 4 a.m. saying their kid was in their own apartment. Again, families worried alone.

Slides of Lexi flashed on the jumbotron screen above. In most of them, she was wearing her navy uniform doing some cop thing. My favorite was of her in a glamorous red dress, one shoulder bare, hair down, hanging out with her guy. She was beautiful and smiling in that one, but I can only wonder if she had to choose only one photo to represent herself if that would have been it. She was a proud and caring human, both in and out of uniform. Just as my son was a proud and caring human dancing in his pale blue, tailored suit with the yellow and blue flowered silk tie at his wedding or standing on the streets of Seattle confronting an angry crowd

*

The tradition of playing bagpipes at police funerals began in the 1800’s when Irish immigrants were the predominant ethnic group in police forces on the East Coast. I can’t think of another portable instrument that is as solemn and deep-throated as the bagpipe. They droned on while the funeral procession marched in, seeming to move the air in the vast arena with their reverberations of sadness.

Lexi’s fiancée, her step-daughters, her colleagues, her friends, all eulogized the young officer. She was loved and admired. My son tells me that admiration was not just funeral after-thought. She was a brave, caring, athletic, smart woman and officer.

At the end of the service, an honor guard of eight officers meticulously folded the flag covering the coffin into a tight triangle, revealing only the white stars on the dark blue background, and handed it to our state’s governor, sitting in front with the family and police chief.  Governor Insley quietly got up and handed the flag to Lexi’s mom and dad.

Lexi’s parents were close to my age — late sixties, early seventies. Mom had short, curly gray hair; Dad’s was thinning.  Grim faced, they didn’t speak during the funeral. Instead, the parents’ words were shared in a newspaper Op-Ed that evening:

Many of our friends were surprised when Lexi decided to become a police officer and often said, “She is exactly the kind of person who should be a cop.” When Lexi heard this, she bristled. Rather [than] receiving this as a compliment, she heard it as an unwarranted degradation of the people she worked with. She said that she was no different than her fellow officers. Over the course of five years and especially since she was killed, we got to see for ourselves what she meant. Seattle should be immensely proud of the women and men who serve in the SPD.[1]

The fact that Lexi’s mom and dad felt it necessary to defend the calling their daughter had chosen, even in her death, in that moment of maximum grief, reflects the untenable position that all cop parents, especially liberal cop parents, found ourselves in during the past year.

During the George Floyd protests, we’d agonized for our kids’ safety. Most of the street demonstrations were angry but peaceful; the anti-racist sentiments represented pain and frustration. They were protected by First Amendment rights of speech and assembly.

But the anger of the moment was concretized in the minds of many by a virulent, blanket hatred of all police. The moral outrage against our kids was palpable. We knew they went into law enforcement to protect the vulnerable, to catch the bad guys, to do their part. Just as they internalized the condemnation they received day after day, night after night, for doing their jobs, we parents watched from the sidelines and felt it too. To lose Lexi just when some of the vitriol was cooling, was especially tragic.

At last, the honor guard took down the flags, the bagpipes played “Amazing Grace” and Lexi’s last call from the dispatcher boomed through the speakers:

Adam 34. No reply for Lexi Harris. End of watch, 1:18. June 14, 2021.

Kresha is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband. She is writing a memoir contrasting her days as a campus radical to her current role as the mother of a police officer and is in love with her first, tiny granddaughter, whom she finds a delightful distraction from other creative work. Kresha’s essays have been published in The Brevity Blog, The Bucket, Amethyst Review and anthologies including American Writers Review 2022 and the Proud to Be Anthology published by Southeast Missouri University Press. For a complete list of her work, please visit her website, www. https://kresharwarnock.com/. Follow her on Instagram @kresharwarnock or Twitter/X