Across the state today, flags were lowered to half-staff to honor Colorado’s fallen law-enforcement officers.
Gov. Bill Ritter led a moving ceremony this morning at the Colorado Law Enforcement Memorial at Camp George West, followed by a bagpipe tribute and a 21-gun salute.
The memorial, erected in 1979, includes the names of 214 fallen officers. Today, Ritter added the names of five more officers, two of whom died last year while on duty.
Colorado State Patrol Trooper Zachariah Templeton, 27, died Oct. 11, while assisting a truck driver in the median of Interstate 76 in Adams County. The driver had lost a tank off his small truck in the median and was attempting to put it back on his truck when Templeton and fellow trooper Scott Hinshaw stopped to help him.
A 17-year-old, driving a 1994 pickup, said he was looking down at the floorboard for some sunflower seeds when he swerved into the median, hitting the two troopers.
Templeton was airlifted but died. Hinshaw was severely injured. Templeton left a wife and a 3-year-old daughter. The teenager wasn’t identified because he was a minor.
Aurora police officer Doug Byrne was responding to a medical emergency on East Sixth Avenue in March 2007 when he rolled his cruiser into a median, was ejected and killed.
Also added to the memorial were the names of Lamar night marshal J. Horace Frisbie, who died in 1906; Routt County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles E. Gibbs, who died in 1929; and Paonia Town Marshal John Armour Stitt, who died in 1952.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
