JERSEY CITY, N.J. (AP) — As rain poured down Tuesday, thousands of police officers lines the streets of Jersey City to honor a detective killed last week in what officials are calling a domestic terrorism attack that also left three other civilians dead.
Joseph Seals, a 40-year-old married father of five, was lauded as a model officer who helped get guns off the streets of the city of 270,000 that sits across the Hudson River from New York City. He was shot last Tuesday in a cemetery about a mile from a kosher market by two attackers who went on to kill three more people at a kosher deli before dying in a shootout with police.
Jersey City Director of Public Safety James Shea last week called Seals “the ultimate detective or officer we would point to to tell young officers, ‘This is how you should behave.’” In 2008, he was credited with saving a woman from a sexual assault inside her own home on Christmas Eve.
Former Jersey City residents Matthew and Eileen McGinn drove in from the suburbs to stand in the rain across from the church to pay their respects. Both have close ties to the police force through family — Eileen McGinn said her sister-in-law’s family “are all Jersey City cops” — or familiarity.
“It’s heartbreaking,” Matthew McGinn said. “You can’t come from Jersey City, be active in the community and not know police, especially being Irish.”
U.S. Attorney General William Barr was expected to be among the speakers at the ceremony at St. Aedan’s Church.
Funerals already have been held for the other victims killed in the deli: Mindel Ferencz, 31, who co-owned the grocery; 24-year-old Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was shopping there; and store employee Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, 49. A fourth person in the store was shot and wounded but managed to escape, authorities have said.
David Anderson and Francine Graham, who were killed in a shootout with police, had several weapons including AR-15 assault rifles when their bodies were found, and a pipe bomb was found in the U-Haul van they drove to the market. The pair also are believed to have killed a livery driver who was found dead in the trunk of a car in nearby Bayonne the weekend before the kosher market shootings.
New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said the attack was driven by hatred of Jews and law enforcement and is being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism.