As you made your way to the Flagler County Sheriff’s annual memorial for fallen law enforcement officers Thursday evening, an enormous “thin blue line” flag sloped down from between two cranes in the breezeless air.
A flag like it had hung at the funeral of Sheriff’s Deputy Deputy Paul Luciano in September 2021 at the nearby First Baptist Church. Luciano is the last sheriff’s deputy to have died in the line of duty, K-9 Kyro aside. The 60-year-old corrections deputy, a law enforcement officer since 1996, died of Covid.
At the time, the Sheriff’s Office had to borrow the flag. Thursday evening it hung again from two tow trucks’ cranes that belong to John’s Towing, the company John Rogers owns. When asked about it, Rogers, a Bunnell city commissioner since 2011, said the flag belonged to the Sheriff’s Office. He was just helping out, providing the trucks.
Not the case, Sheriff Rick Staly, who had been standing next to Rogers before the ceremony, said. Rogers had seen the flag at the Luciano funeral, and at that point decided to buy one and donate it to the Sheriff’s Office, Staly said. “It’s always important to get a thin blue line flag, and we just lucked out,” the sheriff said, “because of John’s generosity.”
“As you could tell, I wasn’t trying to showcase anything,” Rogers said this morning. “The men and women put their lives on the line every day and that’s the least we could do for them. They put their lives on the line for us every day.” (The flag is at times shadowed by controversy and is restricted or banned in some states’ police agencies or public venues after its hijacking by extremist groups, while other states have adopted legislation explicitly protecting its display. It emerged in 2014 as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement to signify that “blue lives matter.” The term itself has a much older history associated with military and police holding the line.)
As the ceremony got under way the sky turned almost blood-red, giving the flag’s white stripes a reddish hue, then darkened, melting the flag’s black stripes into sky about the time when the ceremony was completing the “Fallen Family Recognition” and turning to a recorded performance of the “Thin Blue Line” song and a sheriff’s video of National Police Week ceremonies.
“The first law enforcement memorial service was held in Washington, D.C., in 1982, and it is a tradition that continues today,” Staly told an audience of over 150 people that included elected and administrative officials from most local governments. “The weight of the badge is not easy every day. Those who wear it do so in service to others, understanding the risk they take. However, the badge weighs heaviest for the loved ones who walked alongside these fallen heroes and continue to bear the burden of their sacrifices.”
The sheriff, who writes two condolence cards for every law enforcement officer who dies in the line of duty–one for the officer’s agency, one for the officer’s family–summarized the tally of the fallen for the year. According to the Officer Down page, which documents every death, 41 law enforcement officers have died so far this year in the country.
Last year 114 officers died or were killed in the line of duty, 46 by gunfire, 33 in vehicle-involved incidents, and 17 from 9/11-related illnesses. Florida lost 11 officers last year, two so far this year, including Calhoun County Sheriff’s Deputy Steven Bruner, who died of a medical emergency while evacuating residents from a 500-acre wildfire on March 21, and Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Michael Diego, who died of a medical emergency in training on Feb. 18.
The Flagler County Sheriff’s Office had a loss in the past year when Kyro, the police dog, died on duty last Oct. 14. Kyro had been with the agency less than a year, and belonged to Deputy Marcus Dawson.
“The granite memorials to my left honor the four deputies and the two sheriffs that have fallen serving in Flagler County since 1917,” Staly said, “and sadly, in 2025 we added one K-9 to our memorial. K-9 Kyro is the first K-9 that died in the line of duty, he was one of 23 canines across this country that died in 2025.”
The heart of the ceremony is the pinning of differently colored roses to the wreath by the granite memorial, in memory of the fallen–red roses for local officers, a blue rose in memory of Florida officers, a white rose in memory of officers across the country.
The local fallen are: Sheriff Perry Hall (1927), Deputy George “Son” Durrance (1927), Sheriff Homer Brooks (1965), Deputy Charles “Chuck” Sease (2003), Sergeant Francesco “Frankie” Celico (2011), Deputy First Class Paul Luciano (2021), Bunnell Police Department Sgt. Dominic Guida (2021), and FBI Special Agent Daniel Alfin (2021).
Former Palm Coast Mayor David Alfin pinned the red rose in memory of his son.
Also present among the numerous local officials was Palm Coast City Manager Michael McGlothlin, accompanied by his wife Jessica McGlothlin. They were attending their first ceremony in Flagler–McGlothlin became city manager in mid-December–but McGlothlin spent 31 years in law enforcement before moving into the civilian world. Along the way, he lost two colleagues in the military and seven in law enforcement, none that he directly supervised or who were on his watch. “It just makes you miss them,” he said of the ceremony.
“You don’t lose that connection. You stay connected with the families,” Jessica said after the ceremony. She had been part of the group Wives Behind the Badge when Michael was in law enforcement. “It’s a family unit. When you’re part of that thin blue line, you have a lens that, if you’re not in it, you don’t possess it in the same context, when dads miss Christmases and birthdays and anniversaries, and husbands miss those kinds of things. So it’s the loss of the peacekeepers that you see with their families, of having to go on without them, and to kind of help pick up and support them.”
McGlothlin noted that three colleagues died from suicide during his law enforcement years, “a terrible side effect of our profession,” he said. Deaths by suicide–such as the death of Flagler County Sheriff’s Deputy Joseph Delarosby at Heroes Park in 2014, soon after his retirement, have never been included in memorials, nor are they included in the Officer Down page. A new monument was dedicated in Texas in 2024 to commemorate lives lost to suicide among first responders, including law enforcement officers. The organization behind the monument tallied 148 deaths by suicide nationwide in 2025, three quarters of them on active duty. Seven were recorded in Florida, down from 16 the year before.
Leave a Reply