BATON ROUGE -- The Baton Rouge sheriff's deputy killed last Sunday ran to help another officer when he could have stayed safe in the convenience store where he was working off-duty, a minister said at his funeral Saturday.
"It's a remarkable story, the story of Brad Garafola," said the Rev. Jeff Ginn, lead pastor at Istrouma Baptist Church in Baton Rouge. "He had a place of security ... a place where he could hide. He left that place of safety."
Garafola and two Baton Rouge police officers were killed outside the B-Quik convenience store by 29-year-old gunman Gavin Long, who was later killed by police. Three other officers were wounded. Sheriff Sid Gautreaux told mourners Saturday that one officer remains in critical condition, and another faces a third operation on his shattered arm.
All 1,500 seats in the church were filled for the public funeral for Garafola. Additional mourners, many of them law enforcement officers from around the country, stood along the church walls.
A funeral Mass was celebrated earlier at a Catholic church for Garafola's family and friends, according to the family's obituary.
Gov. John Bel Edwards said strength and courage seem to have defined Garafola's life and death.
Gautreaux said Garafola was "courageous, compassionate, fearless, fair, brave and benevolent."
His brother-in-law, Jaye Cooper, said people called Garafola "the neighborhood husband" because he cut grass, caught snakes and did other chores for people around the community.
During two hours of visitation before the funeral, a line of mourners snaked through the church hallways, out the back door and into the parking lot. It included scores of officers from around Louisiana and from coast to coast.
Two police officers and two sheriff's deputies were from the Seattle, Wash., area. Bellevue police officer Paul Dill said their department sends an honor guard contingent to every out-of-state funeral of officers killed in the line of duty.
Early arrivals for Garafola's service included a deputy who worked with Garafola in the department's foreclosure division. He was dressed in Scottish regalia as drum major for a pipe band, which played "Amazing Grace" outside the church after four helicopters flew over in salute.
Last week's shootings came at a time of racial tension that flared across the nation and in Baton Rouge, after a black man was shot and killed during a July 5 confrontation with two white police officers outside a convenience store in that city. The next day a black man in Minnesota was shot and killed by police, and the man's girlfriend live-streamed the aftermath of that shooting on Facebook.
Gautreaux told reporters earlier that surveillance video showed Garafola firing at the gunman as bullets hit the concrete around him.
"My deputy went down fighting. He returned fire to the very end," the sheriff said.
A Section on 07/24/2016