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In a brief, solemn ceremony in Battery Park City Tuesday morning, NYPD officers and officials paid tribute to the 42 police officers who died in recent years, many of 9/11-related illnesses.
Among those whose names have been etched into the NYC Police Memorial’s green granite wall at Liberty Street and South End Avenue were those of Officer Jonathan Diller, who was shot and killed on March 25 in Far Rockaway, Queens.
Diller, 31, a member of the 105th Precinct’s Community Response Team, was shot and killed after he and other officers approached an illegally parked car in Far Rockaway, Queens. The officer was shot once in the stomach by a man with 21 prior arrests. Despite being mortally wounded, Diller was able to wrestle the gun away from the shooter before the man was shot by police.
Detective Troy Patterson was similarly honored. Patterson, 27, was shot Jan. 16, 1990 and died of his injuries April 29, 2023. The officer was killed while off-duty by one of a group of teenagers as he washed his car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
“We as a city, we sit under the tree of freedom because the 42 men and women watered that tree with their blood,” Mayor Eric Adams said during the ceremony, hosted annually by the Battery Park City Authority.
The memorial, dedicated in October 1997, commemorates the members of the NYPD who lost their lives while in the line of duty. More than 1,000 names, reordered chronologically back to 1849, are etched on the wall.
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