This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
In 1853, Salt Lake County sheriff's Deputy Rodney Badger leaped into a swollen Weber River to help people stranded in a wagon. He rescued a woman and four children, then he went back for two more children. They were swept away while returning to shore.
Badger was the first Utah law enforcement officer to die in the line of duty.
About 163 years later, in January 2016, Unified Officer Doug Barney was shot and killed in a confrontation with a fugitive parolee fleeing the scene of a car crash in Holladay. Barney was the first Unified officer to die on the job since the department was created in 2009.
In the intervening years, a dozen other Salt Lake County law enforcement officials have been killed while serving — in ambushes, car collisions, even saloon gun battles. Two crossing guards also died.
All were honored Wednesday in a memorial service at a monument near the Sheriff's Office. Several family members of the fallen — including Doug Barney's wife, Erika — attended the event, which included a roll call of the dead and a 21-gun salute honoring their service.
"This last year, I have witnessed as we have collectively been in that period of time where we all wore black," Sheriff Jim Winder said, recalling the loss of Barney. "The black shroud across our badges is that representation."
Winder, who oversees Unified Police Department, said he watched Doug Barney's family struggle through a similar period of deep mourning. But then he witnessed something that "renewed and reinvigorated" his optimism.
The Barney family, he said, gradually shook off its "shrouds of sorrow." The sheriff said he watched in the past year as the family sought to be a "living memorial" to Doug Barney — even recently comforting others dealing with the loss of law enforcement officers.
Doug Barney was the first sheriff's official to die in the line of duty since 1994. UPD provides law enforcement services to unincorporated Salt Lake County and several communities.
The deadliest stretch for the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office was nearly 80 years earlier, in 1913. On Nov. 21 of that year, four officers were ambushed by a suspect on a farm in the Saratoga Springs area. Three died — Chief J.W. Grant and Deputies Stannard Jensen and Otto Witbeck.
The bloodshed wasn't over for the department.
On Nov. 29, hundreds of law enforcement officials descended on Bingham Canyon, where the suspect in the killings had holed up in a mine. They began searching the tunnels.
Deputies Thomas Manderich and J. Douglas Hulsey were attempting to light a fire in one of the mine shafts to smoke out the suspect. Instead the man ambushed and killed them.
The stretch is considered "one of the darkest in Utah law enforcement history," Sgt. Jeff Evans said.
Winder urged his department to move forward from Doug Barney's death, and from others who sacrificed their lives in the line of duty.
"If we simply wander around in our lives with sorrow and a black shroud, that is not a memorial. That is not what we are supposed to do," Winder said. "What we are supposed to do is to take those sacrifices, learn from them and give. Give. Give.
"As police officers, it is not what we get," he added. "It is what we give."
Twitter: @lramseth