Organization raises funds to make police memorial more accessible

The Baltimore Sun

Each year, on the anniversaries of her youngest son's birth and death, Joan Prothero visits the cemetery where he is buried. She also goes to the jewelry store where he was shot by robbers, the memorial garden at the police precinct where he worked and the monument where his name is etched in granite alongside those of other Baltimore County police officers killed in the line of duty.

At each place, the 79-year-old mother of eight likes to spend a few quiet moments, sometimes bringing flowers and other times a few of the pennies that Sgt. Bruce A. Prothero was fond of collecting. She runs into difficulty only at the county police memorial -- an imposing stone replica of a police badge perched on a hill that has neither steps nor a path leading to it.

"It just so happens that the day Bruce was killed falls in February, and on some occasions, it's been sort of icy. It's hard to climb that hill," Prothero said. "And I'm an older lady. Every year, it gets a little bit harder."

Prothero, of Rockville, mentioned as much to the president of the local police union, and her casual aside has sparked efforts to raise enough money to make the tribute more accessible and inviting.

A nonprofit organization associated with the Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 4 has raised about $114,000 of the estimated $159,000 it will need to enhance the memorial. The monument itself would remain untouched, but the ground around it would be lowered a foot and a half to create a plaza with stone benches and a lighted path leading from a nearby sidewalk. Planners hope to have the project completed by May for the county's annual memorial service honoring fallen officers.

"I equate it with the Vietnam Memorial," said Dennis M. Robinson, a retired Baltimore County police colonel who is chairman of the Baltimore County Police Memorial Fund, the nonprofit group raising money for the project.

"With the Vietnam Memorial, it was significant for people to be able to come up and touch it -- touch the names of their loved ones and co-workers -- and that's what sold it for me with the police memorial," he said. "As it sits now, it's up on a grassy knoll and for older people and even younger people, they have to practically crawl up to it."

Carved out of gray granite, the 10-foot-tall memorial features the oversized badge flanked by granite slabs bearing the names of the seven county police officers killed in the line of duty. The memorial was unveiled in 1996 on the Courthouse Plaza in Towson, where it sits opposite a monument for county Fire Department members and volunteer firefighters killed in the line of duty.

A path invites passers-by from Pennsylvania Avenue to the fire memorial, where stone benches and a cobblestone plateau allow a visitor to spend a quiet moment there.

The police memorial, however, is fenced off from the sidewalk that lines Chesapeake Avenue and is up the hill from a low concrete wall near the courthouse plaza.

Ironically, the $80,000 structure was built to replace a monument at Joppa Road and Goucher Boulevard that had been criticized for its inaccessibility.

Built in 1975, that towering black monolith sat at the foot of a grassy rise outside a shopping center restraining wall. Pedestrians could not easily reach the memorial. And most cars whizzed past without noticing the tribute at the busy intersection.

G. Warren Mix, a Towson criminal defense attorney, spent about seven years raising money for the current memorial on the plaza outside the circuit courthouse. He said he was surprised that no efforts were made sooner to make the monument as accessible as had been intended.

"I think the officers who died in the line of duty need to be memorialized in some way and given the recognition they deserve," he said. "I walk past it every day on the way to the courthouse and some of the people I knew personally are being honored there."

The memorial is one of the several places that Prothero visits every February and November to remember her son, who died at the age of 35. With four men charged in the fatal shooting and separate legal proceedings for each, the Prothero family spent a good deal of time at the county's circuit courthouse. The police memorial is just a few yards from the steps to that building.

"It just became a very special place," Joan Prothero said. "You feel close to him or something. You go some place and their name is written there in stone -- it's sort of like a little piece of him is there."

For Robinson, who spent 32 years with the county Police Department before retiring in 2003, raising money to enhance the memorial was a project that he could easily support.

On Robinson's last day as western regional commander in February 2000, Bruce Prothero -- an officer assigned to a precinct in that area and the father of five young children -- was killed during an armed robbery at a Pikesville jewelry store. Working as a plainclothes security guard, Prothero was shot three times as he chased four men out of J. Brown Jewelers on Reisterstown Road.

Robinson was also close with another officer honored on the memorial, Sgt. Mark F. Parry, who died in January 2002 from injuries sustained 25 days earlier when a drunken driver struck his unmarked patrol car two days after Christmas. Parry, a father of three, was not scheduled to work the day he was killed but volunteered to help out as a shift commander during his holiday vacation.

"It's a perpetual monument," Robinson said of the police memorial, his voice choked with emotion. "Whether it's the Prothero family or the Parry family or one of the others, they can all realize that their loved one was not alone in his sacrifice. And their grandkids will be able to come here and reflect on the fact that their grandfather was something. That he was a hero."

jennifer.mcmenamin@ baltsun.com

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