‘It Could Be Any One of Us’: Hundreds Mourn Slain Jersey City Officer

JERSEY CITY, N.J. — It was only a week ago that this city along the Hudson River across from Manhattan was overtaken by an atmosphere of panic and horror after two people fatally shot a police officer and mounted a deadly assault on a kosher supermarket.

On Tuesday, as a cold rain fell and hundreds of mourners gathered to pay their respects to the slain officer, Detective Joseph Seals, the mood in this city of a quarter million residents had shifted to one of collective grief.

Within a mile of St. Aedan’s Church, where Detective Seals’s funeral was to be held, traffic was at a standstill. Hours before the funeral was set to begin, caravans of police cars and vans and motorcycles streamed toward Jersey City, their lights flashing and sirens blazing.

The vehicles threaded through the traffic and headed toward Journal Square, a main crossroads where the officers met so they could stand shoulder to shoulder under gray skies to honor a fellow officer.

“We’re here to pay respects,” said Lt. Frank Todd of the Edison Police Department in New Jersey. “This is something we all face. Any day, it could be any one of us.”

Police officers from as far away as Baltimore; Fort Worth and Boston walked slowly toward the church, alongside a solo bagpiper.

“It’s important to stand up,” said Officer J.R. Faigin of the Fort Worth Police Department, who arrived from Texas early Tuesday. “To stand for our brothers and sisters, so that their families feel our support.”

About a half mile from the church, at McLaughlin Funeral Home, columns of bagpipers waited alongside a sea of officers in crisp dress blues. Some were inside for a final service, after which the coffin bearing Detective Seals’s body would travel in a funeral procession to the church.

Officers bearing flags and rifles lined the streets along which the hearse would travel. Above Bergen Avenue, part of the funeral procession route, a flag about three stories tall was suspended on a crane.

Detective Seals was killed last week in a confrontation that began a chain of events in which five more people, including the two attackers who gunned him down, died in what officials say was an anti-Semitic attack on the kosher grocery store.

The others who were killed — Leah Mindel Ferencz, who helped run the market; Moshe Deutsch, a rabbinical student who was there shopping; and Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, an immigrant who worked at the store — have been mourned at separate services.

Before Detective Seals’s funeral, on Monday afternoon, several hundred people gathered for a wake at McLaughlin Funeral Home, waiting in the cold to pay tribute.

Alex Lalaoui, a local youth soccer coach, did not know the slain officer, but he nonetheless felt compelled to attend the wake out of respect for the police force.

“When something happens to them, it happens to my family,” Mr. Lalaoui said. “Between today and tomorrow, to me it is a national moment of honoring our officer.”

Inside the two-story brick funeral home on Monday, Detective Seals’s body was laid out in a half-open brown coffin. A pair of white gloves and a police hat sat on a table to the left. His wife and several of the couple’s five children shook hands with each mourner who passed by.

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Next to the coffin were photos of the Seals family on vacation. Flower arrangements — including one sent jointly by the New York Police Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration — filled two rooms, adding splashes of color amid the beige walls and dim lights.

A framed picture in a hallway showed Detective Seals and a partner outside a store on Martin Luther King Drive. Above that was a framed front page from The Jersey Journal of Dec. 27, 2008. “Rape Foiled. Hero cops save woman from sex attack,” the headline said.

Detective Seals joined the Jersey City Police Department in 2006 after spending several years with the Hudson County Corrections Department. He was born in Jersey City, graduated from high school in Bayonne, just to the south, and lived with his wife and children in North Arlington, about eight miles north and west of the streets he patrolled.

He had been promoted to detective in November 2017, and he was most recently assigned to a citywide initiative geared toward reducing shootings and making gun arrests.

“He was our leading police officer in removing guns from the street,” Michael Kelly, the city’s police chief, said last week. “Dozens and dozens of handguns he is responsible for removing from the street.”

On the day he was killed, Detective Seals was apparently on his way to meet a confidential informer at a cemetery in Jersey City’s Greenville neighborhood, about three miles from the funeral home where friends, family members and colleagues gathered on Monday.

He had been exchanging text messages with his mother about Christmas presents for his children, but he had stopped replying by around noon.

It was around that time, officials said, that Detective Seals noticed a U-Haul van in Bayview cemetery. He was not in uniform, and it was unclear whether he called for backup. He confronted a man and a woman who were in the van, whom the authorities have identified as David N. Anderson and Francine Graham. They shot and killed him.

From there, Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham drove about a mile to the JC Kosher Supermarket. They stormed into the store, unleashing a fusillade and killing one of the store’s owners, an employee and a customer.

In the firefight that followed, the armed couple exchanged rounds with law enforcement officers from Jersey City, New York City, the state police and the F.B.I. When an armored police vehicle ultimately drove into the market, Mr. Anderson and Ms. Graham were found dead.

Ed Shanahan contributed reporting.