Off-duty Las Vegas Police Officer Charleston Hartfield was one of the 58 people killed when Stephen Haddock fired into a crowd during the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last week.
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On Thursday, thousands holding candles came to pay their respects to the 34-year-old husband and father of two at the Police Memorial Park, a Las Vegas park dedicated to fallen officers, according to CNN.
His wife, his sister and two children, a boy and a girl, sat in the front of the crowd as Hartfield’s colleagues described the young man, who was a Nevada Army National Guard sergeant first class and a youth football coach known as “Coach Chucky.”
“He would always serve as a shining example to all of us about what is just and right, and how we live our lives,” said one of his colleagues.
“He led his life with honor, dignity and a great capacity for others,” said another, a detective who had worked with him for years.
Stan King, the father of one of the players on the team, said that Hartfield was “an absolute all-American kind of guy.”
King added, “This kind of guy comes around once in a blue moon. He was a very special guy to the community.”
Hartfield had just released a memoir in July, titled Memoirs of a Public Servant, which documents the “thoughts, feelings, and interactions of one Police Officer in the busiest and brightest city in the world, Las Vegas.”
Read more at CNN.
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