EXCERPT:
LIGHTFOOT: “By all accounts Ella French was an incredible person, extraordinarily hard-working and a great colleague. She exhibited I think all the attributes that we really want young people to do, which is dedication, commitment, hard work, service over self, a lot of sacrifice. Her mother said that she loved the job. There was a lot of emotion running that night. There were hundreds of officers who were there. I met and talked to many of them. And there was a lot of emotion from the range of the spectrum from total despair to anger and rage, and kind of everything in between. And that’s to be expected. This is a really hard loss. A really hard loss for her unit, her team, who are themselves very young and who may be experiencing personal loss for maybe the first time in their lives. So, I think that the most important thing is that we honor her -- her service, we support her mom and her brother and that we pray every day for the other officer who was injured and still hospitalized and his family. His life will -- will always be marked by that incident. So that’s really what I’m focused on.”