Remembering to Forget

Eight months after watching her fiance and fellow officer die, Jennifer Parish will pin his badge to her own Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy uniform and try to stand tall during a month’s worth of memorials honoring slain officers.

All around her, hushed and respectful crowds will be remembering. She will be trying to forget.

“You spend all these months trying to get some sense of recovery, and then to have to go through a month like this, which makes everything fresh again,” Parish, 24, said in her first interview since Deputy Shayne York was shot during a robbery. “It makes it hurt again.”

Parish and York were off duty, unarmed and waiting for haircuts at a Buena Park salon last August when a pair of armed robbers burst in and demanded wallets and purses. The robbers saw York’s badge in his wallet and shot him execution-style.

This month, Parish and the families of other slain officers will attend memorial ceremonies in Orange County, Sacramento and Washington. And on Friday, she carried a torch in the first four-mile leg of a 331-mile run that will wind through Los Angeles County and honor the fallen officers. The events are important, she said, to highlight the dangers of the job. But they do take a toll.

“It won’t be easy.”

After the shooting, Parish took a leave from her job as a jailer at Pitchess Detention Center in Castaic, where she and York had worked. Now staying at her father’s home in Orange County, she said she fears for her safety because the suspects have been identified by police as members of a Compton street gang. Both have lengthy records.

Kevin Boyce, 28, and Andrew Willis, 30, were arrested in Fullerton just hours after the shooting as they fled the scene of another robbery, police said. Both have pleaded innocent and face trial in upcoming months.

Only Boyce, the suspected gunman, is accused of murder during a robbery, which could make him eligible for the death penalty.

Witnesses at the De-Cut Salon said the gunman invoked the name of his gang before firing a shot into York’s head as the deputy lay prone on the floor.

Parish said the tragedy won’t drive her out of uniform.

“I’m going to stick with it, not just for me but for Shayne,” she said in a halting voice. “At the hospital I was ready to throw in the towel. They took so much from me, but they can’t have all of it.”

Images of the day still haunt her.

It was the day before her birthday, and she and York were planning to leave for Las Vegas the next day. The couple finished their shift at the jail and went to the department gun range for their periodic department skills test. They then drove south to Orange County for haircuts at a friend’s salon. Parish, weary from work and from planning their wedding, napped the entire drive.

“Now I think about that 45 minutes we could have spent together and I regret it so much,” she said. “It would have made a difference to me.”

The couple had met two years earlier while in training and had kept their relationship secret, even driving to different cities for covert dates. The pretense was dropped as they became more serious, and wedding plans were discussed.

Both their fathers were police officers. When the two began dating, Parish was the lone woman among 250 deputies working the maximum security dorms in the jail’s east facility. Her father, Denis Parish, a detective and 30-year veteran of the department, says his daughter has withstood incredible pressure in the hostile confines of the jail. In York, she found an equal, the elder Parish said.

The couple had discussed their own deaths, as every officer eventually does, but they imagined they would be apart and in uniform if the worst ever happened, she said.

“I could have accepted it better if we had been in uniform,” she said. “It would have made more sense to me somehow.”

She’s making plans to return to her job in June, but will work at the Twin Towers jail downtown instead of at Pitchess.

In the days after the slaying, she returned to the shooting range to test herself, “just to make sure I wasn’t gun shy,” she said. Her aim never faltered.