A Final Goodby to Fallen Officer : Tribute: Hundreds of friends, family members and co-workers remember slain Compton Police Officer Kevin Michael Burrell as a ‘gentle giant’ committed to his community and to law enforcement.

Mourners overflowed a Compton church Monday as hundreds of friends, relatives and fellow officers came to pay their last respects to one of two police officers shot to death in that city last week.

Kevin Michael Burrell, 29, and his partner, James MacDonald, were killed last Monday after they stopped two suspects in a late-model, red Chevrolet pickup at Rosecrans and Dwight avenues.

Burrell, who stood 6 feet, 7 inches tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds, was eulogized at the Double Rock Baptist Church as a “gentle giant” committed to his community and to law enforcement.

“If our community’s protectors cannot be safe, and our citizens cannot be safe, then none of us can be safe,” Compton Police Chief Hourie Taylor told mourners--who included Gov. Pete Wilson, Los Angeles District Atty. Gil Garcetti, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams. “It is absolutely necessary that we do something to curb the proliferation of firearms in our society.”

A basketball standout at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, Burrell grew up in Compton, where in his teens he became determined to be a police officer.

Officers from throughout the state arrived at the church, filling nearby neighborhoods with patrol cars and motorcycles. Compton City Hall was closed Monday in honor of Burrell and MacDonald.

Compton Officer Jasper Jackson outlined the painful sequence that officers experience when one of their own falls in the line of duty--the news reports, the sorrow, the graveside tears.

At each officer’s funeral, he said, “we stood wondering, who would be next? Would it be you, me or would it be our partner?”

They silently pray that each time will be the last, he said, but “we know that again and again we will come back--feeling the pain, standing together in honor to another fallen law enforcement officer.”

Wilson, who also attended MacDonald’s funeral in Santa Rosa on Saturday, described how his own grandfather was a young police officer killed in Chicago when his mother was 18 months old.

“There are no words that can replace a son,” he said to Burrell’s parents. “But you have my thanks and my admiration. This church is filled with love, gratitude and pride. Kevin Burrell has been taken from us, but his memory will survive.”