Police Bid Farewell to Slain Officer : Mourning: Most of all, LAPD’s Charles Heim is recalled as “just an ordinary cowboy . . . just a great guy.”

Into the crown of her police hat, she tucked a wad of white napkins. “For when I cry,” said Detective Jayme Weaver, securing the napkins before putting the hat on her head and walking into Grace Community Church in Sun Valley for the funeral of Officer Charles Heim on Thursday morning. They had graduated from the Los Angeles Police Department Academy together in September, 1983.

“Oh, Chuck was just always happy,” said Weaver, 32, who works in the Devonshire Division, laughing for the moment even though she anticipated tears soon. “Living his life to the fullest.”

Charles Dean Heim, gunned down Friday at a Hollywood motel while checking out a report of drug dealing, was remembered Thursday as a meticulous and aggressive policeman, a caring father and husband, a prankster, a horse lover, a cowboy and an embellisher of stories.

“His wife tells me he could make a minnow of a story into a whale,” LAPD Chaplain Richard Bargas said.

“Many of you have stopped me and said, ‘Don’t forget to say he was just an ordinary cowboy,’ ” the chaplain said to the crowd of 4,800 gathered at the funeral. “No frills, no lace, just a great guy.”

As the chaplain finished his remarks, a loudspeaker filled the air with the strains of a Willie Nelson recording: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. . . . “

Heim, 33, the 11th LAPD officer killed in the line of duty in the last five years, died early Saturday after being shot the previous night when he and his partner, Officer Felix Pena, were investigating a tip. He had been a member of the mounted unit of the LAPD’s elite Metro Division, but was about to join the Hollywood Division.

Virtually all the officers from both divisions were present Thursday, along with a legion of police officers from across Los Angeles and the state. They blanketed the vast church, overflowing its capacity of 4,500, and later spilled across the grassy slopes surrounding the spot where Heim was to later be buried at Eternal Valley Memorial Park in Newhall.

Most of the officers--half of them, by one estimate, members of the LAPD--filed into the church practically in formation. As the rest walked in, spectators could read the badges on their uniforms: Beverly Hills, Azusa, Culver City, Newport Beach, Burbank, Chino and more.

Heim’s wife, Beth, also a Metro Division officer, sat in the front row of the church, her long hair pulled back into a single braid, her five-month pregnancy barely visible in her two-piece black outfit. With her were family members, including Heim’s father, who uses a wheelchair, and 12-year-old Charles, Heim’s son from a previous marriage, who was wearing a gray-blue suit.

“He looks just like him,” said Donna May, 33, who was engaged to Heim before they broke up in 1990. “He’s one person I’ll never forget.”

So many officers came Thursday that the funeral had the edge of a bittersweet reunion. For the members of Heim’s Police Academy graduating class of September, 1983, it was even more poignant. They occasionally see one another in the field but rarely get together.

“This is the first time we’ve all been together in 11 years,” said Sgt. Stephany Payne of the West Valley Division.

But they all remembered Chuck Heim. They chipped in and bought the cross of flowers displayed in front of the church.

“He kept our class going, kept morale up--he was real supportive of the female classmates,” Payne said.

Among the mourners were Police Chief Willie L. Williams and Mayor Richard Riordan. Standing in the back of the church with others who lined the walls when seats ran out was former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Sgt. Jimmy Render, Heim’s partner for 4 1/2 years in the Metro Division, remembered him as “a caring sensitive person. . . . He was like a brother to me.”

Render also remembered Heim as a prankster.

On duty on horseback, the officers were under instructions “not to modify the uniform.” But Heim blithely ignored those rules. At Christmastime, he bedecked his beloved horse, Panzer, with a Santa Claus hat. At the Venice Beach boardwalk during the summer, Panzer donned sunglasses.

“Our supervisors would just shake their heads,” Render said as the group in the church laughed.

In the front of the church, next to his coffin, was a picture of Heim proudly standing next to his horse.

Among the words of remembrance, there was a hint of the personal anguish that so often accompanies police funerals, but no one dwelt on it long:

“He had some difficult problems in his own life and he was in the process of working them through when his life was taken away,” the chaplain told the crowd.

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What was mostly shared was the sense of the tough-minded, quick-witted police officer.

“Chuck was a warrior,” said Sgt. Kirk Smith of the mounted unit, speaking in a commanding, authoritative voice. “And he died as a warrior.”

Smith was the one who put him in the mounted unit and later designated Heim as the man who would lead the riderless horse at police officers’ funerals. “Chuck could sit on a horse under a hail of rocks at a disturbance or work crime suspension, then go out and scoop up an injured rabbit and take it home,” Smith said.

“I’m going to miss you, Chuck,” Smith said. “I promise you . . .”

Smith paused for an eternity; the silence filled the church and left the mourners hushed and still.

”. . . that you will not be forgotten,” he continued, the crispness in his voice slightly dulled with his pain. “This is not an empty promise or a promise based on emotion, but a promise based on the fact that you were so deeply loved by so many people.”

At the cemetery, it took 45 minutes for officers to gather after driving, riding and walking to the slope of the graveside, seas of dark blue uniforms broken by patches of the khaki uniforms of sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers.

At the cemetery, every conceivable display of police ceremony and ritual was in form, from a bagpiper playing “Amazing Grace,” to two trumpeters playing taps, to a 21-gun salute.

At other funerals of fallen police officers, a line of four mounted officers walk to the grave followed by the riderless horse. As requested by Heim’s wife, there would be no riderless horse at this funeral, because that duty had been Heim’s. But instead of the four mounted officers, nearly the entire mounted unit came to pay their respects: 21 officers in black Stetson hats and black leather gloves sat on horseback at the entrance to the cemetery before proceeding to the grave site.

Heim last rode his horse Panzer several weeks ago. “I would suspect and actually like to think that Panzer misses him,” said Lt. Earl Paysinger, noting that the horse will remain in the department until Beth Heim decides if she wants him. “For us, our horses are our partners.”

Heim’s patrolman partner, Pena, who was wounded in the right hand Friday night in Hollywood, stood at the grave site with his arm in a sling.

At the end of the service, from the western edge of a hill, four police helicopters suddenly flew into view. One broke from the rest and flew off alone in a “missing-man” formation, signifying that a colleague had been lost.

Chief Williams presented the flag that draped Heim’s poplar coffin to Heim’s widow. Another officer handed her a Stetson like the one mounted officers wear on duty. Beth Heim made her way to a limousine, tearfully clutching the flag, a friend on one side and her late husband’s young son from a previous marriage on the other side.

Charles Heim also had a daughter, who died of cancer at age 5 in 1985 and is buried in the same cemetery. Her bronze grave marker, reading, “Melissa May Heim, Beloved Daughter and Sister,” was bordered with pink rosebuds. Her father’s coffin was buried just inches from hers.

Times staff writer Chip Johnson contributed to this story.