A Vow to Serve and Protect : Slain Public Safety Officer Died While Fulfilling Patriotic Duty, Brother Says

Robert Worley looked out from a church pulpit Thursday at hundreds of police officers who had come to mourn his son, a Los Angeles County Safety Police officer slain just days before Christmas in a gun battle with a robber.

“I would hope you can join us in hope,” he said at the funeral of Thomas Benton Worley. “Because death will not have the last word here. Life will have the last word here.”

With that, police officers from all over Southern California lifted their hymnals in unison and belted out “On Eagles’ Wings”--a vibrant tribute to Thomas Worley, who had dreamed his whole life of being a police officer, and died living out his dream.

Worley, 33, was shot Dec. 21 in the crowded parking lot of a Canoga Park strip mall after confronting Jesus Valenzuela, 44, who witnesses said had just held up a discount shoe store in the mall.

After Worley identified himself as a police officer, investigators said, Valenzuela shot at him. The officer returned fire.

Worley, who was off duty and not wearing a bulletproof vest, was shot in the chest and groin and died about 90 minutes later. Valenzuela, an ex-convict with three prior robbery convictions, was hit in the liver and died within the hour from internal bleeding.

At Thursday’s services at the First United Methodist Church of Santa Monica, family, friends and law enforcement officials sought to understand how it was that Worley and Valenzuela came to square off in a suburban mini-mall parking lot, with both ending up mortally wounded.

“Tom is my brother and right now, as with everyone else in this room, I can make no sense of this,” said Charles Worley, 23. “It’s tugging at my ability to make sense of much of anything.”

What was particularly difficult to accept, mourners said, was that Worley died so young--leaving a wife, Pam, 29, and two children, Christina, 6, and Matthew, 2.

“I saw Pam when she walked in,” said Clifton Williams, president of the 400-member Safety Police Assn. “I saw her face and I saw all the police officers ever killed haunting her eyes--it (was) all written across her face.”

If there was solace to be found, mourners said, it was in the fact that Worley had a lifelong passion for police work. His brother called it “a huge love in his heart” that elevated police work to a patriotic duty.

“The man had a love for his country I don’t even begin to understand,” Charles Worley said. From the day in grade school that he first recited the Pledge of Allegiance, the younger brother said, Worley “took it as a vow” to serve and protect.

Worley served as a police officer in the Air Force, worked when he got out as a private security guard and then, 18 months ago, was accepted into the Safety Police, sworn officers who provide security at such county facilities as office buildings and hospitals.

“Matthew was so proud that Daddy was a policeman,” said Dorothy Bimber Worley, an ordained minister who helped the Rev. Donald J. Shelby lead her son’s funeral.

That Wednesday evening, when Pam Worley crawled out of the Payless ShoeSource on all fours and whispered to her husband in the parking lot that the store was being robbed, Worley “had no choice” but to intervene, said Walter Gray, assistant director of the county’s Department of Health Services, which oversees operations of the Safety Police.

At the pulpit, surrounded by Christmas trees, bouquets of flowers, a color photograph of his smiling and mustachioed son and the son’s flag-dropped coffin, Robert Worley said, “Tom had a calling to law enforcement. He knew it, he said it, he fulfilled it. This is why Tom died. I hate it but I understand.”

As the years go by, the father said, there will be “pain anew” each Christmas season. “But we must remember that he gave his life for a great cause, no less a cause than the age-old battle between good and evil.”

Like-minded mourners expressed similar sentiments in a sympathy card passed around before the service, an oversized card featuring a Cezanne still-life of flowers. “Heroes never die,” wrote one.

When the service ended, Worley was given a hero’s procession to burial at a Chatsworth cemetery. The California Highway Patrol temporarily closed the San Diego and Simi Valley freeways to allow the motorcade to pass--a single-file line so long it took 11 minutes to go by at highway speeds.

After a brief service at Oakwood Memorial Park, the chief of the Safety Police, Ricardo Cotwright, gave the flag on the coffin to the officer’s widow. And, as church bells chimed in the distance, mourners turned to leave--several pausing to touch the mahogany-colored coffin, heads down in prayer.