Bicycle Relay Ride to Honor State’s Slain Police Officers

Powered by a relay team of sweaty, determined cops, a tribute to California’s slain police officers rolled into Simi Valley on Monday night on a fleet of bicycles.

Officers from the California Highway Patrol and from several Los Angeles County police agencies pedaled up to the Simi Valley Police Department and handed off their cargo--three gold-plated flashlights etched with the names of the 150 California law officers killed in the line of duty since 1987.

And today, relay teams from three Ventura County departments are scheduled to carry the names of the dead across the county as the gold flashlights make their way through every California city that lost an officer in the past 10 years.

“I think it’s special that you carry these lights for us across the whole state,” Simi Chief Randy Adams said to the two dozen cyclists. “It lets us know what the ultimate sacrifice is all about.”

The Los Angeles County squad presented one of the three flashlights to Jenifer Clark. Her husband, Officer Michael Frederick Clark, was cut down in an August 1995 gunfight with a distraught man whose welfare he was sent to check.

“I think it’s an incredible thing,” Clark said of the trek. “It makes something good out of something terrible. And it makes the family members [of slain officers] feel good.”

The first-of-its-kind Continental Ribbon Ride is also a test-run for a nationwide relay ride, which organizers hope to launch in 1998 or 1999 to remember slain police officers across the United States.

Simi Valley officers on bikes are to set out this morning for the East Valley Sheriff’s Station in Thousand Oaks and ride in memory of fallen local officers including Clark.

The Simi officers are to hand off the flashlights by 9:30 a.m. to Ventura County sheriff’s deputies in Thousand Oaks. The deputies will pedal to the Camarillo sheriff’s station in memory of slain Deputy Peter Aguirre, and then on to the Oxnard Police Department.

Oxnard officers will continue the relay through early afternoon to the CHP station in Ventura to commemorate the loss of fallen Oxnard Officers James Rex Jensen Jr., James O’Brien, John Adair and Fred Clark.

And the Ventura CHP relay team will take over and ride up Ventura Avenue and the Ojai Valley to the Ojai sheriff’s station, in memory of CHP Officer James C. O’Connor, killed in 1990 in a motorcycle crash en route home from training.

In Ojai, the flashlights will be parked in an overnight storage stand beneath a picture of Aguirre, as his family members look on, said Senior Deputy Jim Popp.

And on Wednesday morning, Ventura County deputies are to resume the ride--accompanied by some riders who are traveling the entire route. The ride began in Winterhaven, in Imperial County near the Arizona border, on March 31, and is to end May 9 in Sacramento.