Less than a week after his partner, Det. Jason Rivera, slain NYPD Officer Wilbert Mora will receive his own hero’s farewell at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Wednesday.
Mora, 27, was shot in the head Jan. 21 after he and Rivera responded to a domestic disturbance at an apartment complex in Harlem, where they were met — and murdered — by career criminal Lashawn McNeil.
With a bullet lodged in his brain, Mora was kept on life support so he could, in death and in accordance with his wishes, again go the extra mile and donate his organs.
As Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell aptly put it, Mora was three times a hero: “For choosing a life of service. For sacrificing his life to protect others. For giving life even in death through organ donation.”
And New Yorkers honor him for it. “It is a tragedy both officers were killed — Mora and [Jason] Rivera — and it is important we honor both of them equally,” Benjamin Garcia, among the first of thousands to arrive for Mora’s wake Tuesday, told The Post. “Officer Mora’s death was a great loss to East Harlem. He was a very beautiful gentleman.”
Garcia, a Guardian Angels patrol director, lives in the same East Harlem neighborhood as Officer Mora.
We expect the funeral Wednesday to see much the same crowds as the rites for Rivera, as the civilians he died protecting salute Wilbert Mora’s service and sacrifice. The sorrow and outrage are the same.
