Hundreds of uniformed police saluted as the casket containing the body of NYPD officer Jason Rivera, was carried into St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Thursday, part of a large group of mourners who gathered in midtown Manhattan to give the fallen officer a hero’s farewell.
Rivera was one of two NYPD officers fatally shot last week while responding to a mother-son dispute in Harlem. NYPD officers, MTA cops and law-enforcement officials from Philadelphia, Newark and elsewhere waited on long lines that zigzagged along East 50th Street between 5th Avenue and Madison Avenue to be admitted into the iconic church.
The cathedral’s bells tolled just before 1 p.m., heralding the start of the wake.
“I want to thank you for your service, God bless you,” one man shouted at police as he walked on East 50th Street. “Stay safe.”
Rivera, who died Friday night at age 22, is being memorialized at St. Patrick’s Cathedral — with a wake on Thursday from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. and a funeral Mass on Friday at 9 a.m.
Rivera’s body arrived just before noon as police lined up just outside the church before the wake.
The cathedral will host services for the other slain officer, Wilbert Mora, 27, next week. There will be a wake on Tuesday from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m. and the funeral Mass at 10 a.m. Wednesday.
Rivera and Mora were both Manhattan residents and Roman Catholics.
“On behalf of the more than 1.4 million residents of the county of Nassau, our hearts go out to the Rivera family and also the Mora family,” said Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. “We stand by our police officers and their families.”
Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, will preside over both funeral Masses, the archdiocesan spokesman Joseph Zwilling has said.
Among those scheduled to attend is New York City Mayor Eric Adams, whose appearance at the wake is scheduled for 4 p.m.
Although the cathedral, the seat of the archdiocese, has hosted many hundreds of funeral Masses for line-of-duty deaths of cops, firefighters and military personnel, it’s rarer for the wake to be in the cathedral, a spokesman for the diocese said.
Rivera had wanted to be a police officer since he was a child, and he was an aficionado of TV shows about the police, his brother Jeffrey Rivera told Newsday last week.
“Since we were babies, he wanted to be a police officer,” said Jeffrey Rivera, of Yonkers. “He would watch cop shows all the time. He would have dreams at night.”
The shooting happened Friday at about 6:30 p.m., after Rivera, Mora and a third officer responded to a woman’s 911 call seeking help dealing with her son, according to the NYPD. After speaking with the woman and another son, Rivera and Mora went down a narrow hallway to a rear bedroom to speak with the man, later identified as Lashawn McNeil, 47, who opened fire, striking the two cops. The third officer then shot McNeil, and he died Monday.
The two officers died four days apart: Rivera on Friday at Harlem Hospital, hours after the shooting, and Mora on Tuesday, after his heart, liver, two kidneys and a pancreas were extracted, donated to three people in New York and two outside of the state.
Mora had also been at Harlem Hospital, but he was transferred on Sunday to NYU Langone Medical Center, where the organs were removed.
The NYPD is investigating the circumstances surrounding the stolen Glock that McNeil used to commit the shooting. A preliminary account given Friday evening by NYPD Chief of Detectives said that it had been stolen in 2017 from Baltimore, Maryland.
Mayor Adams has ordered that flags on municipal government buildings be flown at half mast, his press secretary tweeted.
Rivera and Mora were the third and fourth officers from the NYPD to be shot that week. The others survived.
Blakeman said the officers were victims of a recent “epidemic of criminality.”
“Violence against police officers is completely unacceptable, and in Nassau County, it will not be tolerated,” Blakeman said.
