Steven Reedy will usually get a bit choked up on the day each year the Orangetown Police Department remembers his brother, who was killed in the line of duty in 1973, but he says it is not a sad day.
He gets to talk to Orangetown Police Chief Kevin Nulty about his brother and see everyone else who came out to pay their respects. So, for Reedy, it’s not a sad day.
“It really isn’t. For me, it’s a good day,” he said. “For everybody to remember, when you lose someone, it never goes away. Every time I drive by, I think of him, and every time I talk to [Nulty]. We talk about him a lot because he wasn’t chief of my brother then, but he was my brother’s friend. It’s a good thing.”
Each year since it started 16 years ago, the Orangetown Police Department open house closes with a ceremony to honor four officers killed while working: Michael Reedy and Thomas Kennedy, who were killed in August 1973, and Waverly Brown and Sergeant Edward O’Grady, who were killed in October 1981.
There is a plaque in the main hallway of the police department with all four officers’ faces and names on it, where the brief ceremony takes place.
Nulty read a prayer dedicated to the four officers and a member of the Orangetown Police Honor Guard marched into the hall, picked up a wreath and placed it next to the monument.
