Slain Officer Pawlowski laid to rest

THEY SAY pregnant women glow. But when Officer John Pawlowski learned a few months ago that he would be a father, his jubilation outshone his pregnant wife's radiance.

He gushed about whether his unborn son would look more like him or wife Kimmy. (The baby should have Kimmy's daintier eyebrows but his fuller lips, he decided.) Instead of "J.P. Party," a nickname he gave himself because he loved hanging out with friends, Pawlowski became "J.P. Family," his sister said.

So the sonogram tucked into Pawlowski's folded hands yesterday made an already heart-wrenching day almost unbearably poignant.

Killed on duty Feb. 13 while responding to a disturbance call in Logan, the six-year police veteran was laid to rest yesterday, the grainy ultrasound photo beneath his fingers the closest he would ever come to holding his child.

"Kimmy, I don't know what to say, sweetheart. All the dreams, all the plans that you had, were stolen from you," Commissioner Charles Ramsey told Pawlow-ski's sobbing widow at his funeral at the Cathedral Basilica of Ss. Peter and Paul.

"Last Friday night, you said to me: 'My son will never get to know his father,' " Ramsey said of the night that career-criminal Rasheed Scruggs allegedly gunned Pawlowski down.

But "we will never ever leave your side," Ramsey promised. "We will always stand beside you."

About 3,000 people showed similar support, filling virtually every seat inside the cavernous, 1,900-seat basilica and crowding around a giant projection screen broadcasting the service in Logan Square outside.

Lines of mourners who came to pay their respects grew so long that most barely broke stride when they at last reached Pawlowski's casket, blessing themselves or snapping gloved hands into formal salutes while still moving.

Still, the outpouring of sympathy couldn't ease the grief for some relatives.

Pawlowski's weeping father repeatedly approached his son's body, unable to say a final goodbye. A handful of sobbing relatives lingered in a group hug in front of the altar.

And Kimmy's cries, including a single anguished "No!," echoed through the basilica just before undertakers closed his casket.

Their despair continued outside, where they were greeted by bagpipers playing a mournful tune and hundreds of uniformed, saluting, silent officers. Afterward, Kimmy slumped inside the limousine against the window, waiting miserably for the ride to the Bensalem cemetery where her husband would be buried.

With Pawlowski the seventh city officer to be killed on duty since May 2006, some residents have become painfully accustomed to such rituals of woe.

But at 25, he was the youngest killed since 1994. Such lost promise is what kept tears flowing from countless mourners who never knew him.

"I have two kids at home, and this guy is having a kid - it's just devastating," said Officer Dominic Pellegrino, who works in the 25th District, headquartered on Whitaker Avenue near Erie.

Two sergeants from an Ontario, Canada, police department drove eight hours to attend Pawlowski's funeral, after reading about his slaying on a police-memorial Web site.

"The circumstances really hit home with us," said Sgt. Paul Hallett of the Durham, Ontario, Regional Police.

Hallett and others puzzled over how a police badge has become a target for many thugs' weapons.

"It seems that guns are a major contributor to the problem here," Hallett said. "Being from Canada, we don't see the gun problems that you have; it's a bit alien to us."

Revolving-door justice means tougher streets for police to patrol, other mourners said.

"The criminals are better-armed than we are," Pellegrino said. "And the judicial system doesn't work. I mean, how many times can you lock somebody up for the same thing, and they just keep getting out? This guy [Scruggs] had nine prior arrests. And he's back out?"

But those who spoke at Pawlow-ski's service had little to say about city thugs with no respect for authority.

Lauren Pawlowski, the officer's sister, talked of her brother's love of sports. She recounted one time Pawlowski came home from an intense basketball outing, his fingers bloodied and calloused.

"Now that's a kid who loved to play," Lauren Pawlowski said. "Like everything that Johnny loved, he loved it to an extreme."

That included Kimmy.

Lauren Pawlowski said her brother first met his wife in the fifth grade, when they swapped a first kiss on the bleachers during a school dance. The couple married last fall, and their child is due in March. Photos of them smiling on their wedding day and of their tropical honeymoon adorned a funeral program.

"Kimmy, it was you who put purpose in Johnny's life," Lauren Pawlowski told her sister-in-law. "It was you who turned him into the man he was, the hero we lost."

During the Mass, Cardinal Justin Rigali urged listeners to pray for Pawlowski's family, for the police department and for the city to heal. He also offered prayers for criminal offenders who "defiled and violated their own human dignity, and who need conversion and repentance."

Mayor Nutter read a letter of sympathy that President Obama had written to Kimmy.

Nutter called upon residents to again show the same resiliency that has helped them recover from previous police slayings.

"We are being tested as a city," Nutter said. "This is the time for us to unify as a city, a department and a people."

Nutter reminded listeners that Pawlowski always strived to be better, requesting a transfer from the relatively quiet Sixth District in Center City to the more dangerous 35th District, headquartered a handful of blocks north of Broad Street and Olney Avenue, where he was killed.

"John Pawlowski wanted to do more," Nutter said. "Who are we to do any less?" *