Married officers are mourned in San Diego

A traffic collision took the lives of the two detectives, who met at the police academy.

By Alex Riggins and Jonathan Wosen

SAN DIEGO — Ryan Park and Jamie Huntley met and began dating while in the San Diego police academy in 2012. They became officers on the same day in April of that year, married in February 2016 and were promoted to detectives on the same day two years later.

On Friday morning, the two of them were scheduled to be off work, but they were working “follow-up on cases” anyway, San Diego Police Chief David Nisleit said. As they drove in an unmarked department sedan south on Interstate 5 in San Ysidro, a wrong-way driver slammed into their car.

The couple and the other driver died at the scene of the fiery crash, which happened about 10:25 a.m. on the I-5 near State Route 905.

“You couldn’t have met two nicer kids,” Nisleit said at a Friday night news conference at downtown police headquarters. They “had nothing but their lives ahead of them. Both their lives and their careers were definitely on a very, very rapid trend upward, just doing amazing work.”

Jamie Huntley-Park, 33, grew up in the San Diego area and graduated from La Jolla High School, Nisleit said. She played college hockey in New York before becoming a coach and a referee with a goal of refereeing at the next Winter Olympics.

She was a detective in the Police Department’s Southern Division, the chief said.

Park, 32, was one of Nisleit’s patrol officers when the chief was captain of the Western Division. Park was “a remarkable patrol officer who quickly [ascended] the ranks and became a homicide detective,” Nisleit said.

“When the San Diego Police Department loses two members, it hurts,” Nisleit said. “It hurts the department, it hurts the community, it hurts the city.”

The couple did not have children, said the chief, who visited the crash scene Friday before spending the rest of his day, along with a department chaplain, informing the couple’s family members of their deaths. Nisleit spoke in person to Huntley-Park’s parents and one of Park’s brothers, he said.

Mayor Todd Gloria offered his condolences to the couple’s families. He described the call from Nisleit on Friday monring as “the call a mayor never wants to get.”

Gloria said about 11,000 people work for the city of San Diego, and “Jamie and Ryan were two of our best, and we lost them today, and that breaks our hearts.”

Gloria also praised San Diego firefighters and California Highway Patrol officers who responded to the scene.

“What I saw on the freeway today was an expression of the honor that we give to fellow public servants,” Gloria said. “Treating them with the dignity that they deserve.”

Earlier Friday night, as the sun set, the Rev. Shane Harris, president of the People’s Assn. of Justice Advocates, and Bishop Cornelius Bowser, pastor of Charity Apostolic Church of San Diego, went to police headquarters to hold a small ceremony near a memorial for the city’s fallen officers.

Both men are often critical of the Police Department. Bowser said it’s because “we hold them accountable … but it’s not because we see them as the enemy. They are part of our community, and we love them. And they’re humans, but also many of them are our friends.”

Harris and Bowser lighted candles that they placed at the foot of the memorial, then stood in silence saluting the fallen officers, whose names they did not yet know.

The memorial grew Saturday as mourners added flowers and mementos.

Park and Huntley-Park were the second and third San Diego officers to die while on duty this year. In February, patrol Officer David Sisto, 39, had a medical emergency while responding to a call and died later at a hospital.

The detectives’ deaths triggered an outpouring of grief on social media, with the Police Department’s Twitter and Facebook pages filling with messages expressing shock and sadness.

The losses were especially hard on those who knew the couple best. In a statement released to KGTV-TV Channel 10 in San Diego, Park’s brother Justin said, “There is no right way to mourn, and right now my family is at a loss.”

He said the family took comfort in knowing his brother was with his soulmate.

“They did everything together,” he wrote. “Right now we picture them traveling all over heaven, walking among the clouds together, sipping on a beer and some scotch, which Jamie loved to collect.”

It was a message that Huntley-Park’s mother, Cherisse Huntley, echoed during a phone call with KGTV.

“Jamie was an amazing woman, daughter, sister, aunt, coach, friend and wife. She was our protector, our hero, and will be missed every minute of every day,” she said. “Ryan was everything to Jamie, and together they were one.”

Huntley-Park’s death has been especially devastating for the hockey community, where she was a beloved youth coach with San Diego Angels Girls Hockey. Alex Morrison, the group’s director, says she was among his closest friends.

Their friendship went beyond a shared passion for coaching and refereeing the sport. Morrison was the broker that represented the couple when they bought a home. He and his daughter went to Disneyland with them last week, and he was supposed to be at an Angels-Mariners baseball game with them in Anaheim on Friday night.

“She was as heart-on-her-sleeve as anyone I’ve ever met. She always, always, always cared for others,” Morrison said. “She’s just this right balance of holding the kids accountable and holding them to a high standard while showing the utmost compassion for them and understanding. And that’s just how she lived her life.”

Early Saturday, girls from hockey teams Huntley-Park coached gathered at the Salvation Army Kroc Center to grieve. They made a wreath out of flowers, filled with notes and drawings.

There were more than a few tears, Morrison said, but it was also a joyful moment in that it underscored how many lives Huntley-Park had touched — as did the flood of Facebook messages and calls that he’s received, stretching from Finland to New York to South Carolina to Seattle, among other places.

In 2019, Huntley-Park was featured in a segment on what was then Fox Sports San Diego, highlighting her work coaching a San Diego Jr. Gulls hockey team and refereeing for the sport she’d grown up playing. She went on to play at Elmira College in New York, where she was the team’s enforcer.

Riggins and Wosen write for the San Diego Union-Tribune.