Bride Poses Solo One Year After Her Fiance, A Cop, Was Killed

ST. CLAIR SHORES, MI — A year ago this week, Nikki Salgot was happily looking about 11 months into the future to the day she and Collin Rose planned on marrying. He was her hero and the love of her life, a soulmate the 29-year-old St. Clair Shores, Michigan, woman said helped her become the person she is.

But a gunman put a bullet in the Wayne State University police officer’s head on Nov. 22, 2016, and he died a day later, a year ago Thanksgiving Day. Still, last month, 10 days before would have been their wedding day, she stepped into her elegant wedding gown and posed alone in the woods for a photographer, whose stirring photos capture the pain left behind when a police officer — or any loved one — doesn’t come home.

“Today was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, the day I married my forever,” Salgot wrote on Facebook on Oct. 10, 2017, forever a somber rather than happy day. “Instead, it's an all too real reminder of how cruel life can be. How everything can change in an instant. It's proof that despite the best laid plans and efforts, tomorrow is not promised. Every day is a gift and not to be taken for granted. It's been almost a year and it still feels like yesterday he walked out the door for work, and never came home. ...

“I loved a hero and paid the price,” Salgot wrote. “Given the chance, knowing the outcome, I’d do it all over again.”

So Salgot put on the dress, a strapless, tastefully embellished gown that surely would have made her groom gasp in awe, and posed for photographer Rachel Smaller Heller. In one hand next, Salgot clasps the American flag, deftly folded into a triangle, that had been draped over his coffin. In the other, she holds his police officer’s cap. The sadness on her face will pierce your heart.

But it will be lifted in another shot that shows Salgot laughing as she lifts the hem of her dress to avoid soiling it on a dusty road. She's smiling and carefree, and except for the folded funeral flag she clutched, she looks like any other bride starting out on the road to happiness.

It had been a tough assignment, one that brought Heller to tears as she drove to meet Salgot for the Oct. 4 photo shoot. How could she possibly take photos that would do justice both to Salgot and Rose? She wanted her photos to tell the story of his service, integrity and sacrifice, but also of “this woman who’s lost the love of her life but is still going to have closure, and still going to be his wife one way or another."

“When she got out of the car, it was clear as day," Heller told the "Today" show. "She was the picture of grief and resilience and strength and vulnerability and authenticity, all at once. I thought, I have to take photographs that when people see them, they will feel how I felt when she got out of the car."

Heller's focus was perfect, Salgot said, writing on Facebook that the photographer “captured images that still vividly show the pain left behind; images that show I am still able to laugh, smile and be me; images that show this loss has not and will not destroy me; and my favorite, images that show I am still just as fierce as ever and refuse to let this define me.”

“What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and I will not be broken by this,” she wrote. “It is a chapter in my book, a very tough one. One I certainly wish I didn't have and would never wish upon anyone else. It was always a known and accepted possibility, just never one I saw coming, but then again... you never do.”

On what would have been their wedding day, Salgot invited their friends “in true Collin fashion” to “come have a beer, take a shot, tell a story and have a great time!”

“I absolutely cannot wait to see you all today!” she wrote.

Photo of Sgt. Collin Rose, promoted posthumously, via Wayne State University