Funeral Is Tuesday For Slain Jersey City Police Officer

JERSEY CITY, NJ — The funeral for slain Jersey City Police Detective Joseph Seals — killed in connection to last Tuesday's hours-long shooting standoff in Jersey City — will be at 11 a.m. Tuesday, Dec. 17 at St. Aedan's in Jersey City.

St. Aedan's is the Roman Catholic church that serves St. Peter's University, a Jesuit university in Jersey City. St. Aedan's is one of the largest, most magnificent Catholic churches in the tri-state area. It is located at 800 Bergen Avenue, and is the customary location for funeral masses for Jersey City police officers killed in the line of duty.

The funeral mass begins at 11 a.m. Seals' wife and children, the entire Jersey City police department, Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and other numerous dignitaries are expected to be there to pay their final respects. There will also likely be a heavy media presence.

A viewing for Seals will be held a day earlier, on Monday, Dec. 16 from 2 to 8 p.m. at McLaughlin Funeral Home, 625 Pavonia Avenue in Jersey City.

Det. Seals shot dead while questioning drivers of a suspicious U-Haul

Seals, 39, was killed in the events leading up to last week's infamous shooting standoff in the Greenville section of Jersey City last Tuesday, Dec. 10.

Shortly after 12 p.m. that day, Seals, working a plainclothes detail at the time, saw a U-Haul truck near the area of Bayview Cemetery in Jersey City. That U-Haul was possibly linked to this murder from over the weekend in Bayonne, Jersey City Police Chief Mike Kelly said, in which a Bayonne man was found beaten to death in the trunk of a car.

However, Det. Seals never got to question the suspects: As he approached the truck, one of the suspects got out of the car and shot him once in the head, killing him. He was shot once in the back of the head, behind the ear, and died at the Jersey City Medical Center.

From the cemetery, the two suspects, David Anderson, 47, and Francine Graham, 50, then drove the stolen U-Haul to MLK Drive. Heavily armed, carrying long guns, the two got out and appeared to target a Jewish-owned grocery store in that area. They marched directly into the store and fired at people inside the grocer, killing Moshe Hersh Deutsch, 24, and Leah Mindel Ferencz, 32, the wife of the grocery store owner. A man who worked there, Miguel Rodriguez, 49, was also shot and killed.

Homemade bombs were later found in the stolen U-Haul, Kelly said.

Anderson and Graham then holed up inside the grocery store for hours, conducting a shoot-out against Jersey City police officers, firing at anyone and anything that moved out on the street. Two other officers, Mariela Fernandez and Ray Sanchez, were also hit by gunfire, but survived.

After more than two hours, the two shooters were eventually killed by police.

Slain police officer a father of five who worked two jobs to support his family

Seals live in North Arlington, with his wife and five children, one of whom is just a newborn baby.

The young police officer was a man who worked extra jobs. Seals used to work at the Hudson County Jail, and currently had to have a second job in the flooring business to help support his family, North Arlington Mayor Daniel Pronti told Patch.

"He was a very hard-working family man," said Mayor Pronti last week. "He did what was best for his family, while working extra jobs. He even resurfaced my floors a while back.

"On top of all that, he still had time to be active in our great community. This is an absolute tragedy."

Seals became a Jersey City cop in 2006, and was promoted to detective in 2017. He had been working with in the city's Cease-Fire Unit. Authorities said dozens of illegal guns were taken off the streets under his watch.

Fulop and Jersey City Police Commissioner Michael Kelly said Seals did more to take guns off the streets than anybody in the department.

Seals was also a man who never ran from trouble.

He is the same man who was hailed in this report as the police officer who saved a Jersey City woman from a possible sexual assault in 2008. He and another officer broke through a window to save a woman who was being sexually assaulted in an apartment on Christmas Eve. The Jersey Journal saluted him them and his partner as "hero cops."

In 2010, he nabbed a serial robber wanted in two gunpoint robberies.

"When you lose an officer, they say, 'He's a great officer and he took pride in his job,' and they tell you all the great things he did for Jersey City, or she did," Fulop said last week hours after his death. "In this situation it happens to be true, 100 percent."

"We cried with the family; it's one of the hardest things you ever have to see in your entire life," Fulop said. "Sometimes people don't appreciate the tough work these police officers do every single day."

Mortgage on his home paid off by Tunnel to Towers Foundation

Last week, The Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation announced they will pay off the mortgage the family's North Arlington home. The home will be paid off by Christmas through the foundation's Fallen First Responder Home Program. (Siller was a New York City firefighter who abandoned his car in the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and ran the entire way to the World Trade Center towers to respond to the 9/11 terror attacks, where he was killed.)

This GoFundMe has been verified as the accurate GoFundMe for Seals' family; it has raised more than $500,000 for his wife and children: https://www.gofundme.com/f/for-det-seals-and-his-family

The two shooters appear to target the Jewish grocery store:

A Jersey City police officer is shot, then helped by his fellow officer (viewer discretion advised):