Police Sgt. Steve Perez: 5 Facts About Houston Flood Drowning Victim

HOUSTON, TX — Houston Police Sgt. Steve Perez, who drowned Sunday while trying to get to work, is among 15 people who have been confirmed dead in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, which swamped the nation’s fourth-largest city with unprecedented amounts of rainfall.

Perez, a 34-year veteran of the Houston Police Department, is survived by his wife, an adult son and daughter, and extended family members. (For more Tropical Storm Harvey and other Houston news, click here to sign up for real-time news alerts and newsletters from Houston Patch, and click here to find your local Texas Patch. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

Here are five things to know about the fallen officer:

Perez had a job to do and was determined to do it. He left his home around 4 a.m. Sunday, telling his wife, Cheryl, and his father-in-law, who pleaded with him to stay home, telling them, “We’ve got work to do,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said during an emotional 10-minute news conference Tuesday. Sgt. Perez tried for more than two hours to get to his duty station in the Houston Police Department’s traffic enforcement division, but could not find a path through “heavy rain, dark roadways, who knows what else” to get to a secondary location. “Listen, I cannot get to my primary duty station” was the last radio communication he made.

Perez didn’t show up for roll call Monday morning: When Perez failed to show up at roll call Monday morning, police began searching for him at his last known location. Dive teams were unable to recover his body that night. “It was too treacherous to go under and look for him,” Acevedo said, choking back tears. “We made the decision to leave officers there, waiting until the morning because, as much as we wanted to recover him last night, we could not put moe officers at risk for what we knew in our hearts was a recovery mission.”

Perez’s widow accepted the news with grace. “He spent close to 2.5 hours because he has that in his DNA. So I told his wife, if the Lord’s going to take him today how do you think he would want to go, laying in bed, watching a disaster, or doing what he’s done for 34 years. The smile that overcame that woman’s face, that beautiful wife, said it all. If it’s his turn to go, she said, ‘This is the way he would want to go.’ ”

Perez was a public servant, but also saw himself as a servant of God. Acevedo said Perez’s deep faith is a source of “collective strength” for those left to mourn him. He called the Perezes a “family of faith, faith in God, there’s hope in eternal life.”

Perez fulfilled his mission. “What we can say is Sgt. Perez fulfilled his mission and the Lord called him home,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said at the news conference. “I would dare not say he lost his life in vain, because he didn't. Every single day we ask our men and women in blue to show up, to come to work when conditions are good and even when conditions are very challenging. And every day, we ask them to get on our roads and to come to work and to strive to make this city a much better place in which to live.”

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