One by one, they stood and walked up the blue carpet to the front of the chapel to pay their respects to Edward William Eldridge Jr.
They were retired police colonels and active police majors in dress blues, black mourning bands stretched across their badges. A current Baltimore councilwoman and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A police chaplain and a war veteran. The Baltimore County state's attorney. Neighbors, one-time friends and former colleagues.
Strangers who felt it necessary to say goodbye.
There were no relatives.
Edward William Eldridge died alone at the age of 62, a decade after retiring from a quarter-century as a patrolman for the Baltimore Police Department. He took his own life last month in the small Northeast Baltimore home in which he had grown up by shooting himself in the head.
He had no family to claim the body, no close friends to plan a funeral. Instead, the homicide detective who investigated, Randy Wynn, plowed through his former colleague's papers, claimed the body and organized a service at Ruck Funeral Home in Towson. More than 150 attended Tuesday's viewing - including the city police commissioner and two of his predecessors.
Yesterday, another 100 came - not just to mourn, but to challenge themselves and each other to seek out old friends and neighbors, retired colleagues and dying relatives, and make sure they don't end up alone like the man they now honored, lying in a flag-draped coffin surrounded by flowers sent by people he didn't know.
Wesley M. Ormrod never met Eldridge. "I want to be sure that in death he knew he had a family," the retired Baltimore police lieutenant said.
A police chaplain, Don Helms, read comments from Eldridge's personnel file: strong worker; quiet; helps fellow officers; very aggressive. When he applied to the force in 1972, a supervisor asked him why he wanted to be an officer. "Because I want to help people who have no place to turn for help," he answered.
In the end, in his upstairs bedroom on Daywalt Avenue, Eldridge was one of the people who felt he had no place to turn for help. He wrote in his suicide note that he couldn't find someone to stay with him at the hospital for a routine surgery. He didn't write that he also had lost most of his retirement money to the stock market and had recently been assaulted and robbed.
