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A police officer was among the 10 dead.

Among the 10 people who died in the attack was Eric Talley, an 11-year veteran of the Boulder Police Department, who was described as “heroic” by Chief Maris Herold at a news conference at the scene of the shooting on Monday.

“He was the first on the scene, and he was fatally shot,” Chief Herold said, holding back tears. “My heart goes out to the victims of this incident. And I’m grateful to the police officers that responded. And I am so sorry about the loss of Officer Talley.”

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Officer Eric TalleyCredit...Boulder Police Department, via Associated Press

“He was by all accounts one of the outstanding officers of the Boulder Police Department, and his life was cut far too short,” said Michael Dougherty, the Boulder County district attorney.

“The world lost a great soul,” said Officer Talley’s father, Homer Talley, a retired optics engineer who now lives on a ranch in Rising Star, Texas, near Abilene. “He was a devoted father — seven kids. The youngest was 7 and the oldest was 20, and his family was the joy of his life.”

Officer Talley was born in Houston and raised in Albuquerque. He joined the police force as a second career when he was 40, quitting a job in cloud communications, his father said in an interview on Tuesday morning.

“He wanted to be a servant,” Mr. Talley said. “He wanted to serve people. And you know, all kids want to be a policeman, and in many ways, he was a big kid.”

On Twitter, a woman who described herself as Officer Talley’s sister, Kirstin, posted: “Officer Eric Talley is my big brother. He died today in the Boulder shooting. My heart is broken. I cannot explain how beautiful he was and what a devastating loss this is to so many. Fly high my sweet brother. You always wanted to be a pilot (damn color blindness). Soar.”

In 2013, the local newspaper, The Boulder Daily Camera, featured Officer Talley and two other members of the force who had waded into a drainage ditch to rescue a trapped mother duck and 11 ducklings. “He was drenched after this,” Sgt. Jack Walker told the paper about Talley. “They would go into these little pipes and he would have to try and fish them out.”

Talley is the sixth on-duty death in the department’s history and the first officer killed in the line of duty since 1994, the paper reported.

As his body was taken by ambulance from the scene to the funeral home, a procession of emergency vehicles escorted it, and first responders stood by the side of Table Mesa Road, saluting.

Shawn Hubler is a California correspondent based in Sacramento. Before joining The Times in 2020 she spent nearly two decades covering the state for The Los Angeles Times as a roving reporter, columnist and magazine writer, and shared three Pulitzer Prizes won by the paper's Metro staff.  More about Shawn Hubler

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