Two Carthage policemen joined hundreds of fellow officers Friday, standing at attention, crisp in full dress uniforms and campaign hats, offering white-gloved salutes to the families of fallen comrades.

From across the state had come men and women whose fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, gave their lives to protect and serve their state and their communities.

Police Chief Craig Goodnight detailed two officers to escort the families of slain Carthage Chief Bernice M. “Bunn” Cameron and Moore County State Trooper H. A. Hight to a memorial service for North Carolina Peace Officers on Memorial Day.

“Every year on this day, flags fly at half-staff, and that week we call Blue Ribbon week,” Goodnight told The Pilot.

Sgt. Bill Morley and Patrolman Bart Davis, in a Carthage patrol car, led the way to Centenary United Methodist Church in Winston-Salem.

Half of Fifth Street was filled with patrol cars from departments all over the state. The church was full of uniforms of every description.

“This is an important duty,” Goodnight said, “to defend our everyday life so people can go home and feel safe at night.”

The sanctuary was full of uniformed and plainclothes officers and civilians, standing silently as Morley and Davis joined the honor guard escorting families to front pews. A lone bagpiper led in the colors.

‘They Know the Danger’

The Hight and Cameron families were joined by the marriage of Cameron’s granddaughter to Trooper Hight’s son. Their son, Chris Hight, is the grandson and great-grandson of men who lost their lives as officers of the law.

“Lots of people don’t realize,” Goodnight said, “that every day one of them goes to work, there is a chance he might not come home. It is important to other law enforcement officers and their families that they are being remembered.”

At the service, N.C. Attorney General Mike Easley echoed Goodnight’s thoughts.

“They know the danger,” he told the families, “and they know the risk. Words cannot contain the feelings of warmth and sympathy that surround you today.”

Chief Cameron and his family lived in quarters in the county jail, where his other duty was that of jailer. His wife, Mary Belle Cameron, cooked meals for the prisoners and fed them.

It was late at night on March 15, 1953, according to Cameron’s daughter, Mary Doris “Tootie” Apple, when a deputy knocked on the door.

“My husband was a state trooper,” she said. “He was out on duty. We lived upstairs. I had gone to bed, but I heard my mother start to cry.”

She came downstairs to hear the news: Her father had been shot in the face.

“He was already off duty,” she said. “He just went out to help another officer. Some men had driven off from a gas station without paying for the gas.”

A statewide manhunt followed for Cameron’s killers.

Judge Julius A. Rousseau Sr. declared the men outlaws, a designation meaning that they could be shot on sight. All were eventually captured and convicted.

While awaiting trial, they were imprisoned in the county jail.

“My mama had to cook for them,” Apple remembers. “She fed the men who murdered my father.”

May is the month that R. V. Hight most remembers his father.

Henry A. Hight also lost his life aiding a fellow officer, when his patrol car crashed.

R.V. Hight’s wife, Bernice “Bunnie” Hight, is named for her grandfather, Chief Cameron.

Morley and Davis were not the only police officers present from Moore County. Pinehurst sent two men to represent their department — SPO Michael Sanders and Patrolman Ray Evans.

“I thought not only that it was a solemn occasion,” Evans said, “but that the whole thing was organized and handled very well.”

Sanders and Evans work nights. They volunteered for the extra daytime duty.

If other departments did not send delegations this year, they still remembered the fallen.

Southern Pines lost Jasper Addison Gargis on Christmas Day, 1939.

Robbins lost Chief Shellie Wayne Moxley, killed in a raid on a moonshine still in 1946.

Southern Pines Police Chief Charles Edwin Newton was killed in 1961.

Southern Pines Police Lt. Carol McCarn remembers Ed Harris, who lost his life April 4, 1991, when nine members of a drug gang broke into his home and shot him and his wife in the presence of their teen-age son.

Harris’ wife, wounded in the hand, with one finger nearly severed, drove her husband in his patrol car, blue lights flashing, to the hospital, where he died.

McCarn said she and Harris had been having lunch at the Golden Corral in Southern Pines that day and were talking about officers who had been lost in the line of duty, and about his testimony in the drug trial.

Sitting at a table behind them, she told The Pilot, were two or three members of the gang who would come to his home later that night to murder him.

The Sound of Taps

Today an oil painting of Harris, done by his wife, hangs at the entrance to the Southern Pines Police Department.

Friday morning, the Chief Justice of North Carolina spoke, recalling in a poem the names of four North Carolinians added to the Honor Roll since the last Memorial Day.

From outside the church came the report of rifles fired in a 21-gun salute.

Two buglers, one echoing the other, sounded Taps, the solemn notes echoing in the vaulted hall.

Officers left first, forming in ranks, standing at present arms to salute families of the lost as they left the church.