“We think of her every day and miss her very much. The world was definitely a better place with her in it. As we’ve said many times, it was the way she lived, not the way she died that made her a hero,” the statement said.
Clark County Sheriff Deborah Burchett said in honor of the day, members of the sheriff’s office will visit her grave in the afternoon to pray and lay flowers. Burchett said Hopper’s death is “just something we will never get over.”
Hopper, 40, was shot at 11:35 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2011. She was responding to a call about shots fired into a camper at the Enon Beach Campground when she was ambushed by Michael Ferryman, a man who’d been found not guilty by reason of insanity following a violent encounter with law enforcement in Morgan County a decade earlier.
Dozens of officers and deputies from surrounding jurisdictions responded to the officer down call and engaged in a shootout with Ferryman, who fired upon anyone attempting to help Hopper.
Ferryman was also killed in the shootout. Maria Blessing, Ferryman’s longtime girlfriend, was sentenced to five years in prison for her decision to provide him with the firearm that killed Hopper, despite the knowledge that he had a history of mental illness.
At her funeral, thousands of law enforcement officers from across the country drove a 1,600-vehicle procession through Clark County and stood in heavy snowfall as she was laid to rest.
Burchett was not sheriff at the time of Hopper’s death, but said she was one of the pallbearers at her funeral, as well as a friend.
“She gave her heart and soul to her job. It’s truly sad when this rolls around every year. It brings up some really bad memories that are frankly just really sad to talk about,” Burchett said.
In the years since Hopper was killed in the line of duty, she’s been memorialized in ways both large and small.
Thousands of people who never knew Hopper drive the stretch of Interstate 70 named for her every day. Her name is etched among 20,000 other fallen officers at the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington D.C., and an Ohio law created in her honor has improved officer safety by better informing them about individuals with mental illness.
The law, passed in 2013, allows officers in Ohio access to know about every person with a mental illness who has been dealt with by an Ohio court — whether found not guilty by reason of insanity, found incompetent to stand trial or ordered into mental health treatment by a judge.
Hopper was more than a law enforcement officer.
She started a local volleyball fundraiser for the Special Olympics in 2008 and it has grown in the years since her death. More than a dozen teams compete annually.
A group of Zanesville police officers paid tribute to Hopper in 2019 as part of their weekly workouts honoring fallen members of various services.
Patrolman Bryan Wolfe and other police officers moved the workouts from a Wednesday to a Saturday in May “because this one is so special and see if other people want to do it with us.”
The workouts consisted of four rounds of time in honor of Hopper’s four children.
Hopper’s family statement described her as “an amazing person and an outstanding Deputy that went above and beyond to serve her community.”
“She will never be forgotten by her friends and we are very grateful that people that may not have known her personally will take the time to remember her on New Year’s Day,” Hopper’s family’s statement said.
Suzanne Hopper is survived by her parents, Charles and Bonnie Bauer, and her children Emily Bauer, Charles Waughtel and step-children Madeleine and Cole Hopper. Hopper’s husband, Matthew, died in 2014 at the age of 38 following a battle with cancer.
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