Tears of Blue on the Gold Coast

For three years, Howard Mark Hines walked a path few people ever see. He searched out the gravesite of every law enforcement officer who ever fell in the line of duty in Palm Beach County, from Key West to Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, and Kansas, cleaning weathered headstones with his own hands and repairing what time and neglect had worn away. Tears of Blue on the Gold Coast is the record of that promise kept, that none of them would be forgotten.

Beginning with Deputy George Clem Douglas, killed in 1921, and carrying forward across a century of service to the men and women who wore the badge in Palm Beach County, this book tells the stories of nearly fifty officers, deputies, and troopers from the Sheriff's Office and the police departments of West Palm Beach, Lantana, Jupiter, Delray Beach, Palm Beach Gardens, Riviera Beach, and beyond. Each one answered a call that asked, in the end, for everything they had.

Drawn from archives, historical societies, and personal interviews, and researched with the same care Hines brings to cleaning a forgotten headstone, these are not entries in a ledger of the fallen. They are full human stories, of orchards in Michigan and machine shops in Vermont, of a young marshal's family left behind, of a captain who ran into the sea despite a fear of water he never told anyone about, of a sergeant who gave everything to save a child before ever tending to himself. Told with honesty and reverence, each account honors the life that came before the sacrifice, and the family that carried on after.

Tears of Blue on the Gold Coast is the first volume in a series dedicated to the fallen law enforcement officers of Florida. It is written for their families, for the brothers and sisters in blue who still remember them, and for every reader willing to carry their names forward.