Val Verde County honors fallen officers with new memorial monument

Families, deputies and police officers gathered outside the Val Verde Sheriff’s Office on Friday morning as the county unveiled a new black granite monument honoring five Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office deputies and two Del Rio Police Department officers who died in the line of duty. The memorial now gives Val Verde residents a permanent place to see those names, and to confront the cost borne by the people who patrol county roads, neighborhoods and the border city’s streets.

Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez said the ceremony was about the officers and the families who carried the loss with them. Martinez said the gathering also was meant to recognize “the families of these officers,” and he reminded the crowd that the sheriff’s office lost five men while the police department lost two. He said their sacrifice would not be forgotten.

The 2026 Fallen Officer Memorial Ceremony was hosted jointly by the Val Verde Sheriff’s Office and the Del Rio Police Department, underscoring that the county’s law-enforcement losses have never belonged to just one agency. The program included a color guard, the presentation of the colors, the national anthem performed by a San Felipe Del Rio CISD student, a pledge led by Southwest Texas Junior College Law Enforcement Academy cadets and an invocation from VVSO Chief Deputy Enrique Trevino.

The monument was not a spontaneous addition. Val Verde County commissioners had already approved $6,400 from the sheriff’s office reserve account for its construction, signaling that the county intended to create a lasting marker rather than a one-day display. That permanence matters in a community that has long marked fallen-officer remembrance with public ceremonies and name readings stretching back more than a century.

The local memorial also sits within a larger national reckoning. Days earlier, the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund held its Candlelight Vigil in Washington, D.C., where 363 names were added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, including 109 officers who died in 2025 and 254 previously fallen officers whose deaths were newly verified. The memorial fund says more than 23,000 officers have died in the line of duty since 1786.

Among the names tied to Val Verde County’s history are Deputy Sheriff Donald Lynn Hill, whose end of watch was May 31, 1990, Del Rio Patrolman John T. Miller, who was killed on July 4, 1990, in a motorcycle crash involving a drunk driver, and Del Rio Inspector Richard Mack Latham, who was abducted and killed at the Del Rio Port of Entry. The new granite monument places those losses in public view, where Val Verde County can no longer look away from the price of service.