Inside the Dallas ambush memorial that nearly didn’t exist, with the librarians who saved it

The two police cruisers were still there, somewhere beneath it all, carrying the weight of a city’s grief.

Bouquets climbed over the hoods and roofs. Blue foil balloons tugged at their strings. Candles stood in rows along the pavement, some bearing the names of the five officers killed by a gunman who had hunted police during a peaceful protest a decade ago.

Outside Dallas police headquarters there were teddy bears, wreaths, handwritten signs and children’s drawings — offerings for men most had never met.

Back the Blue. We stand behind you. Our brave, gentle heroes.

For a week, the makeshift memorial had grown piece by piece. It was still growing, one handwritten letter, one bouquet, one photograph at a time.

A dark cloud crowded the horizon.

Mary Jo Giudice heard the forecast around 7:30 a.m. It promised rain. She peered out her second-floor office window at the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library. 

The storm threatened to wash it all away.

Giudice, then the city’s director of libraries, started making calls, checking with police and deploying a library delivery truck. 

She pulled on a canvas apron and walked to the basement, gathering volunteers for her mission: Race against the rain. Rescue the shrine. Keep the memories intact.

The scramble that morning became the start of something larger: a yearslong effort to preserve the tokens of grief left outside the police headquarters and sent to Dallas from across the world. It would become one of the largest collections of its kind.

When Giudice looks back on the night of July 7, 2016, she thinks first of the violence. But what she wanted to preserve — for the historical record, for Dallas — was what followed.

“It was a horrific event beyond my wildest nightmares, but on the other side of it,” she said, “the love and compassion that came out for the community and the families of these officers was something I wanted to save.”

Ten years ago, law enforcement officers were working downtown as a protest against police shootings was winding down. A gunman targeting anyone in uniform opened fire. 

By the time the ambush and standoff were over, five officers had been fatally shot: Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, 48; Officer Michael Krol, 40; Sgt. Michael Smith, 55; Officer Patricio “Patrick” Zamarripa, 32; and DART Officer Brent Thompson, 43. 

Among the dead were fathers, military veterans, a newlywed — all officers who had built their lives around the job.

Nine more officers and two civilians were wounded before a Dallas SWAT team ended a standoff at El Centro College, where the 25-year-old gunman had barricaded himself. They killed him with explosives delivered by a remote-controlled robot.

It was the deadliest day in history for Dallas law enforcement.

The next morning, then-Dallas Police Chief David Brown stood before reporters at City Hall and put the city’s grief in the simplest terms.

“We’re hurting,” he said. “Our profession is hurting. Dallas officers are hurting.”

The city was hurting, too. When the library delivery truck pulled up a week after the ambush to collect the memorial, mourners were still there, leaving tributes and taking photos.

But the rain was picking up. The pavement was slick.

“Concentrate on the paper and stuffed animals,” Giudice told her team. “Leave the floral arrangements.”

Among the first things she picked up was a palm-sized toy pickup truck, its red paint chipped and dulled by play. She slipped it into her apron’s right pocket and kept moving.

Dallas officers helped load carts. Volunteers carried plush bears nearly as large as they were, placing them into the back of the truck.

A misty rain fell as they worked. The downpour was still ahead.

By the time Giudice returned to the library, the sky was the color of wet concrete. She took a few minutes to think in the solitude of her office.

She didn’t have a plan for the hundreds of tributes. Her instincts said don’t let it wash away. The city had already lost too much.

“We just knew this was history,” she said, “and if it got destroyed on top of everything else that had already happened, that would be another tragedy.”

When the box truck reached the central library’s loading dock, a basement space typically used for large orders of new books became an impromptu drying room. Staff laid everything across the metal shelves. Big fans hummed to hold off mold.

Then the librarians began the work they knew: sorting, grouping, imposing order. 

Large signs and posters went in one area, stuffed animals — “stuffies,” the librarians called them — in another. Smaller items like toys and figurines were grouped together.

The cloth police badges stood out immediately. They came from all over the world. There were so many that staff separated them from the rest of the collection, arranged them on the floor and climbed a ladder to fit them all in one photograph.

By midafternoon, most things that could be laid out were.

“And then everybody just kind of cried,” she said. “It was so emotional. We’re not reading the letters, but you’re putting things away, and you’re catching a word here, catching a word there.”

As she began to take off the apron, she felt something in her pocket as she reached for her cellphone. 

She pulled the little red truck out and held it, studying the toy in her hand.

“That selflessness from a kid?” she said. “It’s heartbreaking to handle this well-loved toy that clearly belonged to some child and had really special meaning to them, and they left it.” 

After the rain passed, the memorial bloomed again around the two cruisers. More flowers, signs and offerings appeared, just as big as it was the first time.

Later, another team would collect those, too.

Giudice began talking with Dallas police about what should come next. Out of those conversations came a decision: The tributes would become a special collection. It would become part of the library’s broader record of Dallas history — kept in the basement, but in historical company with materials on the John F. Kennedy assassination and civil rights icon Juanita Craft.

“It’s important to protect our cultural memory, to remember our history and to hopefully learn from it,” said Misty Maberry, the archivist who manages the Dallas history collection. “And so I feel like the job we do is preserving the memory of the city.”

Staff moved the items into the library’s former print shop, a large basement room, and fitted part of it with shelves. 

The archive itself would take up an area roughly the size of a roomy two-car garage.

They began with the letters. Thousands of them.

Some were addressed to the families of the five officers killed. Others were made out to the police chief. Most were meant simply for the city’s rank and file.

A worn purple sheet held a note from a young girl, written in thick black marker. She had been diagnosed with autism a few months earlier and her mother always told her to be strong and know she was loved.

We want you to know the same.

Others came on printed sympathy cards and handmade ones, on torn notepad sheets, lined school pages and colored construction paper. Many carried the letterhead of law enforcement agencies near and far. One arrived on stationery with the seal of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Most were handwritten, usually in pen. Some were typed. Others came in marker or crayon.

Thank you so much for risking your lives to make Dallas safer.

A few had no words at all, only pictures colored outside the lines.

A yellowed envelope postmarked , Fla., held 49 small rainbow-ribbon pins, one for each person killed at Pulse nightclub weeks earlier — a tribute sent from one grieving city to another.

Be strong as I know you are.

The sorting work moved in fits and starts. By the time librarian Nora Ochoa was hired in 2022, some had already been done. 

But those who had started it were gone, and no one had made notes explaining the system.

So they started over, this time with another Dallas tragedy as their guide.

The library’s John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection included hundreds of mourning cards, many left at Dealey Plaza after Kennedy was killed in 1963. Those materials had been sorted by where they originated.

So geography would lead them now.

“Dallas. Then Texas, not including Dallas. And then the U.S., not including Texas,” recounted librarian Abbi Rees. “And then outside the U.S., and then a box that has ‘unknown source.’”

Library staff slipped down to the basement whenever their regular duties allowed. By the end, the letters filled 16 boxes.

Among the letters was one written by a Dallas Theological Seminary professor. The blue ink blurred and bled through the paper, a reminder of the storm that nearly stole it. 

We thank God for you.

A security guard scrawled on a tear-away incident report form, repurposing the lined space he usually used to document an altercation.

Just stopping by to show you all that you are not alone.

A trauma nurse at Baylor University Medical Center, where she had tended to wounded officers that night, wrote on a tan card sent with cookies for the department.

Thank you for allowing the rest of us to live without fear.

Then, in 2023, a ransomware attack against the city gave the archivists an unexpected opening.

Hackers disrupted operations across City Hall. The city’s ​network was down, so the library’s computer systems went offline.

The library staff turned to the basement. The memorial archive did not require much technology — it needed space, hands and time.

The sorting took about two months. They used archival boxes and envelopes shaped for what they held: triangular cases for folded flags, long boxes for posters and signs, and large envelopes for some of the letters.

All were acid-free, meant to slow decay and protect what had been left behind.

The final item Ochoa wrapped was a red, white and blue burlap-like wreath, tied with a black-and-blue ribbon bearing the five officers’ names.

They finished the finding guide, a sort of table of contents for the collection. It listed the contents of more than 150 boxes.

Dallas police leaders visited the archive several times over the years, and some items were later pulled for display in department buildings and substations.

Among them were crosses, quilts and a custom black metal bench now on the second floor of Jack Evans Police Headquarters, near the department’s other tributes from the 2016 ambush. 

Its backrest bears portraits of the five officers killed and a poem written as if the officers were speaking in heaven, asking God to ease the pain of those they left behind.

The collection is not open to the public. Some items are now showcased online. The library at times has brought out items to display them on anniversaries and at department substations.

Access was also offered to the families of the officers killed. One family accepted.

The library staff understood why the other families may have stayed away.

Grief did not move on a schedule. The collection would be there whenever they were ready to see it.

Staff photojournalist Tom Fox contributed research.