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Port Authority Police Benevolent Association Inc.

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Fallen Officers

Police Officer Donald A. Foreman

Police Officer Donald A. Foreman

Age
53
Years of Service
29
End of Watch
Sep 11, 2001
Assignment
Holland Tunnel - Jersey City, NJ
Cause of Death
Terrorist attack

From Police Heroes, a book by author Chuck Whitlock:

Officer Donald Foreman, fifty-three, a captain’s clerk at the Holland Tunnel, was ordered to report to Tower Two (South Tower) Command Center on September 11th. His companion of seventeen years, Cheryl Cooper-Foreman, said his habit was to let his family know he was okay. That call was the last time they spoke.

Foreman grew up in Richmond Hills, Queens. He had six brothers and three sisters. He joined the Port Authority Police Department in 1971 after working for five years as a postal worker. Early in his career he worked as a traffic officer. He spent many of his years at the Port Authority working as a captain’s clerk for fifteen consecutive captains.

Officer Foreman was a vegetarian and an avid Star Trek fan; he also coached basketball and was the director of Immaculate Conception School’s sports program. He volunteered at a homeless shelter near the Holland Tunnel along with his colleagues and friends Walter McNeil and Nathaniel Webb.

He has one son, Marcus, and two stepdaughters, Cacia and Tia Walker.

Portraits of Grief, The New York Times

He Kept 15 Captains Happy

The picnic was intended for Port Authority police officers assigned to the PATH system. Technically, Officer Donald Foreman was assigned to the Holland Tunnel, but he was welcome anyway. Donald Foreman was always welcome.

He had spent 29 years with the Port Authority, working for many of those years as a captain’s clerk, which meant he did a lot of the nuts-and-bolts administrative tasks for a superior. According to a plaque on a wall at the Holland Tunnel offices, he served 15 consecutive captains, according to his last, Robert Sbarra.

“If he could work for 15 captains without anyone trying to remove him, he must have done his job extremely well.”

But Mr. Foreman, 53, has a full life outside, with a large extended family and volunteer duties that included running the youth sports program for his Roman Catholic parish, Immaculate Conception, on Staten Island. He was also a strict vegetarian, but that hardly kept him from that picnic, a hamburger-and-frankfurter feast on the Jersey shore.

“I do remember giving him French fries,” recalled his companion, Cheryl Cooper-Foreman. And Ms. Cooper-Foreman and Captain Sbarra both remember this: Donald Foreman playing basketball with kids young enough to be his grandchildren.

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