Officer Bolden lived only a couple of blocks away from Dunne’s, in the Farragut Houses, a public-housing project. He was a transplant from the South by way of wartime Europe. He had been born and raised in South Carolina, and his family members were once sharecroppers on a plantation owned by the Pratt family called Good Hope, his brother, George Bolden, said.

He enlisted in the Navy after the attacks on Pearl Harbor. He was only 16, but lied about his age.

“When the war broke out, a lot of the young men his age and older enlisted in the armed forces,” George Bolden said. “I think he felt the world was moving on without him. He cajoled my mom to go down to the naval enlisting place with him.”

When he came home from the war, he settled in New York City. “He married a lady who lived in Brooklyn,” his brother said. He first found work with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s police unit before joining the Police Department in 1955.

“Always right where you needed him,” said a fellow officer from the 1960s, George Hanley, 75. “Gentleman of a cop. Nothing more you could ask from a man. A real swell guy.”

Officer Bolden relished the work. “He loved being in uniform,” George Bolden said. When he was occasionally assigned to a plainclothes unit, “he absolutely hated it.” He worked in the 75th Precinct in East Brooklyn, but was a familiar presence in his own neighborhood.

“He made it a point, whenever he could, he’d stop in places,” George Bolden said. A luncheonette, a Carvel ice cream shop, a dry cleaner — “He would actually stop in on his way home. He would get in to see those people. They knew him and knew he was a cop. He’d say, ‘I’m thinking about you. How are things going?’”

It may have been in this spirit that he began going to Dunne’s Bar and Grill on Gold Street near the bridge. The night of Jan. 22, 1971, was unusual only in how empty the bar was: just him; his friend the bartender, John Gallagher, 62; and the third man in the phone booth. Mr. Gallagher asked Officer Bolden to tell the man the bar was closing, and he did.