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Sgt. Russell had a loving wife. He had a two-year-old kid. He was 35 when he attempted to stop a runaway snowplow and was struck down and killed on the city’s downtown streets.

“He was a personable and a positive guy, a joy to be around,” his grieving colleague, Detective Colin McDonald, would say. “He was a genuine, nice guy.”

Looking at the photograph, it is easy to see that he was. The police closed ranks on Wednesday. It was a time for them to mourn one of their own, to be together, to wrestle with the terrible truth they confront each day when they put on their uniforms and step outside their front doors.

The worst can happen. The worst did happen: a husband, a loving father, a cherished son, a proven leader, went to work and didn’t come home for dinner Wednesday night.

“People talk about police officers and what we do in an abstract term, crunched down to business and numbers. Well, this is what we do,” said Mike McCormack, president of Toronto Police Association. “We go out everyday and we put it on the line. This is what can happen and we all know it.”

And it is what we tend to forget, the law-abiding among us, when we are grumbling about the line of cars at a police spot check, a cleverly concealed speed trap or the parking ticket you got for running into the corner store for two minutes and running back out to find a yellow piece of paper flapping about on your windshield.