Euless, Tex., a suburb of Fort Worth, is a town of about 54,000 people, with a low rate of poverty, an average home-to-work travel time of 23 minutes, Italian restaurants and Thai restaurants and 18 parks. A few years ago it attracted the interest of David Hofer, a young police officer in Manhattan’s Ninth Precinct, in the East Village, who was researching places where he might live and begin a family that weren’t quite as noisy as New York, or as expensive, or as alienated from the natural world. Early in 2014, he joined the Euless Police Department; his girlfriend moved to Texas with him. They got engaged and bought a house.

A move from New York to a comparatively small town in Texas might seem improbable enough, but there were other aspects of David Hofer’s life that any superficial account of his upbringing might not have predicted. He had arrived as a child in New York from Switzerland, where his father, Helmut Hofer, a prominent mathematician and a leader in the area of symplectic topology, took a position at New York University, eventually moving on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. From fifth grade on, David attended St. Ann’s, the independent school in Brooklyn where “The Odyssey” is introduced in preschool, and where 16 out of 20 children in a class might tell you that they hope to become playwrights or sculptors. He graduated in 2005, a year after Lena Dunham, and went on to N.Y.U.

Until David Hofer died this month, shot in a park by a 22-year-old with a long criminal record, who police said had stolen guns from a nearby home, a police officer hadn’t been killed in Euless in 34 years. Part of the appeal of Euless, Officer Hofer’s friends said, was the sense of safety it provided, the feeling that it was a less chaotic place to patrol than the Lower East Side, and that officers were afforded a lot of good will. “Dave would say, ‘I want to go to a place where cops are loved,’” his lifelong friend Jesse Barocas told me. “He had too much respect for himself and other cops to feel differently.”