Above: DART Sgt. Homer Hutchins comforted DART Officer Shamika Sorrells at Baylor University Hospital after the ambush on police officers in downtown Dallas on July 7, 2016. They were flanked by hospital social worker Nita Tarango (left) and nurse manager Sherry Sutton. (Ting Shen/Staff Photographer)

DART Police Sgt. Homer Hutchins saw the photo minutes after it was taken. The image showed the muscular officer in tears, hugging a colleague and friend, Officer Shamika Sorrells, in the hallway of Baylor's emergency room. He had just learned that DART Officer Brent Thompson had died.

Two Baylor employees flanked the embrace. Sherry Sutton, a nurse manager in the emergency department, stood on the right. Nita Tarango, a social worker, stood on the left.

The image would be shared across social media that night and would run in newspapers across the country, including on the front page of The Dallas Morning News.

Tarango remembers the moment and reaching her hand out to show support.

“I remember putting my hands on them and just praying, praying to give them strength, praying for their safety, praying for their loved ones, praying that they’re going to be able to get through this and that they will continue to have God’s strength and mercy and grace,” she said.

When Hutchins first saw the photo on a colleague’s cellphone, he was angry.

“I just felt like they came in and just kicked my front door in my house and took pictures of my family,” he said. “That was a family moment to me. That was our moment, and it was being broadcast all over the world.”

But he began to see the photo’s greater meaning in the weeks that followed. A black man in his 20s approached him at a gas station in a rough part of Dallas and told him he recognized him from the photo. He said he was sorry for the officers’ loss. A white middle-aged man recognized him at a Wal-Mart and encouraged him to keep his head up. And a Hispanic man came up to him at a Golden Corral and told him he’d been moved and inspired by the photo.

“The picture was hitting everybody, not just police,” he said. “So it became a good thing instead of a bad thing for me.”

Sorrells sees the photo as a reminder of bravery. She keeps the photo in her nightstand drawer with her most important belongings.

“I don’t want to continuously look at it, but it’s safe to my heart,” she said.

For Tarango, the photo’s power comes from its raw emotions: “Out of disaster and tragedy, there’s goodness, and I think that photo shows that, people pulling together that never met in their entire lives and just being there for each other.”

— Melissa Repko/Staff Writer

Related: One of their own was gone: The story behind the iconic Dallas ambush photograph