Michael Nagle
Two big-hearted volunteers have been scouring city cemeteries to find the unmarked graves of dozens of fallen NYPD officers — and raising money to honor their memory.
Christina Wilkinson, 51, in her role as president of the Newtown Historical Society, last year memorialized a police officer killed on duty in 1927 and laid to rest at All Faith’s Lutheran Cemetery in Queens.
She then learned that the officer’s brother also died in the line of duty and was buried there.
She looked for the grave but couldn’t find it. A cemetery map finally led her to an unmarked grave.
“It opened my eyes to this situation because I just assumed wrongly that the police would have covered that,” she told The Post. But during the Great Depression, “they didn’t have the resources for that and the families didn’t have the resources for that.”
She started a database that cross-references names in the Officer Down Memorial Page and FindAGrave.com to find cops killed in the line of duty and where they are buried. She’s found 27 fallen officers so far with no grave markers.
Anthony Pisciotta, a volunteer at All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, offered to help Wilkinson hunt down the unmarked graves.
“She knew if anyone could find them, I could,” said Pisciotta, 52, whose real job is with MTA Bridges and Tunnels.
He soon located the graves of NYPD officers Henry Immen, Charles Weidig and William Eberhardt.
He created a GoFundMe.com page for each officer and quickly collected enough funds to have headstones made by an Amish craftsman in Lancaster, Pa. He charged about $450 per stone.
“They gave their lives for us and it upset me that here’s a guy that died 100 years ago and he still doesn’t have a stone and who knows the last time anybody even spoke his name,” he said. “It’s just sad that they’re forgotten.”
Patrolman Immen was shot and killed on Feb. 21, 1920, when he attempted to arrest two suspects for burglary in the Bronx, according to his page on the Officer Down Memorial Site.
Patrolman Weidig was shot and killed on Nov. 8, 1930, while trying to stop a drug store robbery in Harlem.
He saw three men acting suspiciously inside the store at 118th Street and Lenox Avenue in Manhattan around 10:30 p.m.
Eberhardt died in a hit-and-run in Midtown on Sept. 15, 1931.
He and other officers were working on a broken-down police car when they were struck by a drunk driver.
Right now Pisciotta is researching two law enforcement officers killed while responding to the deadly Civil War draft riots in 1863.
“They were beaten to death and neither one of them has a headstone,” he said. “One of them is in Calgary Cemetery, the other one is in Green-Wood Cemetery,” he said.