By Julia Prodis Sulek
The Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. — The motorcade stretched two miles Wednesday along the smoky foothills of Interstate 680, where more than 200 cars fluttering with American flags followed the coffin of San Quentin Prison Sgt. Gilbert Polanco and his grieving family.
Motorcycle police stopped traffic on three freeways and blocked traffic at every on-ramp from a San Jose mortuary to a Fremont cemetery.
Tributes like this, with an honor guard and police escorts, bagpipes and a 21-gun salute, are reserved for law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty. The last time someone received this treatment at San Quentin was 35 years ago, when a prison guard was killed by an inmate.
Sgt. Polanco, 55, was killed by COVID-19.
A disastrous decision by prison officials to transfer more than 100 inmates from a state prison in Chino at the height of the pandemic in late May introduced the virus to San Quentin that would spiral into the largest cluster of coronavirus cases anywhere in the U.S. Polanco was one of 276 employee sickened by the virus and on Aug. 9 became the first to die after being hospitalized for weeks.
In the mortuary parking lot on Wednesday, where the service took place to maintain social distancing, San Quentin Prison Warden Ron Broomfield dropped to his knee, bowed his head and presented the folded American flag that had draped Polanco’s coffin to his widow, Patricia, his 22-year-old daughter, Selena, and 26-year-old son, Vincent, home on leave from a U.S. Army station in South Korea.
“This should have never happened,” one prison employee muttered.
By Wednesday, 2,236 inmates had tested positive and 26 had died.
Just days before Polanco’s death, his wife had called it “a catastrophe.”
Across California, the virus has killed nine state prison employees. At least four other Bay Area law enforcement officers and employees have died in the pandemic, including Richmond Police Sgt. Virgil Thomas, who died last week.
On Wednesday, Patricia Polanco struggled to maintain her composure, collapsing into her daughter’s arms. The black masks they wore to prevent the spread of coronavirus did little to muffle their sobs. Her son, wearing his formal Army uniform and white gloves, saluted the flag.
The couple had been married for nearly 30 years and in their early days had lived in employee housing with their young children on the grounds of San Quentin. Despite the looming presence of the famous prison and notorious Death Row, Selena and Vincent rode their bikes along the main street and the families there formed a tight bond. The Polancos ultimately moved to San Jose, where Sgt. Polanco was raised and had graduated from Lincoln High School. Even after his children graduated from the same school, Polanco continued to help coach the football team.
In normal times, “we would pack out any church” for a funeral service for such a beloved prison guard, San Quentin Lt. Sam Robinson said before the caravan of cars left the mortuary for the cemetery. “This family would see Polanco was loved by many.”
The length of the motorcade surely showed it.
“It’s overwhelming, but not surprising,” said Elisa Jessen, Sgt. Polanco’s niece. “He was a great man.”
He worked double shifts to help out when fellow guards became sick with coronavirus. He donated supplies to victims of the Santa Rosa wildfires and organized fishing derbies for his fellow prison guards. He had a funny way of making people feel they were in on a secret, when really he was just whispering about sports.
Without a public church service, extended family and friends and coworkers had been invited to join the mobile procession, but warned to remain in their cars to follow federal guidelines and prevent the spread of coronavirus. The rules were difficult to enforce.
In the mortuary parking lot on Little Orchard Street in San Jose, people gathered on the sidewalk and peered through the fence to watch the solemn honor guard ceremony.
“It feels so distant,” said Susan Carmichael, a retired prison guard, who stood on the edge of the parking lot. “We feel we can’t pay our respects properly.”
On Thursday, a funeral Mass for family only will be held outdoors at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in San Jose. It will be live streamed for San Quentin staff to watch.
On Friday, Polanco’s ashes will be scattered in the San Francisco Bay, not far from the prison walls.
“In a year or so, or whenever we are safe from COVID-19, we will have a proper Celebration of Life and do it right to honor Gilbert,” Patricia Polanco wrote on the invitation to the freeway procession. “When that time comes, I want to invite the world.”
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©2020 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)