FAMILY IN BLOOD, BROTHERHOOD TEARFULLY HONOR, BURY DEPUTY

They crowded the pews, laughed at his pranks, prayed for his family and
called him a hero.

And, upon hearing George Selby Jr.'s dying words, they - family, friends,
strangers and big, burly police officers - wept.

"My girls . . . my girls," Selby, a sheriff's deputy, uttered as he lay on
the porch of a Frayser home Wednesday night after being shot while trying
to search the home for drugs.

He was speaking of his family: his wife, Jessica, and daughters Taylor, 5,
and Payton, 2.

At Germantown Baptist Church Saturday, where a sea of khaki and blue filled
the pews, Selby, 33, a narcotics officer who described himself as simply a
"peace officer," was eulogized as "a godly man" who loved his job and family.

About 3,000 attended.

Fellow deputy and close friend George Stauffer talked of those last moments
with Selby. Choking back tears, Stauffer relayed Selby's words as he waited
for an ambulance. Selby died in surgery a few hours later.

Across the flag-draped coffin, Selby's older daughter, Taylor, leaned
against her mother as Stauffer spoke. Also eulogizing Selby was close
friend Billy Speight.

Selby, in the words of another close friend, Jeff Duncan, had "a glowing
effect on people."

It was a day for rituals and pomp to honor a man who lost his life serving
the public.

A few hours before the service, two color guards, one from the Memphis Fire
Department and the lead guard from the Shelby County Sheriff's Department,
donned dress uniforms, white gloves and practiced their somber and solemn
stances.

Fire Department color guard members Sam Hall and Ray Kelly didn't know
Selby, but he was family nonetheless.

"Because of the type of work we do, we're a brotherhood," said Hall.

The sentiment was present along Poplar as the long procession of police
cars followed the hearse to Memorial Park cemetery. In Germantown, that
city's fire department used aerial ladder trucks to form a flag-draped arch
over the street.

Two hours before the service, Peggy Duncan sat in the sanctuary, waiting
for Jeff Duncan, her son. She talked about how Selby, her son and a few
other lifelong friends had gathered at each other's homes.

"They all spent the night at our house many times," she said. "George was
just a kind, sweet, nice young man." Then she remembered that Selby's
father died in July.

"Imagine his mother, what she's going through right now," Duncan said.

Jeff Duncan said Selby and he were to have gone hunting last weekend, but
Selby canceled because his family was moving into a new home.

"He was so full of life," Jeff Duncan said. "You never saw him without a
smile."

As Kathy Steen practiced singing How Great Thou Art, six sheriff's deputies
wheeled in Selby's coffin.

The mother and son held each other and wept. A few minutes later, Steen,
who attends Forest Hill Community Church with Selby's family, said Jessica
Selby asked her to sing the song because it was a favorite of her husband's.

Jessica Selby helped start the church's Mother's Day Out program, and when
an auction to benefit the program was planned, George Selby pitched in,
Steen said.

"He'd sleep a few hours after working at night and come there every day for
two weeks doing anything I asked him to do."

From the balcony, Stacy Parks Poole, another in Selby's circle of friends,
looked down into the sanctuary at the array of flowers and remembered her
friend.

"He was like a brother to me, he really was," said Poole, who drove to
Memphis from her home in Plano, Texas, with Angie Johnson, another of
Selby's childhood friends. "He was so sweet, that big smile and those
little, squinty eyes."

On the drive to Memphis, the two reminisced about Selby, with some tears,
but, because of his antics, "a lot of laughing, too," said Poole. After the
prayers and before a sermon in which Rev. Bob Geabhart, Selby's pastor,
said Selby faced "the epitome of evil" at his death yet had the faith to
make him ready to die, Poole and the rest heard Stauffer sum up their
friend's life.

"For George, there was always something about being No. 1," Stauffer said.
"He'd be the first there to see what I'd cooked, the first to head to the
office to do paperwork, and he was always the first one out the door on a call.

"And now he'll be the first to hold the door to heaven open for us."