Las Vegas Shooting: Motorcade Escorts Slain Officer Charleston Hartfield

HENDERSON, NV — Traffic on the Las Vegas Strip stopped for a moment to allow a casket carrying Charleston Hartfield — an off-duty police officer slain in the Oct. 1 mass shooting near the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada — to pass. Hartfield received full departmental honors, including a motorcade to Central Christian Church in Henderson.

A private burial will be held at the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City, police said.

People crowded pedestrian bridges beneath casino marquees as the blocks-long procession passed the site of the Oct. 1 massacre at an open-air concert venue near the Mandalay Bay resort. Some saluted and at least one man wept as a phalanx of more than 50 police motorcycles with lights flashing led a pickup truck bearing the flag-draped casket on a sunny and breezy day that had palm trees waving in the wind.

Hartfield, 34, was off-duty when the shooting started at the Route 91 Harvest Festival country music concert, but department officials said he died trying to help others escape.

He was an 11-year police veteran, a married father of a son and a daughter, who served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and the Nevada Army National Guard. He worked in recent years as an instructor in the police body-camera deployment program and coached youth football in his hometown of Henderson.

Hartfield recently authored a book about life as a police officer, called "Memoirs Of A Public Servant."

His was the first police officer killed in Las Vegas since Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo were shot to death while eating at a pizza shop in June 2014 by a man and a woman who later died during a shootout with officers at a Walmart.

By KEN RITTER, Associated Press

Associated Press writer Sally Ho contributed to this report.

Photo credit: Isaac Brekken/Associated Press