Mourners grieve for jail officer shot by police after chase
By David Abel, Globe Staff
They wore black bands over their badges, more than hundred of them, stone-faced sheriff’s deputies in their powder blue shirts and white gloves.
They stopped traffic in Roxbury this morning as fellow jail officers carried Marquis J. Barker’s body into the St. John Missionary Baptist Church -- where he had been married just four years before -- and saluted him with an honor guard, bag pipes, and all the tributes for a man who spent 18 years keeping prisoners in line at the Nashua Street Jail.
"What happened was so out of character of him, it feels like a dream," Kim Sanders Barker told the family, friends, and colleagues who came to mourn her husband. "Never in a million years did I think I would be here, never did I imagine this ... What did I miss? I don't know."
Last week, Barker, the normally soft-spoken jail officer for the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department, was "losing it," his wife said in a 911 call. When police arrived at their home in Dorchester, Barker allegedly waved a pellet gun at them that resembled a semiautomatic handgun. He yelled, "Shoot me! Kill me!” and then allegedly stole a police cruiser that had been left running by one of the officers, leading police on a chase through Dorchester and Mattapan.
It ended a half-mile away when Barker crashed into a metal fence at a Walgreens and was surrounded by police, who ordered him to drop the gun. When he didn’t, police said, officers opened fire and killed him.
At his funeral this morning, colleagues described him as brave, funny, and always there for others.
