\u00a0A candlelight vigil in remembrance of fallen Alhambra\u00a0Police Department Officer Alec Sanders, who was killed in the line of duty\u00a0when his patrol cruiser collided with an allegedly stolen SUV during a chase,\u00a0was held Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
“I never heard one bad thing about him,” APD Chief Garrett Kennedy said after the vigil outside the department’s station. “When I would see him, I would ask him, ‘How things are going? Does he enjoy the police department?’ He said he loved it.”<\/p>\n
Kennedy said Sanders’ family told him that Sanders had a passion for\u00a0serving the community and being a police officer, that he just ”truly loved\u00a0coming to work. He loved serving this community.”<\/p>\n
Sanders, who had been with the Alhambra Police Department for just\u00a0eight months, was covering the shift of a colleague when he was fatally\u00a0injured. He previously worked for about a year with the Long Beach Police\u00a0Department.<\/p>\n
He is survived by a fianc\u00e9e, two younger sisters and a brother.<\/p>\n
Sanders, 28, died Thursday in the crash around 3 a.m. at the\u00a0intersection of Edgewood Street and Valley Boulevard.<\/p>\n
The crash also killed one of the passengers in the allegedly stolen\u00a0silver Hyundai SUV. She was identified as 42-year-old Gabriela Moreno, who was\u00a0ejected from the vehicle in the impact.<\/p>\n
On Monday, the driver of the SUV, Steven Ara Zapata, 27, of El Monte, was charged with two counts of murder, one count of reckless driving on\u00a0a highway causing a specified injury and two counts of fleeing a peace\u00a0officer’s motor vehicle causing death.<\/p>\n
Zapata also sustained moderate injuries in the crash and was taken to\u00a0a hospital, where he was later arrested. It was unclear when Zapata would appear in court for arraignment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A third person in the SUV, a 52-year-old man,\u00a0also sustained serious but non-life-threatening injuries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0A candlelight vigil in remembrance of fallen Alhambra\u00a0Police Department Officer Alec Sanders, who was killed in the line…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":405508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[186508,1582,276,2961,224,5337],"class_list":["post-405507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-alhambra","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115614961194116905","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}