Financial help coming for officer’s daughter

By Abigail Goldman

Monday, May 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.

On the same day Metro Officer James Manor died in his patrol car, the Obama administration released plans to dramatically cut a federal benefits program for the families of cops killed in the line of duty.

Now, the president’s proposed cutback does not mean families of slain officers will receive any less in federal death benefits. But the timing — with Manor’s death and the proposed budget cut coming just days before National Police Week, which honors officers killed or injured — does bring to light a dark job: collecting death benefits and raising money for the families of fallen cops.

The Public Safety Officers Death Benefits Program currently awards the families of slain police just over $315,000. This is a mandatory payout, so even if Obama’s proposed cut depletes the program’s funding, the federal government must find the money somewhere, as it did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which caused the number of public safety officers to die in the line of duty that year to jump by almost 50 percent nationally from the year before.

Except for the 9/11 spike, the number of slain cops has slowly dropped over the years, meaning the Death Benefits Program’s annual fiscal demands also have fallen. The president’s plan to trim program funding from $110 million to $60 million is based on a projection of this decline continuing.

Manor is survived by his fiancee and their 8-year-old daughter, Jayla Manor. In cases where the parents are not married, the $315,000 is given wholly to dependent children. Metro Officer Todd Rosenberg is applying for the federal death benefit on behalf of Manor’s family, but says it’s still not enough.

Raising a child is expensive. The United States Department of Agriculture releases an annual “Expenditures on Children By Families” report, which is basically an accounting of what it costs to raise kids. The most recent report available, from 2007, says a single parent who makes more than $45,800 before taxes will spend just over $298,000 to raise a child from infancy to the age of 17.

These expenditure calculations, incidentally, are pretty bare bones. They don’t include the cost of college, for example. They’re also quickly out of date. By the time Officer Manor’s daughter is a teenager, that $315,000 won’t be worth as much.

It’s a cold, actuarial way of looking at things, a process that happens quickly and quietly behind the scenes of a tragedy. Within hours of Manor’s death, the public was made aware of a Nevada State Bank account where they could donate directly to a fund established in the officer’s name. This was the work of the Injured Police Officers Fund, a local nonprofit run by Southern Nevada law enforcement officers who volunteer their time — Rosenberg, the officer filing Manor’s federal death benefit application, is president of the fund.

The last time Rosenberg had to set up a bank account for a fallen cop, and begin the process of soliciting donations from citizens, was in February 2006, when Metro Officer Henry Prendes was killed. The fund, founded in 1982, is today responsible for raising enough money to financially assist injured and killed public safety officers from 10 local agencies.

The fund gives the families of fallen officers $25,000 from its savings, Rosenberg says, then seeks to build on that through charity events and bank accounts. In Manor’s case, the mortuary provided services free of charge, so the fund was able to use some of its money flying Manor’s relatives from out of state to his funeral on Friday.

Through donations to the bank account, and at fundraising events, the fund has been able to raise about $5,000 for the family so far. This has involved doing street-level outreach, as well as partnering with local radio stations to broadcast the call for donations. On May 9, at the Art Fest of Henderson, the fund set up a tent to collect money for Manor’s family. Rosenberg remembers one elderly man riding the bus across the valley to donate $5.

Manor was 13 days shy of his two-year anniversary with Metro. Because he was a public employee, his daughter will receive dependent child benefits from the state — $400 a month until she turns 18. If she remains a full-time student, that $400 will keep coming until she’s 23. And if she decides to go to any of Nevada’s seven state colleges, her lab fees and expenses for text books and course materials will be covered as well, as mandated by state law.

But none of this money is enough, Rosenberg says.

“Nothing’s going to replace the fact that her dad’s not there to hug her.”