2 Slain Police Officers Are Eulogized as Heroes : Funeral: They are lauded for saving others from gunman’s bullets. About 4,000 attend emotional service.

As a lone bagpiper played a soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace,” an estimated 4,000 mourners gathered Monday on a grassy knoll overlooking Los Angeles Harbor to bid farewell to two slain Palos Verdes Estates police officers, who were lauded as heroes for saving fellow officers by breaking up an armed robbery.

The afternoon service and the funeral that preceded it were an exercise in high formality and raw emotion. Capt. Michael Wayne Tracy and Sgt. Vernon Thomas Vanderpool were honored with a 21-gun salute, a sheriff’s helicopter flyover and a procession of 64 motorcycles and untold black-and-whites. The strains of taps wafted over the harbor, punctuated by the sniffles of mourners. The officers’ widows were presented with the American flags that had draped their husbands’ coffins.

Police officers from throughout the state--and a handful from as far away as Texas and Wisconsin--turned out to pay their respects. So did Gov. Pete Wilson, Los Angeles Police Chief Willie L. Williams, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti and a host of other dignitaries.

Tough street cops fought back tears. A troop of Boy Scouts, clad in uniform, hung their heads as they helped guard the casket of Vanderpool, who had been the troop’s assistant Scoutmaster for seven years. The chief of the close-knit Palos Verdes Estates Police Department broke down as he described his fallen comrades, particularly Tracy, who was his best friend.

“They loved being cops and they loved helping people and when they were called, they were heroes,” said Chief Gary Johansen, who witnessed the killings. “They saved the lives of the other 11 people in that room, and I speak from experience because I was there. . . . These two officers saved our lives.”

After praising Vanderpool as one of his most reliable officers, Johansen turned toward Tracy’s coffin while reaching beneath his eyeglasses to wipe away tears. “God bless you, my friend,” he said, his voice cracking. “I love you.”

Tracy, 50, and Vanderpool, 57, were gunned down on Valentines Day, Vanderpool’s 36th wedding anniversary. The shooting took place during a police management meeting on the 12th floor of the Torrance Holiday Inn. Witnesses said the gunman, 32-year-old David Joseph Fukuto--the son of a state appellate judge--burst into the meeting shouting, “This is a robbery!”

Authorities say they may never know whether Fukuto--who was wearing a bulletproof vest--intended to rob the group, or whether he had a grudge against police officers. When Tracy and Vanderpool lunged at him, he shot them. Other officers subdued Fukuto, and he died in the ensuing struggle. The cause of his death remains undisclosed because the district attorney’s office has sealed his autopsy reports while conducting its investigation.

Tracy and Vanderpool were the first officers killed in the history of the affluent South Bay city, which prided itself on having its own small police force rather than contracting with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, as some neighboring communities do.

The deaths have so overwhelmed city officials and the 23-officer force that streets are temporarily being patrolled by officers from neighboring departments.

The tragedy has shaken those close to David Fukuto as well. On Sunday, the congregation at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Koreatown, where he had been a vestry member and was known as quiet and well-mannered, replaced its regular service with counseling sessions for church members to talk about their grief and anger.

Earlier, members of the largely Japanese American church said they had trouble talking about what had happened. “We . . . are very private people,” said one church member who asked not to be named. “We’re too full of grief and too crowded in our heads to talk right now. I just get into tears.”

There was no mention of Fukuto at the police officers’ funeral on Monday, at least not by name. But an underlying theme was the struggle to make sense of what seemed a nonsensical act. In a eulogy delivered for his father, Tracy’s son, Sean Michael Tracy, said plaintively: “I don’t understand many things in life. Funerals happen to be one of them.”

Byron MacDonald, the senior pastor of Rolling Hills Covenant Church, where the funeral was held, put it this way: “There are some moments in society that when they happen, give us a picture of who we are. . . . A week ago Monday at a Holiday Inn in Torrance was a picture of what is happening to us. . . . There’s a darkness, there’s an evil, there’s an increasing resource to violence that is overtaking us.”

MacDonald said he found a “glimmer of hope” in the actions of Vanderpool and Tracy. “Someone must stand to see that evil is restrained and that those who would break the law are brought to justice. Sgt. Vanderpool and Capt. Tracy represent the hope and the encouragement of what is best in us.”

Security was tight at the funeral. Five sharpshooters were stationed on the church’s roof. Because the families of the officers wanted the services to be private, only uniformed police officers and family members were permitted to enter the 1,100-seat chapel.

Members of the media watched on closed-circuit television, as did about 1,000 mourners who arrived too late to get a seat in the standing-room-only sanctuary. Others stood outside.

The ceremonies were laced with humor as well as sadness.

Vanderpool’s nephew, Oceanside Police Detective Ken Gow, prefaced his eulogy with a gesture--taking off his tie and unbuttoning his top shirt button. “Tom hated ties,” Gow proclaimed, as the crowd erupted in applause. “He also hated long-sleeved shirts but there’s nothing I can do about that now.”

Gow then talked of how his uncle had guided him into a career in law enforcement, pushing him to finish his education. He also shared the recollections of Vanderpool’s children, who sometimes heard their father crying in solitude after he had spanked them.

“Tom was a big man but he had a gentle heart,” Gow said.

Tracy’s three children wrote a eulogy for their father, read aloud by Drake Morton, the Police Department chaplain. They described a man who loved dirt-bike racing, who thought he was “the funniest man alive,” who believed in backing his friends and in making other people feel special.

Then, in apparent reference to their father’s taste for beer, the letter closed with these words: “P.S., Dad, we’re looking forward to seeing your cheesy smile someday at the big Bud keg in the sky.”

After the funeral, an elaborate motorcade of police cars, motorcycles and limousines carried family members, city officials and Palos Verdes Estates police officers to nearby Green Hills Memorial Park for the memorial service. The rest of the mourners walked to the cemetery, where they stood behind a low cinder-block wall--and a human blockade of police officers--to witness the service from a respectable distance.

Dozens of American flags lined the winding route into the cemetery, waving against a clear blue Southern California sky. At times, all that could be heard was their flapping in the afternoon breeze.

The somber ceremony lasted 45 minutes. At its close, after widows Billy Jean Vanderpool and Becky Tracy were presented with the flags, the members of the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department filed past their colleagues’ bodies, laying their white gloves atop the blue steel coffins in a final gesture of solidarity.

Times staff writer Susan Moffat contributed to this story.