Donta J. Manuel

Two Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies were killed on Nov. 28, 2007, in Pahokee as deputies attempted to stop a stolen car and were struck instead by another deputy in pursuit.

Among the dead is Jonathan Wallace, a 23-year-old whose childhood dream was to become an officer and had been on the job about a year, according to Pahokee Mayor J.P. Sasser. He was engaged to be married.

The other is Donta J. Manuel of Belle Glade. Manuel was a father in his 30s and was preparing to be Wallace's best man.

Friends and family had already begun to gather at the home of Wallace's mother home at 8:30 a.m., even as his former co-workers circled in helicopters overhead still searching.

The tragedy began to unfold at about 1:09 a.m. when deputies took a report of a stolen 1990 gold Camry in Belle Glade. Word went out and at a time with little traffic, the car was spotted headed north on Highway 715 toward Pahokee.

Three marked cars - a road patrol, a sergeant and a K9 unit - were given the OK to pursue on 715, a long stretch of two-lane road along cane fields with little opportunity to turn off.

Wallace and Manuel were deploying stop sticks in the road near the Pahokee Airport at about 1:30 a.m. when they were hit and killed.

The Camry ran over the sticks but kept going until the passengers were able to run out into a cane field a mile or two away.

After an extensive search, deputies took down the perimeter and were following other leads that indicated the people in the stolen car were able to get out of the fields and hitch a ride elsewhere.

The tragedy adds to the grief in the law-enforcement community in South Florida, where these two officers become the fourth and fifth to die in the line of duty in the past three months.

They are the first Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies to die in five years. Donald Lee Schavolt died of a heart attack while struggling with a suspect in 2002.