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COVER STORY
NEW JERSEY COPS ■ AUGUST 2014
‘The Life of the Department’
CHRISTOPHER GOODELL
Waldwick Police Department
End of Watch: July 17, 2014
Christopher Goodell was a
true road warrior who
cherished every moment of
every day as a police officer.
■ BY MITCHELL KRUGEL
■ PHOTOS BY GREG PALLANTE
Greg McBain believes his best friend, Christopher Goodell, set up his patrol car on Route 17 earlier than usual that night for a reason. Since second
grade, McBain, a Ho-Ho-Kus police officer, and
Goodell, the Waldwick patrolman, had been brothers in every way you can be, and especially now as
cops.
McBain knew Goodell, who was recently elected vice president of Allendale/Waldwick Local 217,
would be doing his road work on Route 17 at some
point during this tour. Typically, Goodell would
work the roads of Waldwick until traffic died down
around 1:30 or 2 a.m. Such devotion made Goodell
renowned as one of the best road cops in this part
of Bergen County. Then, McBain said, around 3
a.m. Goodell would start patrolling Route 17.
But on the morning of July 17, Goodell went out
to the southbound stretch of Route 17 near Bergen
Avenue around 1 a.m. About a half-hour later, a
tractor-trailer barreled into his unmarked patrol
car in front of a house near Bergen Avenue. The
truck crushed the five-year veteran and former
marine against a retaining wall and rammed
through a picket fence and into a house on Bergen
Avenue where a grandparent, two parents and
three children were sleeping.
“I think he was out there early to save that family’s life,” McBain submitted. “If he’s not there, that
truck smashes into that house and maybe kills a
couple of the kids. I think the reason he was out
there was to sacrifice himself to save those kids.”
There might be no other way to understand or
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