Officer down can be one of the most chilling words that fellow officers will ever want to hear while on duty.  Unfortunately, 2016 saw a tragic spike in the number of police officer shooting deaths from the number in 2015.  According to Fox News, Philadelphia, Pa police officer Jonny Castro decided to create something remarkable to pay tribute to his fallen fellow members of the city’s thin blue line.

Officer Castro who has a talent for sketching the images of potential suspects has turned his skills to creating portraits of the heroic officers who were shot and killed.  He indicated that the increasing number of police officer line of duty murders inspired him to use his professional talents learned in art school to offer family and friends a lasting personalized memory of the fallen officer.

Each portrait take the Philly officer about eight hours to design and for him it appears to be a labor of love.  Officer Castro said, “It’s something the family has to remember them by.  Not just husbands and wives but maybe brothers and sisters, sons, daughters. They can each have a copy and hang it in their own place,” reported Fox News.

The thin blue line saw a major hit in 2016 with 21 of the 64 police officers gunned down being ambushed. This represented the highest total of ambush murders in more than two decades.

In 2015 41 police officers were murdered by gunfire. In fact, according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. The 2016 police gunfire deaths were the most in the last five years and tragically outpaced the annual average of police shooting deaths over the last decade, which was 53.

What was especially alarming for the fallen members of the police fraternity  in 2016 was how one of the officers fatally stricken down was an officer who was about to retire while another officer was on her first official day of duty.