As a boy growing up in the South Bronx, Deon Taylor loved to play with GI Joe action figures and protect little kids from bullies.
As an adult, Taylor battled to take drug dealers off Big Apple streets and tried to keep Afghanistan safe from Taliban tyranny.
Yesterday, Riverside Church in Morningside Heights was a sea of blue and olive green as hundreds of cops and Army national guardsmen joined friends and family in bidding a tearful farewell to Taylor, 30, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan on Oct. 22.
Taylor, an NYPD narcotics cop who was on his second tour of duty in the war-torn country, was described as “our GI Joe” in the funeral program.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived is to have succeeded,” Mayor Bloomberg told mourners. “By that token, Deon achieved the greatest possible success in life.”
Then, turning to Taylor’s 8-year-old son, Da’Rue, the mayor said, “You were Deon’s first thought in the morning, his last thought at night and every other thought in between.”
Taylor, whose brother and uncle are cops, joined the force in 2005 and became a narcotics cop in Brooklyn in 2007.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly described him in action.
“In an oversized T-shirt with another shirt thrown over his shoulder, walking with a bounce in his step, he would approach a suspected drug dealer and – without raising the slightest suspicion – ask if they could please sell him some heroin, or crack, or acid. He took the most dangerous drugs off the street,” Kelly said.
“In word and deed, Deon challenged others to be their very best,” he added.
Taylor grew up in the South Bronx, but graduated from high school in Maine, where he had spent his summers. At 18, he enlisted in the Army.
He planned to return home in December, and to marry his fiancée, Caitlin Casey, next August.
In a message read at the service by a friend, Casey said, “I still can’t believe you’re gone. We weathered every storm together except this one. You will live in my heart forever. Until we meet again, may God hold you in his hands.”