Lowering the flag: Some examples of half-staff tributes
NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly 90 percent of days last year, one or more states were flying the American flag at half-staff to memorialize the deaths of military members, public officials, police, first responders, prominent citizens and victims of mass killings and disasters, The Associated Press found in analyzing information from all 50 states and the federal government.
Epigrammatic baseball great Yogi Berra, known as much for his quips as his Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees, was recognized in New Jersey, where Republican Gov. Chris Christie lowered flags for a resident he described as a "national treasure," as well as a World War II veteran.
Christie has been notably open to extending flag honors to famous people who aren't public servants, including E Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons in 2011 and singer Whitney Houston in 2012.
Former U.S. Sen. and actor Fred Thompson, a Republican whose roles in American public life spanned from real-life Senate counsel at the Watergate hearings to fictional district attorney on NBC's "Law & Order," was honored in his home state of Tennessee.
Civil rights leader Julian Bond, who led the NAACP for a decade, was honored in Georgia , where he had been a state representative and state senator.
New Mexico honoree Bahe Ketchum , on the other hand, was among the last roughly 20 members of a distinguished group: the hundreds of Navajo code talkers who played a vital role in World War II by transmitting radio messages in a code based on their native language, which flummoxed the Japanese.
When Democratic former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick lowered flags until the late Sen. Edward Brooke's funeral, Patrick might not have thought they would be at half-staff for 65 days — so long that Patrick's Republican successor, Gov. Charlie Baker, decided to issue an order reminding people to raise them once Brooke was buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
While President Barack Obama ordered flags lowered nationwide after such attacks as the terror strikes in Parisand San Bernardino , California, governors also recognized victims of mass killings and casualties including the shootings of nine black Charleston, South Carolina, churchgoers in what authorities say was a racially motivated massacre; the deaths of 33 mariners when the freighter El Faro sank off the Bahamas in a hurricane; and an assault by radicals on a luxury hotel in Bamako, Mali, in which an aid worker from New Jersey was among the 19 people killed.