Patterson community to honor former student, Coast Guard officer killed by smugglers
A one-time Patterson student who went on to become a U.S. Coast Guard senior chief petty officer, only to be killed by drug smugglers in 2012, has a new 154-foot cutter named in his honor.
His hometown will be joining in the commemoration long-distance.
The Coast Guard Cutter Terrell Horne (WPC-1131) is scheduled to be commissioned in San Pedro on Friday.
Terrell E. Horne III, 34, was a Redondo Beach resident with two sons and a wife who was pregnant with their third. On Dec. 1, 2012, he and three fellow Coast Guardsmen were aboard a small inflatable boat launched from the Coast Guard cutter Halibut, conducting law enforcement operations near Santa Cruz Island off the Southern California coast.
They were approaching a 30-foot-long, open-bowed fishing boat that had been identified as suspicious by a Coast Guard aircraft. Smugglers on the boat intentionally rammed them in an effort to escape capture, the Daily Breeze in Torrance reported.
Horne pushed one of his shipmates out of the way of the oncoming vessel attack, according to a Coast Guard news release. The Tribune in San Luis Obispo reported that the collision threw Horne — second in command of the patrol cutter Halibut — into the sea. The U.S. Attorney’s Office said he suffered a fatal wound when a propeller struck him in the head.
The fleeing boat was stopped by the Coast Guard, and two men eventually were convicted and sentenced in the attack and Horne’s murder.
After the convictions, Horne’s widow, Rachel, issued a statement to the Los Angeles Times: “Although nothing can bring back my husband and the father of our boys, the system worked and justice has been served,” she said. “Hopefully this will be an important step in the healing process.”
In May 2014, the captain of the fishing boat that rammed the cutter, Jose Mejia-Leyva, 42, was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He had been convicted of murder, two counts of “failure to heave to,” or not stopping his boat, and four counts of assaulting federal officers with a deadly and dangerous weapon.
Manuel Beltran-Higuera, 44, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on two counts of failure to heave to (as an accessory after the fact in one count and as an aider and abettor in the second count) and in the four counts of assault (as an accessory after the fact).
Officials said Horne was the first Coast Guardsman murdered in the line of duty by smugglers since 1927.
He will be honored as the fast-response cutter’s namesake in a ceremony at 10:30 a.m. Friday at Coast Guard Base Los Angeles-Long Beach at 1001 S. Seaside Ave., San Pedro.
The ceremony will be live streamed at www.dvidshub.net/webcast/19036.
Horne lived in Patterson as a boy, from 1987 to 1995, when he moved to Florida for the remainder of his high school years, according to a Patterson Irrigator article right after his death. If he’d finished at Patterson High, he would have been a Class of 1997 graduate, Patterson Joint Unified School District spokesman Johnny Padilla said. He was puzzled by the news report that Horne left the city in 1995 because the youth is pictured in the Patterson High 1996-97 yearbook, he said.
On March 4, the Patterson Joint Unified School District Board of Trustees approved a proclamation declaring Friday to be Senior Chief Terrell Horne Day. Wednesday, the city of Patterson did the same.
The Compass, the official blog of the Coast Guard, says Horne was a native of Mountain View. In a career that spanned almost 14 years, he served in Humboldt Bay, Charleston, South Carolina, Emerald Isle, North Carolina, and Los Angeles.