Photos by Dana Rene Bowler / Star staff Glenalys MacKenzie, left, kisses her daughter Vicki Bornet, who received an American flag Thursday for her husband, Deputy Robert Bornet, who was killed while making an off-duty traffic stop in 2006. The Peace Officers Association of Ventura County held its annual memorial ceremony for fallen officers Thursday.

Mournful strains of bagpipe music and taps filled the Ventura County Government Center on Thursday as police, community members and survivors paid tribute to the 31 local law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty over the past 102 years.

Two bell tones rang out alongside the name of each officer, beginning with Deputy Constable Andrew McNaughton, who was gunned down in Oxnard in 1906, and ending with sheriff's Deputy Robert Bornet, who died in a car crash in November 2006.

Bornet was technically off duty when he was killed, but the Peace Officers Association of Ventura County decided he deserved to be honored on a memorial wall at the Government Center because the fatal auto accident occurred while he was trying to stop a traffic violator, said association President Mike Marostica, a senior Oxnard police officer. The association puts on the annual ceremony.

"It was a duty-related death and he deserves to be up there," Marostica said. "That's not something we take lightly."

The investigation into Bornet's crash showed his car was going 82 mph when he pulled in front of a car going 79 mph in a 45-mph zone in Ventura, Marostica said. Bornet lost control of his car when it collided with the other vehicle.

Bornet had stopped a traffic violator while off duty just a month earlier and had spoken with his supervisor about the risks of such off-duty enforcement, Marostica said. But he apparently saw a violation that he deemed bad enough to take a risk.

"He continuously lived his life by example," Marostica said. "Deputy Bornet's actions, while tragic, illustrate the dedication to duty."

After Marostica's comments, members of Bornet's family unveiled his newly engraved name on the marble memorial wall and received a framed, folded flag honoring his memory.

"Today was very meaningful, and it's nice that they do this to honor not only Robert, but all the other officers," said Bornet's widow, Vicki Bornet.

Now that the wall bears her husband's name, Bornet said, the memorial will join the cemetery as a place she can visit to remember her husband. "It will be a place that I can come and sit for a while and remember the kind of man he was," she said.

As she prepared to leave with the wood-framed flag, Bornet said she knows just where she's going to put it: on her bedroom dresser, next to Bornet's hats from his service in the Navy and Sheriff's Department and the clothes he left folded there on the day he died.

"I miss him very much," she said.

Thousand Oaks-area resident Maureen Faulkner told the crowd that survivors of law enforcement officers should know they are not alone in their grief.

"Every survivor has endured more pain than any person should ever be asked to bear, and each has their own story of how their lives were changed in an instant, on a random day, by the death of a loved one," said Faulkner, whose husband, Philadelphia police Officer David Faulkner, was shot to death in the line of duty in 1981.

Faulkner concluded her short speech with a story about how it felt when officers knocked on her door and said her husband had been shot. "I felt disconnected from my body," she said.

That feeling struck a powerful chord with Dina Aguirre, whose husband, sheriff's Deputy Peter Aguirre Jr., was shot to death in 1996 while responding to a domestic violence call.

"Each one of us has a unique story, but we all share the same pain," Aguirre said. "We all share the same knock."