AUBURN, Mass. — A Massachusetts police department has set up a memorial fund for the wife and three children of an officer who was fatally shot during a weekend traffic stop.
The Auburn Police Department says it has received an outpouring of support since Officer Ronald Tarentino was killed early Sunday.
The 42-year-old Tarentino had been with the Auburn police force for two years, and before that worked with the Leicester Police Department in his hometown. He leaves behind a wife and three children.
Donations can be sent to the Officer Ronald Tarentino Jr. Memorial Fund at Savers Bank in Auburn.
Authorities said the suspect in Tarentino’s killing, Jorge Zambrano, was shot and killed by police late Sunday, after he shot at police when they tracked him to a duplex in Oxford.
Zambrano had a lengthy criminal record. He was released from prison in 2013 after serving time for trafficking in cocaine, assault and battery on a police officer and other charges.
Zambrano was sentenced in 2011 on a list of charges that also included assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, resisting arrest, and selling, using or possessing a firearm silencer.
State officials said he was released from a maximum-security prison in Shirley, Massachusetts, on Nov. 1, 2013.
A state police trooper was wounded in the shoulder when police confronted Zambrano in Oxford. State police say the trooper is out of surgery and recovering.
