Honor guard members from the Colquitt County Sheriff's Office place a wreath at the downtown stone monument honoring five officers with ties to Moultrie and the county during a Friday morning fallen heroes ceremony.

MOULTRIE Ga. — There are few jobs where being assaulted or even killed is a possibility pretty much any day on duty, but for law enforcement that risk is reality.

Last year more than 120 police officers died in the line of duty, with 2016 well on pace to equal that number.

And the toll reaches small towns like Moultrie and Colquitt County, where there are five names of law enforcement officers on a memorial marker in downtown Moultrie.

On Friday law enforcement agencies honored those killed here and across the nation during its annual Fallen Heroes Ceremony on the Colquitt County Courthouse square.

“The law enforcement community nationwide lost 128 family members last year in the line of duty,” Moultrie Police Department Chaplain Gwendolyn Knighton told those gathered to honor the fallen officers. “And already this year, 42 of our brothers and sisters have been taken from us.”

The names of those officers will be added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, D.C., which already holds almost 20,000 names.

Sandra Ghelarducci, daughter of the late Moultrie officer Lt. Thomas “Tommy” Meredith, congratulated the community on voting to fund an indoor sports practice facility during the April 1 election. But she asked that voters also give consideration to the officers who are on duty protecting them.

“We have football coaches who make much more than our law enforcement,” said Ghelarducci, whose father was shot and killed in the line of duty on Aug. 25, 1973. “But we don’t pay law enforcement officers a (decent) salary.”

More than 40 years later, her father’s death is still fresh to Ghelarducci.

“I was a daddy’s girl,” she said after the completion of the ceremony that included Moultrie and Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office honor guards. “I can tell you exactly what I was doing when I got the phone call out in California.”

After the ceremony, Carolyn Hancock reminisced about Meredith, who was friends with her father. She attended Friday’s program for the opportunity to greet Ghelarducci.

“I could remember when he would come by the house,” Hancock said. “Momma would give him coffee. I’m the fifth out of eight children. All of us loved him.”

During the ceremony, which featured a seven-gun salute by the Moultrie honor guard, Chief Frank Lang and sheriff’s Lt. Rod Howell read the names of officers who died in Colquitt County and more recent deaths of other Georgia officers.

In addition to Meredith, four other officers with ties to Colquitt County have died in the line of duty:

• Doerun Police Department officer Lawrence M. O’Neal, shot and killed on April 7, 1959.

• Moultrie officer Roy Edward James, 36, shot and killed on Aug. 13, 1960.

• Georgia Department of Revenue agent Daniel J. Hancock, 52, killed in a car accident in Dougherty County on May 17, 1962. He was a Moultrie resident.

• Colquitt County deputy Tony Reed Wilder, 43, shot and killed on Jan. 31, 1986.