A memorial built “with big hearts, and all love”
Today, at the height of a brisk spring day, a permanent memorial was unveiled in tribute to MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, who was killed in the line of duty on April 18, 2013. More than 3,000 people from the MIT community — along with hundreds of officers from MIT, the city of Cambridge, the Massachusetts State Police, and many surrounding campus and municipal police departments — joined members of Collier’s family to honor his memory with the commemoration of a thoughtfully conceived and precisely engineered monument, dedicated in the officer’s name. The Collier Memorial — between the Stata Center and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, alongside Vassar Street — stands as five massive half-arches that extend from a central keystone, like the fingers of an open hand. Each wall is built from blocks of solid, polished granite — 32 in all — pieced together in such a way that...