When Lacie Jeffrey was leaving home for college, her father Bill gave her a note which said, simply, “HNB.” When she asked what it meant, he replied: “Hold nothing back – duh.”

The phrase encapsulated Bill Jeffrey. In his 54 years, he never held back, not studying criminal justice at Sam Houston University, not in a brief stint in the Navy and certainly not during his almost 31 years on the Houston police force.

Becoming a cop only made sense for Jeffrey. “Ever since he was a kid he wanted to be a police officer,” says his widow, Suzanne Jeffrey. “Whenever he and his little friends played cops and robbers … he was always the good guy. He was never the bad guy.” In high school he was the boy who would step in when others were getting picked on.

He loved his job but eschewed pomp and ceremony. He received plenty of recognition – chief citations, unit citations, letters of appreciation and so on – but he hated award ceremonies. “He never looked for pats on the back or congratulations on anything,” Suzanne says. “He wanted to do his job every day, the best he could. And he never expected anything back from it because that was his job.”

He would give rookies and trainees the same advice: “Get up every day and do your job,” Suzanne recalls. “Don’t expect things, just do your best.”

He met Suzanne when they were on the force together in 2010 and they married in 2018. “We just had so much fun,” she recalls. “He was such a good guy. He always put me first.” She retired in 2020 after more than 28 years as a cop and they were building a house in Huntsville, Texas. “He was supposed to retire as soon as it got done,” Suzanne recalls. “It just didn’t get done in time.

In September 2021, a suspect shot and killed Jeffrey as he was executing a high-level felony warrant. The family had t-shirts printed up in his honor – they said, “HNB.”