Ricardo Silva was 26 years old.
The last time 26-year-old Ricardo Silva talked with his dad, Rick Silva, he told a story of bullets pinging off his New Orleans Police Department cruiser.
Hundreds of miles away from his living room in Indiana, Rick shook his head and told him, “Son, you know I don’t want to hear this.”
But Ricardo completed the recap, confiding in his father with tales from the field.
“He loved his job, but I feel like he needed to get some stuff of his chest and I was the person he would talk to,” Rick Silva said.
Ricardo Silva, who went by Jesse, put his life on the line everyday as an officer with the New Orleans Police Department, but his final moments were aboard a motorcycle in St. Tammany Parish.
Silva was fatally struck by a woman in an Acura while on an afternoon cruise along LA 1082. He was ejected from his motorcycle and sustained severe injuries, which he ultimately succumbed to at the hospital. Neither Silva nor the woman were impaired at the time of the crash, police said.
For Rick Silva, his son’s death means there is a little less light in the world.
“I just can’t believe he is gone,” Silva said of his son.
Silva described a man of overwhelming physical and emotional strength, who worked his way from cutting trees in Indiana to patrolling the streets of New Orleans. For most of his life, Silva was the oldest of nine siblings until, in his early teens, he relinquished that title to his best friend, Brandon Carter, who Rick Silva agreed to adopt after some coaxing from his son.
Over the course of his five years with the Silva family, Carter shook free from a past of alcohol and drugs and eventually landed in the military. Silva said Carter learned of his best friend and brother’s passing from Afghanistan, where he currently serves.
Through the two boys’ teenage years, the family developed a tradition of playing video games together. At first, just Carter and Ricardo Silva would face-off, but they eventually cajoled both Rick Silva and his wife to join in. On any given afternoon, each would have a controller in hand, frantically pressing buttons and teasing one another from adjacent rooms.
“Oh, that was a blast,” said Rick Silva, who the boys dubbed “PapaDropShot” for his tendency to mess up the controls and cause his player to fall over. “It was an amazing time.”
After graduating high school, Ricardo Silva spent time working in the family’s lumber business with the nagging ambition to join the police department. He eventually realized that dream by joining the Hobart Police Academy in Hobart, Indiana. When his longtime girlfriend, Taylor Stevens, graduated from Purdue University and landed a job in Louisiana, he followed her south.
He joined the New Orleans Police Department in November 2016 and graduated from the academy in December 2017. Both NOPD Superintendent Michael Harrison and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell called Silva “a rising star in the department.”
When Silva graduated from NOPD’s academy, he famously dropped to one knee and proposed to Stevens. The two planned to tie the knot after eight years on November 11 in St. Lucia.
“I told him to hold onto her, because somethig like that doesn’t come around often,” Silva said of his son’s relationship with Stevens. “Their wedding would have been beautiful.”
For Silva, his current grief at losing Ricardo is so at odds with the way his son made everyone around him feel.
“We joked around a lot,” Silva said, describing his son as a “happy-go-lucky” kid with an occasionally “smart-ass mouth,” a consistent smile on his face and a penchant for honesty and stoicism.
“I couldn’t have asked for anyone better than him,” Silva said.
