RICE LAKE, Wis. — Only days after the deaths of Hunter Scheel and Emily Breidenbach, community members are doing what they can to help each other heal.
A funeral is set to happen on Saturday, starting with visitation at Cameron High School from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. Funeral services will follow and are scheduled to be held at the school from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Police honors will take place at 3 p.m., followed by a procession.
Bob Anderson is a member of the Law Enforcement Foundation of Barron County. He said as soon as he found out what happened to Scheel and Breidenbach, he and his team got out in the community to help.
“In this instance, we went to Chetek, we went to Cameron, and we said, ‘How can we help you?’” he said. a”One of the things they wanted to do was try to get the community together to heal. We are a very small community; everyone knows one another. So we put together a candlelight vigil and we brought — what I believe was — between two to three thousand people [together] in one evening.”
Anderson said the community will be processing its loss for a very long time; his team plans to be there for support for years to come.
“Sometimes people can be left behind and we don’t allow that to happen,” said Anderson. “We reach out to the families, we provide meals… If there are funerals they need to get to, if they need rides, anything we can do for the families, we help.”
At this time, the Scheel and Breidenbach families are working on making it through Saturday’s funeral service and Anderson said he wants them to know the whole county has their backs.
“Thin blue line, Barron county strong — it brings all of us together,” said Anderson. “Police, fire and ambulance — everyone bleeds a little bit of blue.”
Anderson said the best thing that community members can do for the families who lost a loved one is to make a donation.
Additional funeral and donation information can be found, here.