HELOTES, Texas – Inside a workshop in Helotes, the sound of drills and saws echoes through the room. Pieces of cherry wood are measured, cut, and assembled into chairs by hand.
For Tommy Capell, every chair represents more than craftsmanship; it represents a life. “When an officer loses their life in the line of duty, now there’s just that chair sitting there. Nobody wants to sit there,” Capell said. “We want them to have a permanent place so their legacy and their name are always remembered.”
Capell is the founder of Saving A Hero’s Place, a nonprofit dedicated to building memorial chairs for first responders killed in the line of duty. The idea began in 2013 when Capell, a former San Antonio police officer, was first asked to build a memorial chair for a fallen officer.
Shortly afterward, he was deeply affected by the death of Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police Officer Sean Collier, who was killed in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing. “For whatever reason, it bothered me,” Capell said. “I had no ties up there, but I was mad.”
Despite his lack of personal connection, Capell felt compelled to act. He reached out to the department and offered to build a chair in Collier’s honor. After fundraising with his wife, he loaded the chair into a vehicle and drove roughly 30 hours from Texas to Massachusetts to personally deliver it. The experience changed everything.
“You could just see the emotions and everything when we took the chair,” Capell reflected. What began as one memorial chair soon became a nationwide mission. Today, Saving A Hero’s Place has created hundreds of handcrafted chairs for law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other first responders across the country.
Each chair takes approximately three days to build from start to finish. Crafted from cherry lumber, much of it donated by a sawmill owner in Virginia who drives truckloads of wood to Texas, the chairs are customized to reflect the life and service of the first responder they honor.
“Gochenour Sawmill, he drives a truckload of cherry lumber from his sawmill in Virginia all the way here to our shop,” Capell said. The customization process is personal, featuring department badges, challenge coins, patches, engraved messages, or Bible verses. Some chairs include deeply personal touches requested by family members and departments.
For instance, one chair included the phrase “Gone Fishing” because of an officer’s love for fishing, while another incorporated bottle caps because the officer was known for handing out water to people in the community. The nonprofit keeps a patch from every department it serves, with Capell noting, “Every patch represents a department and a story behind it.”
Perhaps the most unique part of the process is what happens after the chair is finished. Capell refuses to simply ship them; instead, he personally travels across the country to deliver many of the chairs himself. “We want to meet them,” he said. “If we ship it, we don’t get the stories of who the officer was that we’re doing a chair for.”
This year alone, Capell plans to deliver 12 chairs to California. As demand has grown, Saving A Hero’s Place has expanded its reach, recently adding chair builders in Florida and Arkansas to help meet requests from departments while preserving the organization’s hands-on approach.
For Capell, the work remains deeply personal. Families have told him they visit the memorial chairs at the departments instead of a gravesite. Others have said the chairs gave them a reason to return to a department building after losing a loved one. These stories remind him why the mission matters. “Every time we open it, we get a badge and we’re like, ‘Man, it’s someone else who has been killed,’” Capell said. “And it’s just an honor to do it.”
Saving A Hero’s Place will also be hosting an Honor Chair Benefit Night on September 19, 2026, at Pedrotti’s Ranch in Helotes, Texas. To sponsor or donate to Saving A Hero’s Place, reach out through email at info@savingherosplace.org.
