Hurricane Katrina left members of the Harrison County Sheriff's Department in Mississippi as homeless and hungry as the people they serve.

"Pretty much everyone in the department was affected," said Deputy Emma Baptiste, a former Hawai'i resident whose mother lives here and is fighting cancer. Baptiste worked 12-hour shifts, but like her fellow officers on the Gulf Coast, she didn't complain.

Baptiste and her fiance, Deputy Joseph Sturm, had been trying to buy a house and plan a wedding. But the house was under water, all leaves were canceled and their plans were on hold — until yesterday.

That's when they stood near Sunset Beach reciting their wedding vows, while her mother and other Hawai'i relatives watched.

After Katrina, Baptiste and Sturm were among the many Harrison County deputies who moved in with friends or erected tents or trailers in their back yards and got on with helping the citizens of their county cope and bury their dead. Despite their own hardships, they did their jobs, Baptiste said.

"Nobody from my department deserted his post," said the 25-year-old former 'Ewa Beach resident and Kamehameha student.

While the officers were sticking it out, Hawai'i cops were champing at the bit to help.

Detective Alex Garcia, O'ahu chapter chairman for the police officers' union, said many officers wanted to hop onto airplanes and fly to the Gulf Coast. Their supervisors advised against it, he said, fearing they would inadvertently add to the chaos that followed the storm.

"So a bunch of us were e-mailing across the country," Garcia said, "trying to figure out how to help each other."

One of the people Garcia corresponded with was Cynthia Brown, editor and publisher of American Police Beat magazine. Brown had collected and published letters from Gulf Coast officers, including one from Lt. Joe Pevey of the Harrison County Sheriff's Department.

She brought the two officers together and Pevey was glad to have the help.

"Imagine this situation," Pevey said in a telephone interview yesterday. "God forbid, your home was destroyed. Where would you go? And if the relative's home was destroyed, too? Where would you go then? And what if your friend's house was gone, and all the hotels were gone? What would you do?

"That is the situation we had here," he said. "It's starting to get a little better, but for the first two weeks we had people and officers living in their cars."

Garcia said Hawai'i's officers wanted to adopt an officer. They wanted to give that person a break from the destruction in Mississippi — a week relaxing on a beach 4,000 miles from the grim duty of clearing bodies from wreckage.

"And I knew the perfect person," Pevey drawled. "But then they said they wanted someone with Hawai'i ties, so I didn't get to go."

Jokes aside, Pevey, who had been an instructor at the police academy in Biloxi, Miss., before the school was taken out in the storm, did know the perfect person.

He remembered how, a few months earlier, the mother of one promising cadet had attended the graduation ceremony at the academy, bringing shell lei for all the cadets and officials.

He remembered how Emma Baptiste wore a haku lei against her hair. He knew Baptiste had been working hard since that day, despite worrying about her mother, who was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer.

"She's one of our better officers," he said. "A lot of people don't think women belong in law enforcement, but no matter how hard we'd knuckle her down at the academy, she'd just get right back up and kept going. She's got a lot of spunk. We don't worry about her."

Pevey put a call through to Baptiste, who was on patrol, and told her she would be going home for a few days.

"She had to pull over," he said. "She had to find a parking lot. She got a little emotional."

The trip was supposed to be for Thanksgiving, but Baptiste told Pevey that because she was going to get the trip home, she'd prefer to go early so another deputy could get time off during the holiday.

"I told Garcia she was coming," Pevey said, "but I told him I wanted a guarantee he would send her back."

Garcia said Hawai'i police also intend to foot the bill to provide Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to sheriff's deputies in Harrison County.

Hawai'i businesses, including Actus Lend Lease, helped bring Baptiste and Sturm to Hawai'i, Garcia said.

Last week, the couple decided to marry while they were here so that Baptiste's mother, also named Emma Baptiste, could attend.

Yesterday, they were married on a vacant strip of beach near Sunset Beach in a simple ceremony. The bride wore a haku lei.

Eighteen family members were scattered on the beach during the ceremony, straining to hear the minister, whose voice was drowned out by the pounding waves.

"The first time we met we talked about her ideal wedding and this was it," the groom said. "I thought it was wonderful."

The trip was more than she could have expected, the younger Baptiste said.

"It's wonderful," she said. "I can't even describe it. I can see my mom.

"I can see family members I haven't seen in 10 years."

The fact that it was all arranged by other officers made it particularly nice, she said.

"It's a jaw dropper," she said. "There is just one big law enforcement family, and it encompasses the whole country."

Reach Karen Blakeman at kblakeman@honoluluadvertiser.com.