If Anything Can Cast A Pall Over A Funeral . . .

. . . it’s as situation like this:

As a throng of mourners converged on Staten Island yesterday to remember the life of one of the Fire Department’s “rising stars,” the specter of his murder seemed to loom over an already grim occasion.

In the morning chill, the crowd of firefighters, police, family and friends gathered around St. Charles R.C. Church in Oakwood watched with tearful eyes as the flag-draped casket of Supervising Fire Marshal Douglas Mercereau was pulled from a waiting hearse. But many of those in attendance — including about a dozen plainclothes police officers — also cast suspicious glances at his widow, Janet Redmond-Mercereau, the sole suspect in the slaying of the 38-year-old Oakwood man.

And while sobbing echoed inside the semicircular chapel, several of those in attendance noted that Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau sat dry-eyed and stonefaced as her husband was eulogized by his brother, Thomas; his boss, Supervising Fire Marshal Louis Garcia, and Monsignor Thomas Bergin, who’d been his principal at Monsignor Farrell High School.

“It made me uncomfortable,” said Westerleigh resident Fran Hogan, a friend of the Mercereau family who attended the funeral yesterday, in respect of the suspicions swirling around Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau.

“But this was about Doug, and we stayed focused on that. The family wanted to give him a respectable, dignified funeral, and we did that,” Ms. Hogan added.