CLEVELAND, Ohio — Slain Cleveland police Det. James Skernivitz started out 22 years ago with a mission to make the city where he grew up a safer place. He said so in his 1998 application for a job on Northeast Ohio’s largest police force.
Family members, Police Chief Calvin Williams and U.S. Attorney William Barr said on Friday at Skernivitz’s invitation-only funeral at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse that he accomplished that mission.
Skernivitz, a decorated officer who worked most recently in the department’s gang unit, mentored other officers and was known as a jokester who ribbed fellow officers and kept things light despite being tasked with often dangerous work.
“What he did out there for our city was to try to lift not individuals, not neighborhoods, not groups, but an entire city to a higher, more noble life,” Williams said. “Badge No. 2249 will always live in the hearts and minds of the people in this city and his brothers and sisters in the Division of Police.”
Williams read from a long list of Skernivitz’s awards during his long tenure as an officer, all for arresting violent suspects.
Skernivitz on Sept. 3 was working undercover and investigating drug dealing in Cleveland’s Stockyards neighborhood when three people opened fire on his unmarked car, killing him and police informant Scott Dingess during what investigators believe was an attempted robbery. Three teens are charged in the shooting.
The 53-year-old officer is the first on-duty officer to die while on duty since 2018, when Vu Nguyen died days after collapsing from heat exhaustion during a training exercise, and the first to be fatally shot since Derek Owens in 2008. Another officer, David Fahey, died in 2017 after an intoxicated driver hit him as the officer set road flares on Interstate 90.
Skernivitz, known as “Skern” to his friends, is survived by his wife of 23 years and three children — Matthew, Bayleigh and Peyton.
The day before his death, Skernivitz was sworn-in to work with the FBI’s Violent Crimes Task Force, a unit that worked as part of the federal initiative Operation Legend led by Barr’s Justice Department.
Barr said he never met Skernivitz but met with gang unit investigators about two weeks before his death. Barr called Skernivitz “an American hero.” He praised Skernivitz for volunteering to work with Operation Legend and that he represented “everything great and good about our police.”
“He is the kind of person critical to making a successful department work, and while he never asked for recognition, he earned it,” Barr said, later adding that Skernivitz made “the ultimate sacrifice by laying down his life for the community he served.”
Skernivitz’s wife, Kristen, did not speak at the funeral — which was moved to the Cavaliers arena in order to accommodate the some 2,000 friends, family members, officers and city officials who attended and to keep social distancing measures in place because of the coronavirus pandemic — but wrote a eulogy read by Brecksville police Sgt. Mike Bauman.
She wrote that she met her husband when she was 17 and that they married about a year before her husband joined the police force. She said her husband was honest above all else, patient, generous and persistent. He loved to rib people and give them nicknames.
Kristen Skernivitz described the anguish of the night he was killed, rushing to the hospital and then to the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“The remainder of the night was filled with anger, sadness, uncertainty and crushing despair,” she wrote. “It stung. My God did it sting.”
She also wrote that she hopes Dingess' family and the family of fellow officer Nicholas Sabo find peace. Dingess was a father of four and grandfather and Sabo took his own life hours after Skernivitz was killed.
“Death by violence is a tragic bond that we all share today, but the bond has given us a new family to lean on before we fall, and prevent heartbreaking loss for another family,” Kristen Skernivitz wrote.
She implored friends and family to live their lives as her husband did, with laughter and love: “Stop the hate, stop the violence, just stop.”
Read more from cleveland.com:
Watch memorial service for slain Cleveland police detective James Skernivitz
See video, photos from funeral procession for slain Cleveland police detective James Skernivitz
Juvenile admitted to involvement in slaying of Cleveland police officer, informant, prosecutor says
The Link LonkSeptember 12, 2020 at 01:13AM
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Slain Cleveland police officer remembered as dedicated, generous, funny officer at funeral attended by U.S. A - cleveland.com
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