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1930–2010
The police department's memorial record is part of the criminal record — it is the price side of enforcement — and it is carried here at the size the official memorials give it; the department's institutional history stands with fire and safety. Patrolman Clarence Casper was killed in a motorcycle crash on June 10, 1930, the Mishawaka department's first line-of-duty death. For seventy-three years the memorial held his name alone at its head.
On December 13, 2003, Corporal Thomas Roberts, 43, with fourteen years of service, and Patrolman Bryan Verkler, 27, with two and a half, answered a report of shots fired at 125 East Battell Street. The gunman, Raymond Matthew Gilkeson, 30, shot both officers; a third officer's return fire wounded Gilkeson, who killed himself inside the house on Sarah Street. Roberts and Verkler are the first Mishawaka officers murdered on duty, and their names stand on the memorial at the police station below Casper's. There was no trial; the record is the memorial record and the Tribune's accounting of it, and it is printed at that size. Corporal James Szuba completes the line as the record reached gives it: killed in 2010 when a drunken driver struck his car, per the Tribune's tenth-anniversary accounting of the 2003 shootings. One boundary is printed for the avoidance of the commonest error in this record: the 2007 motel shooting that killed Corporal Nick Polizzotto was a South Bend case — a South Bend officer, a South Bend address — and belongs to that city's file, not this one.
Sources:
- Officer Down Memorial Page — Patrolman Bryan Verkler and Corporal Thomas Roberts (December 13, 2003); Patrolman Clarence Casper (June 10, 1930)
- South Bend Tribune, tenth-anniversary account of the Roberts and Verkler shootings (2013) — the memorial's order, Casper's and Szuba's entries
- Indiana Law Enforcement Memorial — Corporal Nick S. Polizzotto, South Bend Police Department (April 24, 2007), the boundary case