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21–23 APRIL 2006 · NORTHSIDE BOULEVARD
Corporal Scott Lee Severns was a third-generation South Bend officer — his grandfather Herbert and his father Dennis had served before him — and the department's Officer of the Year for 2004. On the night of Friday, 21 April 2006, off duty, he was walking a companion to her car near 1433 Northside Boulevard, by the Indiana University South Bend campus, when two men attempted to rob them. Severns stepped in front of the woman and was shot; he returned fire and wounded the shooter before he fell. He died of his wounds on Sunday, 23 April 2006.
The shooter, Jeffrey L. Finley, seventeen, was charged as an adult. He pleaded guilty to murder and attempted robbery and was sentenced to sixty-five years; the sentence, imposed in the spring of 2007 when Finley was nineteen, drew public criticism from officers who judged it too lenient, and a state representative, Tom Dermody, took up a push for harsher punishment for the killers of police officers. The second young man pleaded guilty to attempted robbery, was sentenced to forty-five years, and on resentencing saw the term reduced to thirty; he was discharged in March 2019. Severns's death was entered in the Congressional Record by Representative Chris Chocola in May 2006. His case opens a twelve-month span in which this section's record turns twice more to men killed in the city's uniform — and the two corporals now lie, as the record of the second case tells it, about ten feet apart in Southlawn Cemetery.
Sources:
- Officer Down Memorial Page and Indiana Law Enforcement Memorial, records for Corporal Scott Lee Severns
- Congressional Record, tribute by Rep. Chris Chocola, 9–10 May 2006
- South Bend Tribune coverage of the shooting, the plea and the sentencing, 2006–2007