News

Loose Cannon

The first shooting by Officer Daniel Jopek and his partner was ruled justified. Nine months later, Jopek killed again.

By Kevin Hoffman 

Stanley Strnad's dinner had gone cold.

On November 14, Nicole Tomazic, a pretty nursing student with tanned skin and Georgian curls, picked up a large pepperoni pizza. From her mom's house in Euclid, she called her fiancé and told him dinner was ready. "I'm right down the street," Strnad said. "I'll be there in a minute."

That was hours ago. Tomazic called his cell phone several times. No answer. She ate her slices and took the rest home to their bungalow around the corner. Still no sign of him. She tucked their four-year-old daughter, Haley, into bed and started her anatomy lab homework, but she found it hard to concentrate. This was so like Stanley.

Strnad was a bit rough around the edges. A T-shirt-and-jeans guy with a buzz cut and goatee, his rap sheet and skin accumulated ink in equal measure. It was mostly punk stuff: drugs and fights. And he often underestimated his time of arrival -- his "minute" might take 20 -- which infuriated Nicole.

But he was also a good father. When Haley was a baby, he packed her diaper bag as thoroughly as a Boy Scout prepares a first-aid kit. As she grew older, he braided her hair and treated her to so many father-daughter outings that Nicole almost felt left out. At 26, Strnad finally seemed to be maturing.

Or so Nicole thought. Now he was missing.

The phone rang. It was her sister Theresa.

"Where's Stanley?" Theresa asked.

"I don't know," Nicole answered.

"I just saw a car that looked like his on the news."

Nicole turned on the TV and recognized the North Collinwood neighborhood where Strnad grew up. She saw his silver Taurus; it looked like an accident. She didn't wait for details. She strapped Haley into her car seat and sped to the scene, where she found the car.

The airbag was deployed, and the street was clogged with reporters, police, and onlookers. Strnad's brother John arrived and waded into the crowd to ask what happened. "They shot that white boy," someone from the neighborhood said. The injured man was being treated at Huron Hospital.

Nicole went to the antiseptic waiting room and hoped for the best. A nurse approached and asked whether her fiancé had any distinctive markings. She recited his many tattoos: a skull, a panther, Haley's name and birth date with two hands clasped together in prayer . . .

The nurse cut her off. "He passed."

Months went by before Nicole learned the details of why the police shot Stanley that night, but when she did, the events hardened into a statement so cold and immutable that it could serve as his epitaph: "He was shot like an animal."

The cop who killed Strnad was Daniel Jopek Jr. As is routine when police use deadly force, the city investigated. But this was no ordinary case. After a lengthy inquiry, the prosecutor arrived at a conclusion as historic as it was controversial: The shooting was unjustified. Jopek was accused of reckless homicide.

It was the first time in at least 15 years that homicide charges were filed as a result of an on-duty action, and it came at a time when police shootings were already under a microscope.

Cleveland had seen a spike in police shootings, with 10 people dying in two years. This came after the Justice Department criticized the city for its handling of deadly force incidents, saying that some "may have been avoidable." To fend off a federal lawsuit, the police department agreed to change its policies. A settlement was reached in February, the terms of which included federal monitoring for the next year.

The last attempt to prosecute a cop for an on-duty shooting became an exercise in incompetence.

On December 6, 2001, Officer Edward Lentz was guarding Mayor-elect Jane Campbell's home when he encountered a 12-year-old boy driving a stolen station wagon. Lentz fired 14 shots at the boy, who was hospitalized with injuries to his arm and ankle.

Lentz claimed the car hit him, sending him rolling over the windshield and onto the roof, where he became trapped in the luggage rack. Prosecutors, however, said the evidence demonstrated that Lentz had never been hit by the car and had invented the story to justify the shooting.

The case quickly unraveled. Police mistakenly crushed the 1984 Chevrolet the boy was driving, destroying crucial evidence. A grand jury declined to indict Lentz on felony assault charges, so prosecutors had to settle for a misdemeanor count of lying in a police report. Even that charge was ultimately thrown out by the judge, who said prosecutors failed to prove their case. Lentz walked.

Police viewed Lentz's and Jopek's prosecutions as politically motivated. "We believe that the city has been reaching out, looking for cases to charge police officers with as a result of the current politics and the consent judgment they have with the Justice Department," says union lawyer Pat D'Angelo.

Yet an investigation into Jopek's history raises questions about whether he's fit for duty -- and whether the city is adequately policing its cops.

At the time of the Strnad shooting, Jopek was a three-year veteran. With his blue eyes and buzz cut, he could model for recruiting posters. The 33-year-old had already earned a reputation among fellow officers as "an aggressive guy" and a "ball buster." Through his lawyer, Jopek turned down an interview request, but his employment records reveal a man in search of action.

Fresh out of high school, he joined the Marines. He left after six months for family reasons, but his service made a big impression, as evidenced by his three Marine Corps tattoos; he later joined the reserves. Jopek came home to Fairview Park to work for his dad's tree-care business, but kept an eye on more exciting work, studying law enforcement for four years at Tri-C and graduating from the Cleveland Heights Police Academy.

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