Thursday, April 14, 2005 |
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LIVINGSTON - Wayne Skertich was a builder by trade, but music was his passion. With it, he made friends around the world. With his fiddle and piano, his bass and guitar, he spread a lot of joy, lifted a lot of spirits. On Saturday morning, at 2 a.m., after police had surrounded his home
for 26 hours, after close friends and his wife had pleaded with him to
come outside, he put his gun to his head and the music was over. But people who were on the scene, close friends dear to Skertich, people who tried to help him in those final desperate hours, had no criticism of law enforcement. "Right now, everybody is second guessing (the police) because it's such a tragic result," said Dale Reinhart, a landscape architect in Yellowstone National Park, and one of the friends who tried to talk him out of the house. "I feel they handled this thing with restraint and professionalism." Dr. James Allison, a friend for 30 years, stayed on the scene through the tear gas and the final gunshot. He too, tried to convince Skertich to leave the house and give up.
"We reasoned with him," Allison said. "We told him we loved him and everything was going to be all right. But there was no response." "I talked until I was blue in the face," Reinhart said. "I threw everything I had at Wayne." Skertich's wife, Miriam, thanked police for their "professionalism, restraint and compassion." She said they kept her informed throughout the process and tried to keep her husband alive. --- The incident began last Thursday night, when Wayne assaulted Miriam and she left the house and called 911. That's when Skertich bolted his door, refused to talk to police, and began walking around his house with a rifle in his hands. But Miriam and her daughter Zondra say it really started eight years ago, when Skertich took a fall off some scaffolding, fracturing his head in two places. The accident was a bad one, and he never fully recovered. Over the past couple years, Zondra said, Wayne had grown worse. He could remember a hitchhiker from the 1960s "but making coffee was an issue," Zondra said. He sometimes flew into irrational rages -- though last Thursday's was the worst - and forgot songs he'd known forever. His emails became nearly indecipherable and it seemed at times he had to remind himself how to react to things. These are all typical symptoms of a brain injury, said Zondra, 27. He knew his problems were getting worse, and he tried to hide them. "He didn't want people to see him in a lesser mental state," she said. "He tried to hide it, but he couldn't hide it at home." It had become bad enough by last summer that she'd been wondering, "what am I going to do about my dad?" She said it's important to her that people know her dad wasn't "crazy." He had a physical injury over which he had no control, an injury that changed his behavior. --- "I don't know anybody who had more friends than Wayne," Reinhart said Tuesday. "He must have been hurting a lot more than we realized. "Wayne had good friends all over the world," added Allison, a retired Livingston physician. One day, a group of pickers from Siberia showed up at the door. Wayne didn't know them, but he invited them in and everybody made music, playing faster and faster, in the Russian way, until everything broke apart into laughter. Zondra said that even in Antarctica where she works, she'd run into people who knew her dad. Skertich was best known for his bluegrass fiddle playing, but he could play all sorts of instruments and all sorts of music, Allison said. An ethnic Croation, Skertich played lots of unusual instruments from that country, plus the accordion, piano and guitar. He knew bluegrass, but he also knew Gypsy music, ancient Jewish music. His father and uncles had a band that was well-known in the Chicago area, where Skertich grew up. With Zondra, who plays standup bass, he traveled to folk festivals in Seattle, where they played with musicians from around the world. Every Fourth of July, Wayne and Miriam hosted a party at their Jardine home that attracted pickers from around the region, some of whom camped there for days. Allison, too, hosts an annual fiddlers' convention in Livingston, and Skertich always had a special campsite in an orchard there. Allison had recently cleaned it up, and gave him that news through the bullhorn, about 20 hours into the standoff. "I told him I had his campsite ready," Allison said. He asked him to flash a light, do something, "at least let me know you're alive." He talked for 15 minutes, and never got a response. --- A ranger from nearby Yellowstone National Park was the first to respond to Miriam's 911 call. Then Park County Undersheriff Gary Tanascu and Sergeant Scott Hamilton arrived. They knocked on the door, identified themselves, and called on the phone, but Skertich refused to communicate with them and barricaded himself in the house. Officers saw him walk past windows, carrying a rifle. At some point, he covered the windows with sheets and blankets. Help was summoned. Special response teams from Bozeman, Billings and the park came to the scene. Skertich ignored repeated phone calls and finally disconnected the phone, Tanascu and Park County Sheriff Clark Carpenter said. About 5:30 a.m. Friday, officers decided to "breach the door." The goal, Tanascu said, was to "try to get a form of communication with him." They knocked it open and an officer saw Skertich sitting on a couch, a rifle in his lap. He grew agitated, and yelled at them to get out of his house. The gun barrel was pointed "in the direction of the door," Tanascu said, and at one point Skertich rose and approached the door, so the officers withdrew before things became violent. That's the last anybody heard from Skertich. By Friday afternoon, word of the standoff had spread, though some in nearby Gardiner -- a town with a six-page phonebook -- remained unaware. Allison, his son-in-law, Reinhart and others drove to Jardine, offering to help. "I would have gladly walked into that house, but they wouldn't let me," Allison said. His son-in-law Dave Miller, made the same offer. Doing so was too dangerous, the police told them. At one point, Tanascu said, officers ignited a cracker shell outside the house, while a negotiator on the bullhorn explained what it was, told Skertich they just wanted a sign of life from him. Meanwhile, the weather was turning bitter. Rain had turned to snow and it was piling up, as was the fatigue level of officers on the scene. About 35 of them were involved, usually about eight at a time, two of them watching each side of the house, Tanascu said. Wayne knew police were there, but couldn't see all the activity, Reinhart and Miriam said. "He never knew" there was a SWAT team in the area, Miriam said. "There's no way he could have." About 1 a.m. Saturday, an officer tossed a cellular phone in the house. A negotiator called it, and it rang for nine minutes before Skertich tossed it back outside. "We tried and tried," Carpenter said. Then, after consulting with the SWAT team specialists, they used tear gas. They shot canisters through second story windows, working their way downstairs. "That's a non-lethal method," Carpenter said. The plan was to rely on tazers or bean bag projectiles if Skertich left the house. Then they heard a gunshot inside the house, and it was over. Police did what they had to do, the friends and family said. "He got his foot caught in a trap," Zondra said. "It's not the trap's fault." --- "The Wayne who was up there that night was not the Wayne we all knew and loved," said Julia Page, a close friend of the family in Gardiner. "Nobody can comprehend the Wayne we were dealing with that night." "He's a gentle soul," Allison said, still speaking of his friend in the present tense. "I never heard him utter a hostile thought in his life. My granddaughter called him Uncle Wayne." Skertich had a special fondness for children and taught many of them to make music. He thought of it as planting seeds, Zondra said. Miriam Skertich, along with some close friends of the family, issued a statement Tuesday. "All of us are so sad at the passing of my husband and our great friend Wayne Skertich," they wrote. "Those of us who were closest to the events last weekend would like to thank the law enforcement personnel for their professionalism, restraint and compassion," wrote Miriam Skertich, Reinhart, Page and Craig and Dayna McClure. For Wayne's many friends, Zondra had a simple request. "Don't remember him for the last 30 hours of his life," she said. "Remember him for who he was, and understand that isn't who he was becoming." There will be a celebration of Skertich's life April 30, at the Livingston Depot Center, at 2 p.m. "There will be music," Zondra said. "That's what he would have wanted." Scott McMillion is at scottm@dailychronicle.com
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