The two have hearings before parole authorities next month.

The two have hearings before parole authorities next month.

By DENISE DICK

VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — On July 24, 1982, the Skica family numbered four sons and boasted a burgeoning restaurant business.

Early the next morning, one son was killed, leading to the demise of the business and a void in the family.

One of the four men involved in the crime escaped charges by providing information to authorities. A second was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and released from prison in 2004.

Two others, James Lee Hall, 54, and Jerome Thompson, 52, remain in prison with hearings before parole officials set for next month. Dan and Debbie Skica want them to stay behind bars and have expressed those wishes to corrections authorities.

It was Dan’s brother, Doug, 29, a graduate of Canfield High School and Kent State University, who was killed.

“They did a pretty good job of destroying a family that night,” Dan Skica said.

Doug was an architect at Dalton, Dalton and Newport, Cleveland, the second of the family’s four boys.

He was an athlete, helped at the family restaurants and was an aspiring businessman himself.

The most important thing to him was family, his brother said.

That’s who Doug died trying to protect.

David Skica, 58, the father of four sons, left the family’s new Mayfield Heights restaurant that night, tossing a bag of sandwiches into his trunk. After enjoying a successful Sandwich Factory business on Youngstown-Poland Road, the family opened International Sandwiches in Mayfield Heights three weeks before Doug’s death.

4 criminals

Four young Cleveland men at a business across the street spotted Skica and mistook the bag of sandwiches for money. They decided to follow and rob him.

They tailed the business owner along the Ohio Turnpike to his Boardman home in the Sherwood Forest development, and two of them approached when he got out of the car.

Initially they asked for directions, but it quickly turned violent, the two repeatedly pistol-whipping the man in the driveway, demanding money.

His wife, Gloria, and two sons, Doug and Matt, heard the scuffle from inside the house. Gloria and Matt ran to a bedroom and she called for help. At first, the call went to city police before it was directed to Boardman.

Doug let the pair into the home when they threatened to shoot his father.

There was more beating — of both David and Doug — inside the house.

While one of the men stayed in the kitchen with David Skica, the other took Doug back to the room where his mother and teen-age brother were.

He hit Matt with the gun and took a swing at Gloria, but tripped.

That’s when Doug tried to overpower him, but the other man in the kitchen heard the commotion and ran into the bedroom.

Doug was shot in the face.

“He died instantly,” Debbie Skica said.

About 1:30 a.m., Dan and Debbie got a call at their Youngstown home from a neighbor, crying that he couldn’t save Doug.

They rushed with their 6-month-old son, Danny, to Dan’s parents’ home. While doctors at the hospital treated David, Gloria and Matt, Dan and Debbie cleaned up the house.

“They did a lot of beating,” Dan said, remembering the scene. “There was a lot of blood.”

More suffering

After Doug’s death, Gloria and David spent little time at their house.

“They’d come over to our house every night and stay till about 11,” Debbie Skica said.

They couldn’t bear being in the house where their son died.

David Skica couldn’t concentrate on the family businesses and eventually, they lost them.

Gloria went through a period of blaming her husband, thinking he should have noticed he was followed.

David suffered from dementia, and the family believes it was hastened by the pistol-whipping. He eventually moved into a nursing home and died in 1994.

Dan’s two brothers, David, the oldest, and Matt, the youngest, moved out of the area and although they sometimes visit, they don’t stay.

Debbie and Dan believe the memories are too painful.

The last conversation Dan had with Doug still weighs on him.

He wipes tears from his eyes before relaying the talk.

Dan had spent money for the restaurant and Doug didn’t agree with the expenditure. They argued.

“I told him to drop dead,” Dan said, still fighting tears.

He apologized and neither carried a grudge, but that one phrase still gnaws at him.

Vindicator files show that Hall and Thompson were convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Thompson reached a plea bargain, and the jury in Hall’s trial heard that there was confusion over who fired the fatal shot. The jury also convicted Hall of aggravated robbery and aggravated burglary.

Both men also are serving time on charges from Cuyahoga County.

Dan says his mother never went a day without crying about Doug.

“She even talked to me about him,” said Erica, who is Dan and Debbie’s daughter.

Her uncle died before Erica was born.

“She told me what a great guy he was and stories about him and my dad and the things they used to do,” Erica said.

Gloria kept track of all of the scheduled parole hearings for the men convicted in her son’s death, informing the parole board of her opposition each time they were scheduled for a hearing.

She died in 2004.

It’s Debbie who keeps track of all of those hearings and schedules now.

“I promised my mother-in-law that I would,” she said.