"Mr Shamash light one Candle".

Ron Campise tells the sad story of a World War2 Silver Star veteran in Highland Park.

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Transcript

Ron 0:00

Hi, I'm Ron Campise. I worked for the Scientific Investigation Division, Los Angeles Police Department. Thirteen years as a night supervisor. I encountered over and was on and had coordinate somewhere around 13,000 crime scenes in my career. 20-year career, like I said. This is one of the dying in La La Land stories. This one is entitled Mr. Shamish, Light One Candel Frankie Shamish, he was 66. He wasn't feeling real well that night. You know, he really didn't have any relatives left. He had a few distant ones on the East Coast, and he had relatives that died in the Holocaust in Europe. You know, that night he went to bed, he had a little indiggestion, and he was just, you know, thinking to himself. He couldn't stop in contemplating his time as a sergeant in the Big Red One Division in World War II. He was a squad leader. He fought all through Europe. When he went to bed that night and closed his eyes, and it was 1986. In 2016, these kids were playing outside his house and broke the window to the bedroom. And it was, you know, getting dark outside, and they looked in and they could see, they could see a body in the bed with the Yarmook on it. And of course, they screamed, they yelled, and they ran home and the police were called, the LAPD. Northeast detectives showed up, broke in the door, went in, and sure enough, there was the mummified body of Frankie Shamus. He had been in this small house in Highland Park for 30 years. And what they determined is that he only had distant relatives on the East Coast. Some of his family died in the Holocaust, and nobody checked up on him. All his utilities they found out were paid automatically. Everything, including his property taxes, everything. And so I got there later and they told me, Ron, this is a really sad scene. It's really sad. It was like I said, now 2016. Frankie Shamus died in 1986. His body had been in there for 30 years. He was mummified. He was just a mummy now. One of the detectives looked through the mail and it was all piled up inside the door. And at the bottom of the mail, he found the earliest one said mid-December 1986. There wasn't anything collecting evidence really. Already determined to be a death investigation. A very sad one. The coroner showed up, took the body away. And you know, in this case, you know, I said in my heart, I said a s I said a prayer for Frankie Shamash. I said a prayer that because I it just touched me so much. And also because I was looking around the living room and uh I saw a display case there. You know, in the display case was a silver star. He had gotten in World War II for bravery. And there was a picture of one of his squads uh in combat gear. And you know, I was just thinking about it. Sometimes I really think about these crime scenes, you know, a little. You know, I went to I went to bed that morning. Remember, I'm working nights, right? So it was part of the night. And you know, I went to bed that morning, was laying there. You know, in a few hours, my son, he is about five years old at the time. He usually used to come up, and when he was excited and he wanted to show me something, he just kind of pulled my eyes open and say, you know, Daddy, wake up, I got something for you. I got it, I'm singing a song. I'm singing a song in school. He says it's a nonaka song. I'm singing a nonaka song. I go, okay, nonaka song. And he began to sing these lyrics. The lyrics went, I guess it's a traditional folk song Jewish for Hanukkah. And he began to sing. He be and it went like this Mr. Shamus, light one candle. Mr. Shamus, burn it bright. Twinkle twinkle, one little candle. Instead of Hanukkah, he said, Nanaka is here. And you see, this was reaffirmed to me that there are really no coincidences, or very few in this world. We're meant to be where we are at a certain time in a certain place. And I was meant to be in that house thirty years later, after Sergeant Frankie Shamus died, peacefully in his bed. I still think of it sometime to this day when Hanukkah comes around and I uh hear those traditional songs.