'It's about community': Kent police helping cancer patients one check at a time

After driving her uncle Carl Fike home from UH Portage Medical Center on Wednesday, Denise Ficzeri could only speculate what he might do with the $500 check he had just received from Kent Police Department staff.

More:Kent Police, Seidman Cancer Center team up to give survivors a boost

Maybe he would use it to go fishing, she said.

"He really hasn't made any real choices, yet," said Ficzeri. "He just kind of looked at it when we were driving home and kind of smiling and thinking about stuff."

Fike was part of the latest group of beneficiaries of fundraising Kent police have been doing for about 15 years to help people struggling with cancer.

The effort mostly takes place in the last three months of the year. During the last three months of 2022, a little over $3,000 was raised to split among cancer patients like Fike, a Kent resident.

Kent dispatcher Rebecca Schneider, who has been heavily involved with the fundraising since its inception, said the practice is to present the checks as a surprise for the recipients. Typically, it is done at UH Portage's Seidman Cancer Center, where Fike and another recipient, a Debra Holloway, received their checks Wednesday morning.

"They're always kind of shocked as to what's going on when we walk in the room, especially when I come with an officer," said Schneider, laughing. "We've had a lot of people be, like, 'Am I getting arrested?'"

Ficzeri said her uncle, who turns 66 in March, has had throat cancer and is currently undergoing treatment for thyroid and lung cancer. He uses a electronic voice synthesizer and has a hard time speaking and being understood.

"It's not really ever going to be completely wiped away, eradicated. So they're keeping it at bay with the immunotherapy," she said.

Ficzeri said that while it was a surprise for Fike, she was told about it the previous day because the hospital wanted to make sure he was there for an appointment.

"I was so happy that the nurses thought of him, and the doctors, and you know the process and everything," she said. "He was not had an easy life, so I just think the whole entire program and him getting picked was was fabulous. It's great."

An officer's battle started it all

The police department's fundraising for area residents with cancer goes back more than 12 years when the department's Susan K Graves Breast Cancer Memorial Fund was started.

Graves was a Kent police officer. She grew up in Atwater and graduated from Waterloo High School. She majored in criminal justice at Kent State University, then became a police officer, first at KSU in 1997 and then with the Kent Police Department in 2000. She was a member of the U.S. Marshal's Northern Ohio Violent Fugitive Task Force and was named the task force's officer of the year for teamwork in 2007.

Graves died from breast cancer in December 2007. She was 35.

Her co-workers raised money for her within the police department.

Schneider headed the effort with the help and encouragement of her colleagues.

"It was a collective effort," she said. "We originally started it to collect money for Susan when she was still alive. And then when she passed away, I decided to keep it going in her memory and in her honor."

In the meantime, the Men's Health Initiative was started by Sgt. Rich Soika. Detective Dave Marino, who lost his father Daniel to cancer, is now involved with that program.

Initially, the department donated the money raised to the Susan G. Komen Foundation and Movember, a national organization that advocates for men's health. After a couple of years, it was decided to focus on helping local cancer patients.

"My mom had been diagnosed with Stage 4 ovarian cancer and I got to know the people in her oncologist's office pretty well and I just had to ask them one Christmas, 'Is there a patient that could really use some help?' and that's how it started," Schneider said. "And then it just kind of got bigger and bigger every year with the amount of money that we were collecting and able to donate. And then, the officers at one time, they were working security down at UH in Kent and they got to know a lot of the people down there and then it just kind of snowballed into the Seidman Cancer Center, which, incidentally enough, is also the doctors that were my mom's oncologists. So that was just an amazing partnership to be able to have with them and that we continue to have year after year."

Fundraising mostly done within Kent Fire Department

Over the years, the work by the Graves Memorial Foundation and the Men's Health Initiative has morphed into one endeavor.

The police department does the bulk of the fundraising for the program in-house.

"Most of the donations actually come directly from employees of the Kent Police Department," said Police Lt. Mike Lewis.

In October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a raffle is held within the police department. Bake sales also have been popular.

For many years, a departmental policy prohibiting beards was suspended for male officers if they made a donation to the cause during No Shave November. For an additional donation, they could continue to sport their beards through December.

In 2020, the policy was changed to allow officers to have beards at all times, said Lewis, but they still grow them, if they do not already have them, and make the donations.

Female employees can get in on it, too. Those who work exclusively at the police station, including dispatchers, can wear blue jeans to work. Women officers are allowed to dye a blue streak in their hair for a donation.

'I can only hope it gets bigger and bigger'

It's up to recipients to decide how they use the money.

"I know that one of the folks we presented to last year, they told me that they had just been dropped by their insurance company and they're talking about the medical bills mounting up and it was terrible," said Lewis.

Some recipients are recommended by Seidman, but others come to the attention of the police department more directly. One recent recipient has been the city insurance representative for 14 years, said Schneider.

It's uncertain how much money has been raised in all, but Schneider and Lewis estimate more than $20,000. A little over $3,000 was raised in the just the last few months of 2022.

The best year, said Schneider, was 2019, when about $8,900 was collected. Much of that was thanks to Tiffany Wolf, a nurse at Seidman Cancer Center who was known as "One Crafty Nurse."

"She would create cancer-themed shirts that she would sell and she gave us all the proceeds for one year," said Schneider. "So that year was a very big year and we were able to help a lot of people that year."

Wolf, unfortunately, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and has since died.

Schneider said she hopes the fundraising not only continues well into the future, but grows.

"I'm really lucky, grateful, thankful that I have an amazing department that I work for and amazing coworkers that not only support it year after year, but look forward to it," she said. "I can only hope it gets bigger and bigger and we get a lot more money donated because just helping so many people is just what it's about. It's about community."

Ficzeri said she knows her uncle was very pleased with the surprise.

"He was really, really happy about it. I cried," she said. "He was really ecstatic. His big thing is he always does a thumbs up for everything."

Reporter Jeff Saunders can be reached at jsaunders@recordpub.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Kent police helping cancer patients one check at a time