Haunted by cop son’s COVID death, business owner leaving Paterson after 36 years

PATERSON — Sebastiano Scorpo stood in front of his restaurant supply business on Main Street, his eyes following a city police vehicle that drove past him and disappeared around a bend in the road.

“Whenever I see a Paterson police car go by, I think it’s my son coming to hug me,” he said. “That’s why I gotta get out of here.”

Scorpo’s son, Frank, had served as a Paterson police officer for almost five years when he died of COVID-19 in April 2020. His death haunts his father so much that Sebastiano Scorpo has decided to move his business out of Paterson, the city where it has operated for the past 36 years.

A white banner hanging in front of Savco Restaurant Equipment announces Scorpo’s next business address: 250-254 Route 46 West in Denville. Scorpo already has begun packing things in moving boxes, with the goal being to finish the move by the end of this month. He has sold the Main Street property where his company operated for decades.

Police cars aren’t the only things in Paterson that remind Scorpo of his son’s death. His business sits just a block from St. Joseph’s University Medical Center, where the police officer died.

“I don’t want to see that hospital as long as I live,” said the 68-year-old shop owner, balling up his fist.

Scorpo never had a chance to see his son — who was the father of two boys, ages 4 years and 6 months — before he died. Coronavirus visitation protocols barred him from entering Frank’s room, he said.

In the early hours of Easter Sunday that year, Scorpo said, he received an update from the hospital that his son’s health had improved and he was coming home soon. The message was accompanied by a photo of the 34-year-old cop in his hospital bed posing with his thumbs up.

“Three hours later I got a call that my son was dead,” Scorpo said. “Now two babies have to grow up without a father.”

'Teddy bear' still mourned

Frank Scorpo’s death sent a chill through the entire Police Department. A popular officer whom co-workers described as an ever-smiling “teddy bear,” Scorpo worked as a motorcycle cop in the traffic division at the time of his death.

Just before he got sick, leaders in the traffic division complained to the department’s top brass about the lack of quarantine procedures after some of the division’s members were exposed to someone who had the coronavirus. After Scorpo died, police union officials confirmed that 10 of the traffic division’s 18 members had tested positive for COVID.

Police Officer Artim Hani, Scorpo’s partner in the traffic unit, recalled the impact of losing his close friend.  “I went back to work, but it was never the same,” he said.

Hani said that after Frank was buried, officers would visit Savco to check on the grieving family.

“We stopped by almost every day,” he said. “I still stop there when I get a chance.”

Remembering a childhood loss

Sebastiano Scorpo was born in a small town near Syracuse, Sicily. He said he came to the United States in 1971, when he was 16, to live with his uncle after his older brother died.

The brother had scoliosis and became fatally ill after becoming paralyzed when a surgeon in Sicily severed his spinal cord during an operation, Sebastiano said. The doctor skipped town, he said.

"After the surgery, my brother said he couldn’t feel his legs,” Scorpo said. “My mother thought it was the anesthesia.”

Scorpo, sitting in his office chair in a deep recline, sat up and inched closer to continue the story.

“My brother passed away in my arms,” he said. “Now I have two scars — my son and my brother.”

After he immigrated to Woodland Park in 1971, Scorpo said, his uncle helped him get a job at Marlo Mini Parts, where he learned the restaurant supplies business. Scorpo searched his office — cluttered with paperwork, maps of Sicily and religious statuettes — for a photograph of his late uncle that he keeps on the windowsill. But then he remembered he had packed it away in one of the moving boxes.

“He said, 'I’m gonna straighten you out,'” Scorpo said of his uncle, admitting he was getting in trouble in New Jersey. “'I’m gonna get you so much work you won’t have time to think about crazy things.'”

From 2020: Paterson police officer dies of coronavirus, marking department's first casualty from it

From 2020: Francesco Scorpo, Paterson cop who died from coronavirus, laid to rest

'We grew up in that building'

Scorpo opened Savco in 1987. The first location was Jackson Avenue, then Pacific Street, before he moved the business to Main Street in the mid-1990s. His restaurant supply store  has been one of the few remaining Sicilian-owned businesses in an area of town that used to be a stronghold for southern Italians.

Not long after arriving, Scorpo met his wife, Anna DiBerardino, also an Italian immigrant, at a Sicilian-owned bakery in his neighborhood called Gino’s, which has since moved to Texas. They married when they were both 20 years old and had three children: twins Frank and Paul and their older brother, Carmelo.

Paul Scorpo, who will eventually succeed his father in running the business, said Savco was more than just a supply shop.

“We grew up in that building,” said Paul, 38, who was named after Scorpo’s late brother. “We used to go there right after school to do our homework.”

But now the Scorpo family is ready to leave it behind.

Darren Tobia is a contributing writer for Paterson Press.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson NJ business moving, after owner haunted by COVID death