GREENFIELD – Jacob Garmalo, the 21-year-old Franklin County Sheriff’s Department correctional officer who was killed on his motorcycle last Thursday after leaving work, was laid to rest Wednesday morning following a tribute by area public safety officers.
The ceremony, held at Holy Trinity Church on Main Street, the family’s long-time parish, was attended by law enforcement personnel from around the region, and the pews were filled to near capacity by friends and family.
Police and fire personnel escorted the hearse carrying Garmalo’s ashes from the Smith-Kelleher Funeral Home on Franklin Street to the church.
During the ceremony, Monsignor Ronald Yargeau noted that Garmalo had been a life-long member of the church, and received all of his holy sacraments there.
He urged attendees to maintain their faith in the midst of a tragic death.
“The ways of God are never known, but we do know that he is here with us this morning,” Yargeau said. “God is truly found in tragedy, the God we believe in desires to be at the center of those events we can’t understand ourselves, and he also cries with us this morning.”
Yargeau said Garmalo in life embodied the church’s beatitudes, bringing mercy into his work every day at the county jail.
He urged attendees to know the value of life, and to cherish and protect it.
“Today is the gift,” he said. “We don’t know about tomorrow.”
Garmalo’s mother, Kathleen Garmalo, a canton at the church, sang the song “No eye has seen, no ear has heard,” near the end of the ceremony.
Garmalo, of Leyden, was just leaving work on June 9 shortly before the accident, around 7:30 a.m. The crash is still under investigation.
He was to have graduated from a six-month reserve police training program that would have enabled him to become a deputy sheriff that night, Franklin County Sheriff Christopher Donelan said.
Donelan posthumously promoted Garmalo to the rank of sergeant.
Kathleen Garmalo described her son as a “hard-working young man who gained the respect of everyone he knew,” who loved the outdoors, carpentry and working on small motors. He was a graduate of Pioneer Valley Regional School.
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