The family of Robert “Sharkey” Sharkevich Sr. said they’ll remember the 66-year-old as a hero who touched countless lives and was meant to be a firefighter.
“He truly was a hero,” Karen Letizio, Sharkevich’s sister, said. “I hear from so many of the firefighters about what a mentor he was to them. Just a true hero. Someone that the guys look up to.”
Letizio said she wasn’t surprised to hear her brother had responded to the massive brush fire on Lamentation Mountain in Berlin that’s still burning.
He responded with the Wethersfield Volunteer Fire Department where he’s served for the last 22 years.
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“To get the phone call from my brother Gary about what happened was just devastating,” she said. “The only thing that I guess is helping now is hearing again from firefighters is that he died doing what he loved to do.”
Sharkevich was killed Tuesday afternoon when the UTV he was riding rolled over on top of him, Meriden police said, while responding to the fire.
“I actually just remember hanging up the phone and screaming and running down the hall to my son’s room and opening his door…telling him what had happened and just flying out into the car to go to his house,” Letizio said. “The next awful thing we had to do was go to my two nephews, Robert’s two twin sons, their soccer game, and deliver the awful news to them.”
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She said it was just like her brother to drop everything to help a community in need.
“That was Robert. It didn’t have to be just Wethersfield. I’ve heard nights where he’s gone to Rocky Hill, he’s been in Newington, he’s been in Glastonbury,” she said, “cause that’s what the firefighters do. They’re a brotherhood and it doesn’t matter the town they work in. Someone needs help, we all have to get there.”
Sharkevich is a retired Hartford firefighter where he served for 25 years. He rushed down to New York City after 9/11 to assist in combing through the debris.
“[There] wasn’t a place you could go that you wouldn’t say his name and somebody would [say] ‘Oh I ran into him here, I knew him from here.’”
Gary Sharkevich said he and his brother didn’t want to be firefighters at first.
“We took the Hartford police test before we took the fire test, and we didn’t pass the police test,” he said.
The brothers passed the fire test, and joined the Hartford Fire Department in 1982. Their brother, Steve, joined in 1994, he said.
Years later, Robert and Gary’s sons became firefighters, too.
“I hate to say it’s part of the job, but we know when we leave the home, give your wife, girlfriend, mother a hug and a kiss and you hope you return,” Gary said through tears. “Look at the brother and sisterhood that’s out there, the support that our family is getting right now is unbelievable.”
“It’s pretty overwhelming in a good way,” Letizio said. “It helps so much. Driving down the Silas Deane Highway, the procession, children just standing there as we were coming into Farley-Sullivan the other day, phone calls, texts, people stopping by my brother’s house…the support is just overwhelming, but it’s great. It’s what we need right now.”
It’s that support from across Connecticut and beyond that’s helping them get through this tragedy. Leaning on one another, their memories and the stories of the countless people that knew and loved “Sharkey.”
“That name stuck by him and it’ll be stuck with him forever,” Gary said. “We’ll never forget.”
Services for Sharkevich will be held in the coming days, with calling hours set for Sunday from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Farley-Sullivan Funeral Home in Wethersfield, and a funeral is planned for Monday at 11 a.m. at the Cathedral of St. Joseph’s in Hartford.
