After 34 years as a cop, 22 of them with Ocean Ridge, Sgt. Daniel Tinfina is saying goodbye to law enforcement — and he’s doing it with a tear in his eye.
Sure, he’s a tough guy. Chief Chris Yannuzzi says Tinfina is his officer-training specialist, his “by-the-book” guy.
But even tough guys get misty when they leave something they love.
“It’s a tough decision,” says Tinfina, 56, whose last day is scheduled for Sept. 1. “You develop such personal relationships, so when you make that decision and you know you’re not going to continue your career.
“My retirement from law enforcement is final,” he said.
Nothing’s wrong. Everyone’s healthy, and he’s leaving on a nice note. Tinfina says it’s time to put family first, finally. He and his wife, Rosemary, have two sons, ages 13 and 16.
“It will be nice,” says Tinfina, who is taking a private security job that will allow him to have his summers off. “Law enforcement is one of the worst jobs there is as far as the quality of family time goes.”
A native of Ohio — born in Cleveland and raised in the small town of Macedonia, near Akron — Tinfina attended the police academy in 1977, when he was a young man in his early 20s. He and Rosemary moved to Florida, and Tinfina worked for Greenacres from 1980 to 1984. When his wife grew homesick for family, they returned to Ohio. Moving home, they found, is a sure way to cure homesickness.
The family returned to Florida and, again, Tinfina worked for Greenacres — a city of 35,000 with real urban issues. It was a metro police job, where he reacted to almost constant calls, Tinfina said.
“When you’re young and you’re just out of the academy, you want to go from fight call to fight call,” he says.
But age changes everything.
In 1989, as Ocean Ridge was redesigning its public safety department amid a bit of a controversy, Tinfina got hired as part of Chief Bruce Schroeder’s new team. Immediately, Tinfina, a small town boy himself, fell in love with community policing.
For 19 of his 22 years, Tinfina was also an officer in Briny Breezes; the town has long hired Ocean Ridge for its police protection, except for a small three-year respite.
And it was on a seemingly quiet Sunday morning in January 1990 that Tinfina and Officer Ronald Inman came upon the most horrific crime of their careers.
Horrific, even by big-city standards.
On that quiet winter morning, in a town where even a car burglary is big news, John Raymond Wall attacked three residents with a sledgehammer, bludgeoning one of them so badly she never fully recovered. Inman and Tinfina would later receive broad accolades for how they handled the crime.
It was a morning Tinfina never forgot. “It’s not something you expect,” he says, simply.
What he did come to expect, through the years, was this comforting nature of island police work. Sure, he carries a gun. Sure, there could be a John Raymond Wall around any corner. But being a cop along this stretch of coastline requires more grins than gruffness.
You know most of the guys carry biscuits for the dogs, right?
Tinfina knows when the Smiths are gone for the summer, and when they’re scheduled to get back. He knows all their kids’ names, what their cars look like, where they park. “You’re dealing with the same people on a daily basis,” Tinfina says.
And that makes the goodbyes even harder.
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