BY ELINOR J. BRECHER AND STEVE ROTHAUS, EBRECHER@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Stephen David Jerome had a flair for the dramatic.
The Pompano Beach bankruptcy lawyer acted in community theatre, and was known to break into song in the courtroom.
Early Friday morning, he chose a dramatic ending to his own life. Police say he jumped from the roof of the 11-story BankAtlantic building at 1600 S. Federal Hwy., where he kept an eighth-floor office, hours after bonding out of the Broward County Jail on minor drug charges.
Acting Broward Medical Examiner Dr. Darin Trelka said that Jerome died at the scene from "multiple blunt force injuries [to the] head, trunk, pelvis and extremities.'' Results of toxicology testing are pending.
Born on Dec. 7, 1950, in Pennsylvania, Jerome was 61.
Officers who raided Jerome’s home, in the 400 block of Northeast 15th Street, on Thursday, found small amounts of pot and oxycodone, and drug paraphernalia. But that wasn’t what they were looking for.
According to a search warrant, they expected to find two videos featuring boys and girls as young 7 being used for sex by adult men. They took his computer equipment and related items.
A woman who answered the phone at Jerome’s office on Tuesday angrily declined to comment or identify herself.
“When someone jumps off the top of your building, your office gets very busy,’’ she said, adding that Jerome’s body had already been buried.
Had he lived, Jerome, a 1977 University of Miami law school graduate, might have faced child pornography charges for the second time.
In 1990, after a three-month investigation that yielded a stash of European kiddie-porn magazines in his bedroom closet, Jerome was charged with sexual performance by a child, a third-degree felony.
Two years later, he was sentenced to probation and community service after pleading no contest. He could have faced five years in prison. Also, the Florida Bar briefly suspended his license to practice law.
At the time of his plea, The Miami Herald reported: “Jerome, who shared the house with several other people, never admitted wrongdoing and was prepared to go to trial, his lawyer [Mark Skipper] said. But prosecutors obtained personal writings and diaries and ‘were just putting so much pressure on him for two years that he couldn’t take it. He just wanted to end it,’ Skipper said.’’
"This picture was taken just after we finished putting up the lights,’’ Jerome wrote on his Facebook page. “The neighborhood kids were absolutely thrilled with the display and were thrilled to be part of my picture.’’
Jerome was already well known for his holiday displays in Broward. A 2003 Sun-Sentinel feature about elaborate holiday decorations described the candy canes, “big and little snowmen,’’ reindeer, angels, and 27,000 lights outside his home.
Jerome told the newspaper: “My domestic partner, Balvino Barrera, is from a very small, very poor village in Guatemala. Christmas 2001 was our first Christmas together. I got him his first Christmas tree and we decorated inside the house.’’
Friday, Jerome was due onstage for opening night of The Producers, with the Pembroke Pines Theatre of the Performing Arts. He’d been cast in the lead role of the bombastic Max Bialystock, and by all accounts was looking forward to it.
“This was his second show with us,’’ said Alvin Entin, the theatre company’s board chairman, also an attorney. “About two or three years ago, he played Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady,’’ the father of main character Eliza Doolittle.
“He did a lot of work with Broward on Broadway,’’ a now-defunct theatre company, and Curtain Call Playhouse, also in Broward., said Entin, who broke the news of Jerome’s death to the cast on Friday, knowing little more than Jerome had died.
He said he got a call from Jerome’s law clerk, then told director Beverly Riches. Together, they told the cast.
“There was shock, amazement, a lot of sadness, crying,’’ he said.
The show went on with a second actor cast for the role, Keith Kramer, who was to have split the four-week run with Jerome. Another actor, Troy Stanley, who’d recently done the play with a Tamarac theatre company, also is filling in.
“An announcement was made prior to the opening curtain [Friday] that one of the cast members had died,’’ Entin said. “We put up a little memorial plaque’’ at the theater, part of the Pembroke Pines River of Grass ArtsPark.
Kris Coffelt, artistic director of Curtain Call Playhouse, a Broward-based touring theatre company, said that Jerome had done a production every year since the 2006-07, when he debuted in My Fair Lady.
"He did a lot of musical revues from all different Broadway shows,'' she said. "He had a beautiful voice...and a wide vocal range, from high bass to high tenor.''
He also helped out with the lighting and cues, she said.
"The only show he couldn't do was this year, because when we were casting [during the holidays] he was away visiting his partner in Guatemala.''
She said that Jerome "did as well in comedy as drama. He was very versatile.''
In one show program, Jerome's bio noted that he was "classically trained,'' and had been a guest soloist on an Alan King television special.
"He was a sweet, sensitive man, and he took what we did very seriously,'' Coffelt said.
Riches, the Producers director, said that she saw Jerome in My Fair Lady, and cast him in the Mel Brooks musical for his comic timing and strong voice: an operatic tenor.
“He was very thrilled, and it was a big commitment for him,’’ she said, because of the travel time between his office and the theater.
But when he got the lead, he told Riches that he would change his schedule, to make rehearsals.
Jerome’s penchant for the dramatic extended beyond the stage. In 1987, he bought a royal title, Count of Macedonia, from the estate of a homicide victim, for $300.
He was already known as the defense lawyer who belted out a snippet of the 19th Century Italian opera Pagliacci during closing arguments in a 1982 criminal trial.
Pagliacci means “clowns.’’ Jerome lost the case.
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