Former Elyria police officer booked into jail on tampering with evidence charge

ELYRIA — Facing criminal charges, former Elyria police officer Patrick Jama was booked into Lorain County Jail on Friday morning. Jama resigned from the department Tuesday after having been on paid administrative leave since March 9 amid an internal investigation. Jama, 32, was a 10-year veteran of the Elyria Police Department. He recently was indicted by a Lorain County grand jury on charges of tampering with evidence, a felony, and dereliction of duty, a misdemeanor. According to jail records, Jama was released about a half-hour after booking on a $5,000 personal bond. Records did not say if he had a lawyer. Elyria Police Chief William Pelko confirmed that the department had investigated Jama, but declined to go into specifics. "We did a criminal investigation, and we turned it over to the prosecutor's office and let them determine what should be done with it," Pelko said. The result was a secret grand jury indictment, which was confirmed Friday by Lorain County Prosecutor J.D. Tomlinson. He also declined to go into further detail on the circumstances that led to the investigation. Over his decade of employment, Jama earned accolades including being named the Lorain County Crisis Intervention Team Officer of the Year for 2019 and receiving a life-saving medal in 2021 for his actions in saving the lives of two shooting victims. Though Jama has no past record in the Lorain County Common Pleas Court, documents in his personnel file showed that he had been disciplined at work in the past for crashes in his police cruiser. Jama was working under a last chance agreement between May 2018 and October 2019 after he allegedly left the scene without reporting a minor single-vehicle cruiser crash, was not initially forthcoming about the incident with police personnel and filed a false police report, according to the agreement. Contact Dylan Reynolds at (440) 329-7123 or dreynolds@chroniclet.com. Follow him on Twitter @drey1357.