More than 600 friends, family and cops bid a tearful farewell to Erskine Bryce in Brooklyn yesterday, hailing the slain city marshal as a “hero in every sense of the word.”
Verna Thomas wailed uncontrollably as the casket bearing the body of her fiancée was carried out after the funeral Mass at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Lefferts Gardens.
“All who knew him loved him, especially for his helpfulness and good advice,” said the victim’s distraught nephew, Gerald Bryce, 25.
“Children naturally gravitated towards him and he in return adored them all,” he added, his voice choked with emotion.
Bryce, a 66-year-old father of two adult children, both in law enforcement, and Trinidad native was torched Aug. 21 while trying to evict JoAnne Jones, who owed $14,000 in back rent, from her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment.
Jones, 53, threw Bryce over a second-floor railing, beat him with an aluminum stick, doused him with gasoline and set him ablaze, authorities said.
Jones has been charged with second-degree murder.
Although he wasn’t a full-fledged cop, Bryce, a marshal for 12 years, received the pomp of an official department ceremony, complete with a police honor guard and bagpipe band.
Mayor Giuliani eulogized Bryce as a fun-loving, selfless man who lived for his family and for being a marshal.
Giuliani quoted a Bryce colleague who told him a story about how the popular marshal once gave $12 of his own money to a woman rather than have her car towed away.
“He took his compassion right with him every day,” the mayor said.
“The way he chose his life is an example for us all . . . He was a hero in every sense of the word.”