May 23, 2021- 10:27 p.m.
Sherika Salmon watches the clock tick away on Trenton Catholic girls basketball.
The No. 2 team in the NJ.com top 20, is down 58-48 midway through the fourth quarter to St. John Vianney, the No. 1 team in the state.
Salmon, Trenton Catholic’s lone assistant coach under Bob Fusik, gives instruction from the bench, as her team desperately tries to mount a comeback.
But they run out of time.
The final buzzer sounds and St. John Vianney has just finished toppling Trenton Catholic in a matchup of two powerhouse New Jersey girls basketball programs. Salmon walks to the locker room with a group of dispirited players after narrowly missing a chance to stake its claim as the best team in the state.
Salmon walks back onto the court roughly 10 minutes later and lingers before walking out of the gym and onto the bus.
It is 8:15 p.m. on an unseasonably warm day in late February, but Salmon’s day is just beginning.
Along with her role with one of the top girls basketball programs in the country, Salmon, 29, is also a homicide detective in the Mercer County Prosecutor’s office.
Once the bus gets back to Trenton Catholic, Salmon packs up and heads back to her other office.
Weariness from the loss to St. John Vianney still lingers. She has to put it aside. She has a homicide to solve.
There was a murder in Trenton in February, and the suspect is still on the loose. Salmon has been working the case since she got the call. She feels she’s close to a breakthrough.
Solving homicide cases is a process, and Salmon excels at it. It’s why she’s had a meteoric rise through the ranks.
In a way, basketball games present a different kind of case to solve. The meticulous details and intricacies of trying to bring someone to justice parallel trying to break a press defense — a need to see things in slow motion to gain clarity.
There are hours of planning, hours spent poring over notes and hours spent executing the plans.
Coaching basketball is Salmon’s escape, relieving the stress of being a homicide detective. At any moment, she could find herself in physical danger. The risks in her career are ever-present.
A steady stream of homicides come across Salmon’s desk.
The desk is full of mementos and notes on active investigations. Salmon was at her desk before the game at St. John Vianney, and it is where she’ll end her night.
She says she might spend up to 20 hours in the office in a day, working a case, interviewing witnesses or potential suspects. She’ll compile notes for the next step, but a call can come in, and she might have to respond and begin a new investigation.
It serves as motivation.
“I’m a winner. I don’t like to lose,” Salmon said. “There’s just a competitive nature in everything I do. The way I attack a basketball game is the way I attack my cases. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure whoever is responsible is caught. It’s the same with a game. I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that we win this game.”
Salmon got her start as a homicide detective in Hudson County. She worked there from 2013 to 2017, investigating major crimes in gritty neighborhoods throughout Jersey City, West New York, North Bergen and Weehawken. She worked drug deals gone bad, infants suffocated accidentally in bed by their parents, murders, rapes, beatings.
A 2016 case in Jersey City lingers in her mind. Salmon took a call on Super Bowl Sunday. An elderly woman had been brutally raped and then murdered.
“That case stuck with me,” Salmon said. “That opened my eyes to how cruel people can really be, because that lady didn’t deserve that. She lived alone. She was a great community person. She helped a lot of people out in the area.”
Salmon and her partner arrested a suspect in connection with that murder and the suspect is currently awaiting trial.
Working homicides is an unrelenting career. It wasn’t her original plan.
Sandra Gardner, Salmon’s mother, moved to the U.S. from her native Jamaica, and Salmon attended Hamilton West High School before enrolling at St. Peter’s University and playing on the women’s basketball team.
After graduating and putting aside a potential basketball career overseas, Salmon worked her way up through an internship in Jersey City. She eventually became an agent and was fast-tracked to becoming a detective in Hudson County — one of the youngest ever, according to Salmon — because the office needed young, Black detectives in the largely minority communities.
Her intellect — she says she has a photographic memory — and her track record as an agent made her a perfect fit, and she excelled, helping out the community by solving cases.
“She thinks she can save the world,” Gardner said. “I think she gets it from me because I’m a giver, and she’s a giver. She will stop at nothing to help somebody else. She’s like that. She’s feisty, but she’s a sweetheart.”
A case begins for Salmon when she arrives at a crime scene and begins canvassing the area. Salmon tries to track down witnesses, asking them if they saw or heard something that leads to a clue.
The next steps include gathering more insight via fingerprints and DNA and gleaning key details from interviews. In a way, a scouting report on a potential suspect is beginning.
Once a person of interest is apprehended, they are brought in for questioning, and the “game” is on. The case continues to evolve until a suspect is charged.
A plea or a trial is the fourth quarter, the ending of a case — the winning moment. Salmon is among the best in her department at getting those wins.
“She is very tenacious. She is one of the hardest-working detectives I’ve come across,” said Jessica Plumeri, the Mercer County Chief of Detectives and Salmon’s boss. “There are just so many words to describe her. She is extremely intelligent, selfless, persistent, dedicated. There are just not enough adjectives, good adjectives to describe her. … In my career, I have not seen many people like Sherika, at 29-years-old, that are knocking it out of the park in homicide.”
Being a detective and basketball coach connects her two passions. It’s a balancing act, and the brass at the Mercer County prosecutor’s office understands her need to coach basketball.
Salmon also has a great relationship Fusik, who allows her to run practices and make calls during games.
“To me, she’s a class act,” Fusik said. “I would never have done any of this without her.”
The suspect in the homicide in Trenton is still on the loose. The case is ongoing, but more surely will arrive on Salmon’s desk in the coming days or weeks. All the while, Trenton Catholic, which may not close after all, could have more games to play.
More opponents to figure out, more wins to chase. Salmon will be there in the middle, day and night, working both angles to crack the cases.
“All day, I’m watching kids get their lives taken, and for me, coaching is more like I’m saving lives, and that’s the way I look at it,” Salmon said.
