How to set JAVACMD

I have a Tomcat7 install on a CentOS (6.7) system. Tomcat will not run, throwing exception in catalina.out

/usr/sbin/tomcat: line 29: -classpath: command not found

and related tomcat-initd.log

/usr/sbin/tomcat: error: Failed to set JAVACMD

According to this SF post, I should be able to set it in /usr/share/java-utils/java-functions like this:

# Add all sorts of jvm layouts here
  if [ -x "$JAVA_HOME/jre/sh/java" ]; then
    JAVACMD="$JAVA_HOME/jre/sh/java"
  elif [ -x "$JAVA_HOME/bin/java" ]; then
    JAVACMD="$JAVA_HOME/bin/java"
  else
    JAVACMD=`which java 2>/dev/null`
  fi

  if [ ! -x "$JAVACMD" ]; then
    echo "$0: error: Failed to set JAVACMD"
    return 1
  fi

But I still get the exception. What's missing? What am I not understanding, and how do I resolve the exception?

JAVA_HOME is set:

echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/java/jdk1.7.0_79

Checking tomcat status:

sudo service tomcat status
PID file exists, but process is not running                [WARNING]
tomcat lockfile exists but process is not running          [FAILED]

This is true even after deleting the Tomcat pid file, rinsing and repeating.

Request responses:

whereis java
java: /usr/bin/java /etc/java /usr/lib/java /usr/share/java

ls -lad /usr/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 21 Jul 21  2015 /usr/bin/java -> /usr/java/jre1.8.0_51

ls -lad /etc/alternatives/java
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 20 Jul 21  2015 /etc/alternatives/java -> /usr/java/glassfish4

after commenting out JAVA_HOME in tomcat.conf

/etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat start
Starting tomcat:                                           [  OK  ]
sudo service tomcat status
tomcat (pid 13517) is running...                           [  OK  ]