Cop Does Not Shoot Unarmed Man

by Paul Bass | Mar 16, 2018 1:50 pm

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Posted to: Legal Writes, Fair Haven, The Heights, Cop of the Week

The man ran from the cops, through traffic, to the edge of the bridge. He was out of control. He turned, grabbed a dark object from his waist, pointed it directly at an officer.

“Shoot me!” he cried. “Shoot me!”

It all happened within seconds. And now, the officer, Matt Stevens, had to make a potentially fatal decision: Should he pull the trigger?

In seven years on the police force, he’d never had to shoot anyone. Now he had no time to debate the question. He had to rely on instinct. And his training.

If he had pulled the trigger, Stevens would have been found to have exercised justifiable force, observed his boss, Fair Haven District Manager Lt. David Zannelli. Stevens would not have gotten into trouble.

And if he had pulled the trigger, Zannelli noted, the headline would have read: “Unarmed Man Shot By Cops.”

Stevens didn’t pull the trigger. He ended up getting bruised, missing two weeks of work. But he and the two cops with him that day, Zannelli and Officer Jocelyn Lavandier, ended up saving, not ending, the disturbed 37-year-old man’s life.

Such encounters can often end differently. Especially when a cop has a legitimate reason to fear his life is at stake.

The three Fair Haven officers — all of whom coincidentally played high school or college sports — have had weeks to reflect on why this encounter didn’t end in a shooting. It didn’t, Zannelli said, because of specific steps the cops took. Beginning with some thorough and quick actions by Jocelyn Lavandier.

The episode began on a Monday in February toward the end of Lavandier’s 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift. She was driving around the Eastern Street area. Someone had been breaking into cars there recently. In fact, Lavandier’s mother’s car had been ransacked. So while driving Lavandier kept an eye out for suspicious activity; she’s known for taking that kind of initiative, according to Zannelli.

She noticed one man parked on Eastern in a silver Honda. She drove by several times. Each time he pulled a sweatshirt over his head.

So she pulled up and got out of the car to chat with him. At which point he turned on the car. As she and an officer approached, he hit the gas, backed up, sped away.

Lavandier hopped back in her car and followed. After about a mile, she stopped following because of the department’s policy discouraging chases.

In the meantime, she had broadcast the car’s license plate over the police radio. Another officer, Francisco Ortiz Jr., heard the report and called Lavandier. He told her he’d stopped that car recently. And he gave Lavandier the phone number of the woman who owns it.

Lavandier called the woman, who said her husband was driving the vehicle. And that he was paranoid schizophrenic, also suffering from manic depression. The man’s wife was worried, she said. Because he had stopped taking his medication.

The woman agreed to meet Lavandier at 1 Union Ave. to give a statement. As Lavandier waited there for her, the woman called again. She reported that her husband was on the Grand Avenue Bridge. (His Honda had conked out on Front Street after he fled from Lavandier.) He had previously jumped off the bridge. She feared he would again.

Lavandier radioed in the update and headed to the scene.

Zannelli was a few blocks away when he heard the report. He rushed to the bridge. So did Matt Stevens.

Zannelli arrived first. He saw the man standing by the southern edge of the bridge. Zannelli pulled over and hopped out.

“How are you feeling today?” Zannelli asked.

“Why are you bothering me?” replied the man, agitated.

Zannelli thought back to the de-escalation training he and others have received from retired New Haven Lt. Ray Hassett (who was a master at defusing potentially explosive street scenes). He needed to convince the man that the police weren’t there to hurt him or give him trouble. He needed to calm the man.

“We heard there was a robbery up the road. I think it was kids with bikes. Did you happen to see them?” Zannelli improvised.

That worked at first. The man calmed down.

Then Stevens arrived. The man realized he was, in fact, the subject of the stop, and again grew agitated.

He darted into traffic, weaving through passing cars and a bus headed west over the bridge into Fair Haven.

Stevens and Zannelli ran after him. It was a cold, windy day. They worried that if the man jumped into the Quinnipiac River, he would get caught in the currents and die.

“The last thing we wanted to do,” Stevens recalled, “was get him to the edge of the bridge.”

Stevens got within 15 feet of the man when the man, passing the double yellow line in the middle of the road, reached into his waistband.

“Don’t reach! Don’t reach! Don’t reach!” Stevens yelled.

The man reached deeper. He pulled out a black rectangular metal object, raised it.

Stevens reached for his holster. He pulled out his gun.

That’s when, according to Zannelli, the man yelled at Stevens to shoot him, an attempt at what’s known as “suicide by cop.” He pointed his hand, with the black object, directly at Stevens.

Stevens didn’t want to shoot. He also didn’t want to get shot.

The scene would sound like it stretched out for minutes in later recollection, but in truth, it elapsed in seconds. “It’s muscle memory at that point. It’s like sports,” said Stevens, who pitched for college teams and played basketball, football and baseball at Fitch High in Groton.

In the moment that he had to decide whether to pull the trigger, Stevens looked closer at the metal object in the man’s hand and realized it was a cell phone.

That didn’t mean that the man had no other weapon on him. But it meant Stevens wasn’t going to get shot with the object in the man’s hand.

Stevens reholstered his gun, retrieved his Taser instead. As he got closer, though, he saw the man’s bulky jacket. He realized, based on his training, that the Taser wouldn’t work because the shot wouldn’t penetrate the man’s skin. (Click here to read a story and watch a video about how some other New Haven officers learned that lesson.)

Stevens caught up with the man. They were now right by the belly-button-high metal fence at the bridge’s northern end. Steven grabbed the man’s waist; the man punched Stevens on the right side of his head. Stevens lost his grip and fell to the ground.

Zannelli rushed in. He didn’t know if the man had a gun on him. But he reasoned that even if the man were armed, he would use it to hurt himself, not the police. He also reasoned that the man probably came to the bridge to jump, not use a gun.

“I’m five-eight. He’s six-four,” said Zannelli, who was a middle linebacker in high school in Providence, R.I. “I was able to get low on his leg.” The man punched Zannelli in the chin; Zannelli held on with a bear hug, brought him to the ground.

Stevens got back up. The two cops wrestled with the man, who fought them hard. (The man is black; Stevens and Zannelli are white.)

Lavandier, who had sped over in minutes from Union Avenue with her lights on and siren flashing, speaking with the wife and conveying information on the police radio, arrived on the scene. She got out of the car, rushed over and yelled at the man to put his hands behind his back; he kept fighting instead.

Lavandier (who won a full volleyball scholarship to American International College after her 2005 graduation from Wilbur Cross High School, where she starred on the team) noticed part of the man’s skin exposed during the tussle. She drew her taser and shot him.

She told him again to put his hands behind his back. He kept fighting. She shot, and hit, again.

That worked. The man stopped fighting. Stevens handcuffed him.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the man told the officers as they shepherded him to a cruiser.

Medics arrived on the scene. The man wasn’t injured; Zannelli and Stevens were, and they went to the hospital for treatment. The cops charged the man with two counts of interfering with officers, two counts of assault of police officers and first-degree threatening. He was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

As suddenly as it began, the potentially life-changing episode — for all involved — was over.

For the next six hours, Stevens replayed the scene over and over in his mind. Step by step.

He was thankful that he hadn’t ended up pulling the trigger.

“Nobody wants to shoot an unarmed person,” he said. “It was satisfying how we were able to stop it and get him the help he needed.”

He and Lavandier regularly deal with mentally disturbed people. One time, Lavandier helped talk a man off a third-floor ledge, where he had tied an electrical cord around his neck and prepared to jump. She pursued a career in criminal justice because, she said, she wanted to help people the way she grew up wishing she could have helped her younger sister when she hung “with the wrong crowd” and kept getting into trouble. (She had initially planned to become a juvenile probation officer until fate steered her to the police force in her hometown.)

Most mental-health calls, while challenging, don’t end up with having to make a life-or-death decision. But “you never know how they will react,” Lavandier noted. As she and Stevens saw on the Grand Avenue Bridge. (The arrested man has not yet entered a plea in the case.)

Lt. Zannelli said Lavandier’s quick work in obtaining and then communicating crucial information enabled him and Stevens to arrive on the bridge in time to save the man’s life. And Stevens’ sound decision-making at the moment of truth enabled the cops to save rather than end a life.

Stevens was out of work for two weeks recovering from an injury to his hip. (He had fallen on his holster in the struggle on the bridge.) His first day back he found himself driving across the bridge — and revisiting the incident, feeling a bit angry about getting injured, but more feeling grateful for not having shot someone. Now, a couple of weeks later, he said, he is no longer replaying it.

Zannelli said he’s proud that his officers displayed the kind of police work that New Haven trains cops to do. “They exercised great restraint,” he said. “Anywhere else, this could have ended up an officer-related shooting.” They could have shot the man that day on the bridge. But they didn’t need to.

Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:

• Keron Bryce and Steve McMorris

• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia

• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia (2)

• Steve Cunningham and Timothy Janus

• Robert DuPont and Rose Dell

• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer (2)

• Bleck Joseph and Marco Correa

• Monique Moore and David Santiago

• Caitlin Zerella, Derek Huelsman, David Diaz, Derek Werner, Nicholas Katz, and Paul Mandel