Re: 9/28/00 - NH Advocate: Murder is Silence
Murder is Silence
Hit & Run
By Paul Bass
Published 09/28/00
Someone murders a Yale student. New Haven police can't find the killer. But after a year, they update the public. They tell us what they've done to try to find the murderer. They even name a prominent suspect.
Someone murders a prostitute. New Haven police can't find the killer. Ten years later, they fight for the right to tell the public nothing.
Welcome to Chief Melvin Wearing's police department, a force whose credibility gap is growing into a canyon.
A year after the 1998 murder of a Yale student, Wearing held a press conference to update the world on the department's unsuccessful investigation. His chief of detectives publicly identified a suspect, a man the department has, to this day, not charged with a crime.
Most people don't remember the murder of Jacqueline Shaw. It happened 10 years ago this month. Police never found the killer. The trail turned cold.
Yet there were Mel Wearing's cops at a hearing in Hartford last week, concocting reasons for refusing to tell the public anything about the case.
The hearing took place at the headquarters of the state Freedom of Information Commission. The commission heard a New Haven Advocate appeal of Wearing's refusal to release records related to an interview cops did shortly after the Oct. 12, 1990 murder with an informant named Ovil Ruiz.
In refusing to release the records, Wearing cited the reason cops always cite: This is an "open case."
But that's not enough under Connecticut law as interpreted by the courts (most notably in a 1998 case called Department of Public Safety, Div. of State Police v. Freedom of Information Commission). Police have to prove that information they're withholding is crucial to a pending "law enforcement action." Or they have to prove that releasing the information could subject a witness or suspect to harm.
Otherwise, cops could always cover up bungling or corruption by stopping work on an embarrassing case, but deeming it permanently "open."
Wearing's new chief of detectives, Lt. Brian Norwood, testified at the hearing that releasing written reports related to Ruiz could "absolutely" jeopardize a prosecution. And, he testified, it could subject Ruiz to intimidation and threats.
Under questioning, he acknowledged that he knew of no actual threats to Ruiz based on Ruiz's interview in the case. He acknowledged that he knew of no pending arrest of a suspect. He claimed that the department does have a suspect. He claimed the police continue to work on the case.
When was the last time someone conducted an interview in this case? Sometime in the last two years, Norwood testified. He said he didn't know when.
He could have found a more precise answer from his predecessor as chief of detectives, Lt. Brian Sullivan. Sullivan testified earlier this year at an earlier Freedom of Information Commission hearing that the last interview took place two years ago.
After Norwood's flimsy testimony last week, FOIC Chairman Frederick Hennick ordered the police to give him the records, over the protests of the cops and City Hall lawyer present.
"I'm just asking this to help solve the mystery," Hennick explained. "For us to make an intelligent decision, we should take these documents in camera," for him to review privately.
After huddling, Chief Wearing's emissaries said they weren't sure precisely what they had relating to the original interview with Ovil Ruiz.
That effort earned a sharp retort from FOIC counsel Barbara Housen: "If you're saying, 'No, you can't have it' [to the press], you have to know what you have first."
Perhaps Wearing is merely acting like your basic cop: Keep secret information unless someone forces you to release it.
Or perhaps he is covering up information that might further embarrass his already humiliated department.
He's done it before. Just last year, Wearing refused Mayor John DeStefano's call to reopen an investigation of another 1990 murder, of former Alderman Ricardo Turner and his lover, for which two drug dealers received 70-year and 120-year sentences. The FBI concluded, after an extensive investigation, that a crooked detective had concocted those charges, that the wrong guys went to jail. The FBI found that the main piece of evidence against them--testimony from a drug-dealing informant who changed his story at least twice--was at best untrustworthy and very likely fully concocted. (See "The Cop & The 'Killer,'" Advocate, Sept. 17, 1998, <www.newhavenadvocate.com/ articles/copandkiller.html>.)
Guess who that informant was?
A guy named Ovil Ruiz.
The same Ovil Ruiz who apparently talked to cops early on about Jacqueline Shaw's murder. What police concluded then about Ruiz's reliability matters a lot right now to people who want to see justice revisited in the other 1990 murder.
What's Wearing hiding? He wasn't chief when these murders occurred. But as chief he's now responsible for redressing possible miscarriages of justice and for his department's public accountability.
Does Wearing worry that too much scrutiny of old records will reveal that plenty of people currently sit in jail because of trumped-up charges or sloppy work by his detectives?
Right now a state grand jury is wrapping up its investigation of another tainted murder case, in which city detectives sat on smoking evidence that could have solved the 1993 killing of Philip Cusick. Whether or not the grand jury indicts anyone, it has become clear that high-ranking cops lied to investigators about their actions.
As long as Wearing stonewalls the public, as long as he remains New Haven's police chief, justice will not be done. The force won't regain its credibility or emerge from its state of crisis.
E-mail: pbass@newhavenadvocate.com
newmassmedia.com |
