Re: 12/1/00 - New Haven Advocate: No "Accident" - Another killing covered up by the New Haven Police
No "Accident"
By PAUL BASS
New Haven Advocate
December 01, 2000
When Michael Tricaso fell to his death from the Crown Street parking garage, New Haven police termed it an "accident."
Even though they had the name of a man who threatened to kill Tricaso that night.
Even though an eyewitness from a drug gang claimed to have participated in a fight with Tricaso that night and watched a fellow gang member push him to his death.
Sound familiar?
The aborted investigation into Tricaso's Dec. 19, 1996, death mirrors New Haven cops' response to the murder of North Havener Philip Cusick, shot to death one month earlier in New Haven's Fair Haven neighborhood. A state grand jury will soon release results of an investigation into that coverup.
In both instances, New Haven police interviewed an eyewitness who named a potential killer. But they kept the names secret and the cases unsolved.
In both cases--the Cusick murder and the Tricaso death--key witnesses dealt with Detective Edwin Rodriguez.
These new revelations about Tricaso's death continue the snowballing series of misconduct scandals involving the department's detective division. (For a Web archive of Advocate stories on the scandals, see .)
After the Advocate inquired about the Tricaso case last week, Chief Mel Wearing (who was not chief in 1996) said he will reopen the investigation.
Tricaso, a 20-year-old New Haven man who worked at a fish market and had a history of alcohol abuse, plunged from the garage deck after a late night of partying at a downtown nightclub.
According to police records made available in response to a Freedom of Information requestion, detectives interviewed a friend who accompanied Tricaso to the nightclub that evening. The friend told detectives that a man inside the nightclub threatened to kill Tricaso or one of his group. The friend named the man who made the threat.
But the file shows no evidence that police ever tried to contact him man or even pursued the angle. Instead, they closed the case and deemed the death accidental.
Subsequently, two sources with direct knowledge of the case say, members of a Fair Haven drug gang told them that the gang chased Tricaso into the garage. The gang members said they watched Tricaso fall to his death amid that confrontation.
Police officer Keith Wortz, contacted after the Advocate reviewed the police file, says one of his informants in the gang was an eyewitness and told him the story. Wortz says he took the eyewitness to the police department for an interview with detectives.
"I brought the information to my supervisors. Everyone was made fully aware of it," Wortz says. "It wasn't just ignored. It was hushed."
Wortz's statement carries extra weight because he blew the whistle on the Cusick scandal. When superiors ignored his claims of a coverup, he took the information to the state's attorney's office. That led to the current grand jury investigation. It also led to an internal police investigation, based on which Chief Mel Wearing suspended the detective division's two top cops.
Tricaso's family and friends believe the cops, for whatever reason, let this case go.
"I don't think it was accidental. They [the cops] gave up an answer too quick. They didn't try to do nothing," says Robert Rivera, who accompanied Tricaso to the nightclub the night of his death.
"I believe he was pushed. He was streetwise. There's no way he fell," says Bob McNeil, Tricaso's former boss at Number 1 Fish Market in Hamden. "Had he been a Yale student, you wouldn't have heard the end of it. But because he was just a regular Joe, they just filed it away."
"This wasn't an accidental death," maintains Tricaso's sister, Elisia Smith, who's now 21. "I don't believe [the cops] went into the case the way they should have, especially with the evidence they had."
Michael's grandparents raised him and his two younger siblings. The kids' mother died when Michael was 4 or 5 "if that," according to his grandfather, a retired worker at a paper-box manufacturing plant. "She got so upset. She got to drinking. Her husband left her. She couldn't find a job. One thing led to another. She had a heart attack."
Like his mother, Michael battled substance abuse. His sister told police that he'd used marijuana and cocaine in the past and had recently finished a court-ordered alcohol-abuse education program as a condition of his probation for a drunk-driving conviction.
But he was a valued worker at Number 1 Fish Market, according to owner McNeil. "He was a great guy. I loved him. He was like a little Marine. He used to show up every morning, setting up the case meticulously. I was schooling him to be the manager. He always had a smile on him. "
Michael mainly grew up "a real good kid," his grandfather Frank says. "He finished high school. He went to work for a while. He was going to go back to school [to study car repair] when all this happened," Frank recalls.
"All this" began happening the evening of Nov. 18, 1996. Tricaso came home from work and got together with three male friends. According to transcripts of police interviews with the friends, they sat around drinking 40-ounce beers at one of their homes and playing on the computer. Around 9:30 they left in two cars to hang out at Gatsby's nightclub on Crown Street. Along the way they stopped at a Quinnipiac Avenue gas station to buy Philly Blunt cigars.
At the club, one of the friends knew a bouncer, who sold them colored wristbands that allow wearers to be served alcohol--even though the bouncer knew three of the four were under 21. (The bouncer admitted this in a police interview.) The friends drank beers and shots of tequila. At one point they slipped into an alleyway outside the club to smoke a Blunt, the tobacco replaced with marijuana.
At one point, a Hispanic man walked up to Javier Rivera, the only Hispanic member of the Tricaso foursome. Rivera told Detective Rodriguez that he knew the man, according to a transcript of his police interview.
In the interview, Rivera identified the man by both his street name and his real name. He said the man "approached me and he said I'm gonna blast one of them kids, stay away from them, my, one of my friends, he meant one of us, one of the group. ... He said he was gonna shoot one of us."
The man pointed to Tricaso and his two other friends. But he didn't specify which of the three he planned to kill, according to the transcript.
Tricaso and another of the friends later took two women to an apartment for a while, according to the transcript. They returned to the club after hours. The friendly bouncer allowed them back in for more drinking.
Eventually, according to his friend, Tricaso proclaimed that he was too drunk to drive home. He left the club, and his friends, behind, according to the police reports. It was sometime after midnight.
Later that evening, the Crown Street garage's security guard heard a crash while making his rounds. He peered over the edge of one of the parking levels. He later told police he saw three men "he recognized as having committed criminal activity in the garage in the past" fleeing the scene.
Later still, a homeless man who'd been bumming change around College and Crown streets found Tricaso's body behind an abandoned building that backs up to the garage. After going through Tricaso's wallet, he alerted people on the street and called the cops, according to the reports. The police came, taped off the scene, called an ambulance. Efforts to revive Tricaso at the hospital failed. He was pronounced dead at 3:02 a.m.
Tricaso had parked his blue Toyota Corrolla in a surface lot around the corner, not in the garage. He was found without his sneakers on.
What was Tricaso doing in the garage? How did he get up there? What about those three guys spotted fleeing the garage?
The file contains no evidence that the police pursued any of these questions.
Not even the following January, when an informant we'll call Felipe came to police headquarters to spill his guts.
Felipe (not his real name) belonged to a Fair Haven gang known informally as the "Stick-up Boys" and "Poucho's Posse." Officer Wortz brought him to the New Haven police department on Jan. 1, 1997, to give information on a variety of cases. Detectives Rodriguez and Thomas Trocchio taped an interview with him.
Some of the contents of that interview appear in an arrest warrant application for an unrelated case, filed in the state court system. Trocchio recorded at length information Felipe gave him about his gang's involvement in a shooting at the corner of Peck and Rowe streets, a drug-dealing area. Based on that information, the cops made arrests in the case.
That shooting occurred one day after and two blocks away from where Philip Cusick was shot.
In the arrest warrant application, Trocchio notes that Felipe "advised officers of his desire to provide information on several unsolved shootings and robberies" in New Haven. Trocchio also vouches for Felipe's reliability: "[Felipe] provided detailed information concerning three (3) other violent street robberies/shootings. The information given by [Felipe] contains details that only a person present could know and is consistent with known facts of the cases. Continued investigation of these other cases has corroborated [Felipe]'s statements and is leading to the application [for] arrest warrants."
The affidavit makes no reference to the two fatal cases Keith Wortz says Felipe brought information about: the Cusick murder and the Tricaso death.
Felipe is currently serving time in a state prison. Contacted by mail, he declined comment.
Chief Wearing also initially declined comment last week, other than to say through a spokeswoman that Capt. Brian Sullivan made the determination to close the Tricaso investigation and call his death accidental. Wearing also noted that this happened when Nicholas Pastore served as chief. Sullivan is one of the two top cops Wearing suspended for allegedly lying to internal investigators about the Cusick case.
Sullivan could not be reached for comment.
Pastore resigned as police chief seven weeks after the Tricaso death. Wearing, Pastore's assistant chief, succeeded Pastore as chief.
"As far as I was concerned, this was an ongoing investigation," Pastore says. "Sudden deaths usually take more than a few weeks to come to finality--and are always subject to being reopened." Pastore says he was unfamiliar with the investigation's details.
After the Advocate sought comment from Mayor John DeStefano, Wearing called the paper. "If there's any wrongdoing in this case, I want to know," he said. "We have to get to the bottom of this stuff. I take this seriously. The case is now open." He said he plans to assign Keith Wortz to the case when Wortz returns to work. Wortz has been on leave after reporting that cops implicated in the Cusick scandal threatened him. Wearing recently promoted Wortz to detective and asked him to return to work.
Like the Cusick murder, the Tricaso case presents disturbing facts about the local police that beg larger questions. Were they sloppy? Were they protecting criminals? Were they concerned about keeping the murder statistics down?
Or did they just not care?
E-mail: pbass@newhavenadvocate.com
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