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Pastimes : Murder Mystery: Who Killed Yale Student Suzanne Jovin? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeffrey S. Mitchell who wrote (858)	12/13/2000 10:12:29 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1397

Re: 12/14/00 - NH Advocate: Angels Above, Angels Below Angels Above, Angels Below Hit & Run By Paul Bass Published 12/14/00 The villain ran the detective department. Angels worked below him. Angels worked above him. A dead body was found. The killer went free. The cops could have caught him. But the villain hid the evidence. The villain blamed it on one of the angels above him. But he was lying. The angels below him wanted to see justice served but feared the villain, so they did nothing. That synopsis comes from this season's long-awaited must-read story: a grand jury report on the New Haven police coverup of the 1996 murder of Philip Cusick. The 11-page report, written by state Superior Court Judge Carmen Elisa Espinosa sitting as a one-woman grand jury, was released Monday. It culminated a seven-month investigation that saw 57 witnesses tromp through Espinosa's New Britain courtroom. Espinosa's plain-language narrative reads like a novel. (Read it on our Web site, .) It offers a powerful story that puts to rest the benign theory that the Cusick case involved little more than carelessness by cops who "forgot" that an eyewitness statement naming a murder suspect was sitting in a drawer for two years. But the grand jury report also reads at times more like fiction than fact. Does the judge really believe that so many people with so much to hide told her nothing but the truth--and that the story has only one villain? The villain in her tale is New Haven Police Capt. Brian Sullivan, a laconic 25-year veteran with a just-the-facts mien and a penchant for wry, corner-of-the-mouth quips. Sullivan ran the department's detective division when police found Cusick's body in November 1996. Detectives soon learned that Cusick had been shot in New Haven's Fair Haven neighborhood; a friend later dumped his body outside Cusick's mom's North Haven home. New Haven insisted, though, that this was officially a North Haven case. New Haven would "help" North Haven investigate. Sixteen months later, New Haven detectives took a statement from an eyewitness who named a suspect in the Cusick shooting. According to the grand jury report, the detectives told Sullivan they wanted a search warrant for the suspect's home. Instead, Sullivan told them "to stop the investigation 'per order of the Chief.'" They did. "The detectives who took the statement, although very upset ... did not question Sullivan as to his reasons," Espinosa writes. "Initially, they thought that perhaps their work may have interfered with another more serious investigation to which they were not privy and which was being handled by another agency. They also feared reprisal from Sullivan who had previously removed other officers from the Cusick investigation." Sullivan's second-in-command, Sgt. Edward Kendall, asked Sullivan "if the order had really come from the Chief." Sullivan said yes, so Kendall "did not pursue the matter further," according to Espinosa. Then, according to Espinosa, Sullivan told Kendall to retrieve the tape of the interview and the typed transcript from the property room and hold onto them pending further orders--which never came. Later, "Kendall lost the cassette tape," Espinosa writes. You've gotta wonder what Espinosa would have thought if these cops told her their division was a unit of the Boy Scouts of America. It seems more than a coincidence that the grand jury exonerated all those cops who told Espinosa their stories--and that the only one who took the Fifth, Sullivan, emerged as the villain. Some of those cops have committed questionable acts in other investigations. Both Sullivan and Kendall have been on paid leave since soon after the scandal broke. Kendall had the most to gain by pinning all the blame on Sullivan; now he won't face criminal charges. (However, City Hall's lawyers planned to ask the city police commission Tuesday night to bring both Kendall and Sullivan up on charges of violating departmental rules.) Sullivan may or may not be guilty of covering up this murder. With this grand jury report, he is unquestionably a scapegoat. Espinosa recommends prosecuting only Sullivan. It strains credulity to suggest he was surrounded by choir boys, none of whom went along. It strains credulity to believe that, during the two years that then-patrolman Keith Wortz tried to blow the whistle internally on this coverup, no one noticed. Could Sullivan truly have covered up this case all by himself? Sullivan's actions grow darker in the next section of Espinosa's potboiler. She reports that after hiding the eyewitness statement, Sullivan contacted North Haven's deputy police chief. He reported that he "may have some information" on the case. They got together. Sullivan asked to review North Haven's entire file. Then he never mentioned the eyewitness statement. Twice more, according to the report, Sullivan lied to North Haven about having "nothing new." At this point, it becomes impossible to explain away this case as one that slipped through the busy fingers of an overworked division. Whatever its other flaws, the grand jury report makes clear that we're talking coverup. But why? Espinosa's report leaves that question unanswered. That heartens Capt. Sullivan's attorney, Hugh Keefe, who plans to maintain Sullivan's innocence if the case goes to trial. "From a legal standpoint, motive is irrelevant," observes Keefe. "From a practical standpoint, that's all juries are interested in. You've got to be able to tell juries a story." Judge Espinosa probably told enough of a story to get Sullivan charged with suppressing evidence and helping Philip Cusick's killer stay free. By limiting her tale to one villain, she let others off the hook--and deepened the motive mystery behind the whodunit. E-mail: pbass@newhavenadvocate.com newmassmedia.com