Milford police say a local man is accused of assaulting a woman and trying to keep her from calling 911 for help.
Police said on Nov. 7 officers received a complaint of a possible domestic violence incident at a Stone Manor home.
Investigation
led to the arrest of Karl Sachs, 51, of Stone Manor Drive, who is
accused of engaging in a physical altercation with a female inside the
residence, police said.
Get free real-time news alerts from the Milford Patch.
At
one point the victim attempted to dial 911 and the phone was knocked
out of her hand as she was thrown to the floor, police said.
Sachs is charged with disorderly conduct, third-degree assault, and interrupting an emergency call.
This archived post is one that I put up every year at September 11th. It haunts me and inspires me. 9/11 was a huge crime against humanity as well as every victim that died that day. Please read with caution:
While
recently researching an article called "The Falling Man" I came upon
two tape recordings of 9-1-1 calls made by two victims trapped in the
higher floors of Tower Two which, horrifyingly collapsed in the middle of a call made by one man named Kevin Cosgrove The other call was made by a young Mellissa Doi, who also perished in tower two. The heat from the Planes Fuel weakened the structure and it's floors began to collapse, one on top of the other. Mr.
Cosgrove was still holding out hope huddled under a desk on the 103rd
floor of that tower as it fell inadvertently recording his death as he
spoke to the 911 operator. Fifteen minutes later.. Tower one, the first one to be hit by another Hijacked Plane, collapsed. As
all of us across the Country watched this unfolding on live TV we were
given panned back camera shots of the burning buildings. Still I
imagined the horrors we spared from seeing; Close up views of the raw
suffering and mayhem happening to the brave souls still trapped within
the Towers wouldn't come until later. Hundreds
of First Responders were killed as they rushed into buildings that were
hopelessly ensconced in A raging Jet fueled fire. The Firemen trudged
up 70-90 flights of stairs, carrying heavy gear dragging hoses to save
the handful of lives that they encountered along the way. Many perished
when the buildings collapsed. For
a year at least as a Country, especially in the Northeast, we banded
together in a collective yet unfamiliar connectedness, borne of this
cowardly act of Terror, something that every one of us was affected by
in our own unique way, but for all, in perpetuity:. We would never be
the same. However, amidst the nagging pain and anger evolved another en masse emotion: PRIDE. We
were proud proud of both our civilians and the First Responders alike.
Fireman, Policeman and other heroes were rampant in rushing to help
others. Tugboat captains rushed to get People out of harms way off the
island, as there was no other way out - the streets bridges were not passable. Ferries loaded with people traversed back and forth. No one knew if more attacks were coming. Manhattan
looked like a war zone and in fact it was. Living in Connecticut I was
born in New York City albeit until I was ten years of age, I still feel a
native New-Yorker Memories
and photos of my sisters and I skating in Rockefeller Center with our
father were heavy on my mind. His impressively loud whistle, reserved
for hailing cabs which I will always recall the smell of the seats.
Trips to Radio City Music Hall all and more are part and parcel of me
and always will be. As
nice as Westport Connecticut was, it was not New York City. However,
the City's influence being 45t minutes away ran throughout this
originally artistic community. Known for its theater artists writers
Westport became a teeming Commuter town. The New York City line was
barely discernible to many of us, it was a cultural influence even to
those who were born and bred in Westport and other Connecticut towns. Back to my original article about September 11th. I re-post this every year on this Sacred Day. Below is a continuation from
the first few paragraphs at the start of this Post where I mentioned
how this all began for me, researching the "Falling Man "Article in
Esquire Magazine. Note:
These two 911 tapes were instrumental in the Prosecution of the one
sole Terrorist that was arrested for helping plan the attack, Zacarias Moussaoui .
He was completely impassive as the everyone in the Courtroom weeped as
they listened. Mrs Cosgrove has allowed the release and she made a
victim impact statement also regarding the effects of the loss of her
husband on her children's lives. Courageous Woman, I am awed by her
strength.
.
Not
knowing what I would be hearing when I came upon the 911 taped calls I
was reluctant but feeling I owed it to the victims, I finally listened
to them. It was excruciating, heartbreaking and life-changing. .
As
I listened, I found myself experiencing the physical symptoms that each
caller was enduring; the black thick smoke that was choking Mr
Cosgrove, the terrible heat that young Mellisa Doi kept crying to the
operator that she and her coworkers could not escape. They were standing
on desks. The growing
panic fear and frustration of the poor 911 operator was evident as she
tried to calm these embattled people she knew were likely to die. The
callers were placated, told that help was coming, but not given any
concrete information and communication regarding one open stairwell in
tower two was not even known until too late by fire fighters. Kevin
Cosgrove actually worked at Aon Corporation on the 83rd floor. But,
as designated Fire official for that Aon office, he tried to make
certain that most of his group of employees evacuated after the North
tower was hit. He
then called his wife and began the descent down the stairs on foot just
as the second plane hit the south tower. The explosion and heat smoke
drove him right back up now to the higher floors, to the roof - this the
where his fire training had always taught him to go in situations like
this- to ascend was one's only hope to the roof, for a helicopter
rescue. Tragically. the roof door was locked,
as was the roof-door on the North tower -hundreds of people attempted
that same superhuman climb up miles of stairs, many flooded, covered
with debris only to discover locked doors. The
word was that there was no chance that a helicopter landing was
possible in either building anyway; they say that the smoke and heat
made any rood rescue impassible yet I watched those helicopters and
small planes circling those towers and I was sol very frustrated and
angry as I imagined the office workers trapped with broken windows and
flames behind them, wondering why the rescue helicopters were not
attempting to help them? Perhaps ladders
of rope to swing to the broken windows as the copters hovered as close
as they possibly could to the buildings. All I know is there were
hundreds of people waving flags sheets shirts and scraps of material
climbing down the face of the building, believing that those helicopters
were there for a reason, for some kind of rescue...and yet, there was
none. In
the meantime Kevin took his exhausted body and climbed back
down flights and flights of stairwells by foot, facing growing smoke
labored breathing and panic; he must have run into the first office
where he spotted other men or voices gathered It was this office on
the Southwest corner facing the financial center that he made his now,
infamous 9-1-1 telephone call from.
As one person expressed so aptly, at the end of Kevin Congreve's call "I found myself not wanting to let go of him." And like many others who chose listen to these phone calls, they have forever changed my perspective of that terrible day.
Kevin Cosgrove's
9-1-1 call was one of three used as evidence in the Moussaui
trial, and this is why It has become available to the public via the
freedom of information act. After
reading this post in it's entirety if you wish to listen to the tape, I
have embedded the most tasteful version that I could find. It has
a heart warming biography of Mr Cosgrove's life giving us a real feel
for who he was at his very core. A man who desperately wanted to live
for his family whom he kept mentioning. . I
must warn all readers that these tapes will be an extremely emotional
experience, and it will forever change anyone who listens to it. At
first, I regretted having listened to them because they were so
upsetting so raw, so real, and much worse than I expected. However, I came to the realization that I should not regret listening and sharing in these two callers pain. I
was bearing witness and thus as every victim of crime needs I along
with anyone who listened validated these and all of the victims
experience. It was for me a necessary pain A
pain that ultimately transformed 911 from a terrible terror based
tragedy, to something altogether more more personal, more human more TRUE. The
pain that all of us feel upon hearing these desperate callers describe
the horrific conditions in the towers, their fear over their likely
imminent deaths, and the distress in having to leave their families and
loved ones, made us now feel that we knew them. By becoming privy to
the most intimate last moments of their lives, this has allowed us to
honor their experience without the whitewashed effect of pulled back
news camera shots of a burning buildings, thousands of feet in the air. Even
the sudden and awful collapse of the towers into veritable dust bowl,
like so much else that happened that day, was somehow surreal when it
happened. It is not that we couldn't and didn't consider the horror of
what was likely going on way up where our eyes could not see, it just
wasn't in our face and we gratefully took advantage of that kind
distance, because really, the horror might have been too much for us at
that time. The voices of the people on these tapes however will be with us forever The people themselves will thus reside in us. We carry them now. I do not suggest listening as voyeurs, but as caring witnesses
. We can use the powerful emotions that are triggered in us the
empathy, the pain and even the anger-to bring us to a new level of
awareness; about violence, crime, tragedy, justice, Life and death.
Hopefully with the help of a higher power, we can then use this
awareness wisely and do only positive things with it. These good things
shall become the legacy of those who perished that day, victims and
heroes all. When
reading the memorial pages of the 911 callers, many people shared that
the problems that has seemed so important in their lives prior to
listening to Kevin Cosgrove's desperate last minutes on earth,
immediately were diminished. And this experience was not a rare thing,
in fact a great deal of folks cited this as a turning point in their
lives, an appreciation for every hour of every day, marked by the
experience of listening to these tapes. Thousands of good
people expressed gratitude to Kevin Cosgrove and his family for giving
them an opportunity to rethink the value of their lives through his
heroism. Kevin Cosgrove's Memorial Page New
messages appear daily from all over the world, more since the 911 tapes
were released. Somehow I am certain that the Cosgrove family reads
them, and I only hope that they provide solace to them, knowing that
their beloved father husband son and friend, has had such a
life-changing impact on so many. Many
people will embrace their daily lives,hours and minutes once taken for
granted. Time and again, I read memorial messages from young folks not
old enough to grasp the reality of September 11th when it happened but,
who share that they've shed their first tears about this tragedy, by
listening to Kevin's final minutes and his his death. My
hope is that we will be more inclined to spend our time ministering,or
helping - people in pain or in need; This is the legacy of Kevin
Cosgrove. There are thousands of people like Kevin who suffered the same
pain and so many exhibited bravery and courage we cannot fathom. May you all rest in God's loving arms Your spirits in eternal comfort,
Domestic Violence crimes statistically pose the most danger to Policeman and women and this Fairfield shooting is indicative of this very kind of danger. In this case the perpetrator was fatally shot and we are left with the usual disbelief of friends and neighbors who often claim that they never saw this side of the man who was abusing his spouse.
The prototypical batterer is very often charming and pleasant in social situations but upon closer scrutiny family members sometimes see signs of abuse whether it is physical emotional or both.
Statistically speaking, it is police officer who becomes a fatality in Domestic violence calls like this. Story in Connecticut Post
However in this case the alleged perpetrator, a well liked attorney Christopher Andrews, was fatally shot by the Fairfield Police Department. Very little is known about the shooting other than the fact that Andrews had assaulted his wife and child with a knife and blunt force trauma prior to being shot by visiting police.
Milford police say at 11 p.m. on Dec. 9 officers investigated a domestic violence call that took place in a motor vehicle in the 1300 block of the Boston Post Road.
Investigation led to the arrest of Tony Jackson, 36, of Deer Meadow Drive in Bloomfield, who was driving the vehicle at the time it was stopped and he was allegedly found to be in possession of a Taser-style stun gun.
RIYADH—Supporters of Islamic State carried out the deadly attack in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed 14 people, the militant group said Saturday in an online news bulletin.
In a broadcast on al-Bayan Radio, authenticated by SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors and tracks radical groups online, the group said it considered the two shooters “martyrs.” Islamic State tends to claim a wide range of attacks, though its involvement is often disputed.
Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, are the main suspects in Wednesday’s massacre, which took place at a gathering of county employees, also leaving 21 people wounded.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday it was investigating the shooting as a terrorist act.
FBI Director James Comey said the couple had shown signs of adopting radical ideas and “potential inspiration by foreign terrorist organizations.”
Ms. Malik posted a message on FacebookFB1.72% pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, Mr. Comey said.
Investigators are still looking into the circumstances of how the couple met and what led them to carry out the attack.
A new report from George Washington University's Program on Extremism sheds light on the radicalization of American ISIS supporters. WSJ's Shelby Holliday highlights three key findings.
Mr. Comey said that, so far, there are no indications the two suspects were part of a broader terror cell, and that the two suspects hadn’t been previously on the FBI’s radar.
Mr. Farook was a U.S. native born to Pakistani immigrants. Ms. Malik was a Pakistani national who had formerly lived in Saudi Arabia, where her family moved for work around 25 years ago.
Saudi authorities indicated on Saturday that it was unlikely that the couple had met in the kingdom.
The interior ministry said Mr. Farook made two visits to Saudi Arabia. The first was in June 2014 for nine days to perform umrah—also known as the lesser pilgrimage. The second was for performing the hajj in 2013. He came from the United Arab Emirates, entered the kingdom on Oct. 1 and left on Oct. 20.
Ms. Malik entered Saudi Arabia twice with a Pakistani passport to visit family, a spokesman for the Saudi interior ministry said.
The first visit was in July 2008 coming from Pakistan. She stayed for nine weeks before returning to Pakistan. The second visit was in June 2013, again coming from Pakistan. She entered the kingdom on June 8 and left for India on Oct. 6 before the start of the hajj, according to the Saudi official.
Document the Abuse (documenttheabuse.com) is gearing up awareness campaigns for October to coincide with National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Campaigns will be launched across all social media channels as well as through outreach to individuals and community organizations.
Pastor Neil Schori of Naperville Christian Church in Naperville, Illinois has developed a campaign that will address the faith-based community and it’s role in assisting victims of intimate partner violence. (safefaithcommunity.com)
Schori hopes to encourage leaders to become safe havens for victims of abuse and to duplicate what he has set up in his home church.
According to Schori, “Victims often have limited resources available to seek immediate and long-term help when leaving an abusive relationship, especially those considered high risk. We have established a system of counseling and referrals, along with assisting victims in preparing an Evidentiary Abuse Affidavit (EAA), which we intend to bring to other church leaders.”
The EAA was developed during the high-profile disappearance of Stacy Peterson when Schori, who was Peterson’s pastor, was approached by intimate partner violence prevention activist, Susan Murphy-Milano. Together they were able to utilize video equipment in the church, along with Murphy-Milano’s methods, to establish the outlines of the EAA, a notarized testimony containing details to build a better case for prosecution if the need arises.
Training sessions are available to certify the Evidentiary Abuse Affidavit (EAA). Neil Schori will be holding a training at Naperville Christian Church in October, and Sandra Brown, CEO of The Institute for Relational Harm Reduction, will be holding EAA training for mental health professionals on November 11 in Hilton Head, SC. For details or registration, please refer to the TRAINING page at Document the Abuse website.
To become involved in Document the Abuse and it’s October campaign download graphic files from the website to share across social media platforms and use the hashtag #IAmSafe.
Join with others to become a Safe Person during the October campaign, it only takes a minute to take the pledge.
Together they were able to utilize video equipment in the church, along with Murphy-Milano’s methods, to establish the outlines of the EAA, a notarized testimony containing details to build a better case for prosecution if the need arises.
If it didn't happen one way, it would happen another. When the
horrifically untimely "Prospective" Death Penalty Repeal was passed by a
slim margin in 2012 by the Connecticut Legislature everybody in the
know, knew that the men that were sitting on death row in
Connecticut when the repeal was passed, would never be put to death.
As all on-board lawyers were happy to point out, historically every
other state where Prospective DP Repeals were passed, the very nature
of the prospective language held the door was wide open for defense attorneys to argue (successfully) that if the State decided that the death
Penalty was cruel and unusual punishment at a particular juncture, then
it only followed reason, that it could not and should not, be imposed
retrospectively upon their client because ....well basically,' it just
wasn't fair.' Excuse the sarcastic summation, but this is in fact what
their arguments boiled down to.
Mike Lawlor, then influential Connecticut Legislator and
Co - chair of the Connecticut Judiciary Committee, largely instigated
and co-authored the 2012 Repeal bill as well as the new Capital Punishment law that prevailed in it's stead.
Lawlor and his inseparable but substantially less vociferous compatriot, then State Senator Andrew MacDonald, also co-chair of the Judiciary Committee, concurred with Lawlor that the death penalty had to go because A) Connecticut was one of the "last New England States" to abolish the Death Penalty - the implication being that we were " archaic" behind the times and therefore politically incorrect. Thus the repeal of the death penalty was a foregone conclusion.
Furthermore we were informed by Lawlor and other high profile anti death penalty activists and lawyer contrarians such as Norm Pattis et al, in every other State
whereby the Death Penalty was repealed "prospectively", the aforementioned actual application of said Sentence wound up being tossed out in the
higher courts time and again, thus assuring that not one convicted murderer on death row, were ever executed as a result of the repeal regardless of what was sold to the wavering members of the legislature and the citizens of the State at the time.
This is particularly infuriating when one is familiar with the excessively thorough and fair process which the state invariably paid for both sides of, that preceded the rare imposition of an actual death sentence in the State of Connecticut. The bottom line is that whole Juries comprised of our dedicated citizens carefully weighed mitigating and aggravating factors as charged by Judges and found twelve men deserving of a death Penalty sentence for what were found to be particularly brutal cruel pre-meditated murders of innocent human beings.
This was the presiding law at the time of these crimes and these men were each afforded their due process and found wanting. They were given this sentence after tremendous amount of evidence and deliberation.
What just transpired within Connecticut's Supreme Court in effect
washed away the need for any of those silly time consuming legal arguments also known as due
process, albeit fruitless due process with a predictable end result. In this case it was already smugly predicted by a gaggle of indignant Lawyers, Legislators, Anti- Death penalty activists and the Governor's hand picked yes men, one of whom now sits as a Connecticut Supreme Court Justice.
Of course this judicial farce occurred after the Prospective Death Penalty Repeal Bill was passed; at which point those who naively trusted the proponents and authors of the new Capital Punishment bill, as well as our newly appointed Governor who signed it into law, discovered that this "prospective" business was nothing more than a disingenuous farce, a plastic bone thrown to the reluctant legislators who were on the fence (and would not have voted to pass the bill otherwise)as well as something to soften the blow and quell the loud opposition of our State's law abiding citizens, still reeling from a succession of particularly brutal murders, each crime happening because of the ineptitude, ill placed liberalism, and plainly put - corruption of State's Judicial system.
While we're on the subject of Lawlor, Macdonald and Company, am I the only one that sees the impropriety of ex-Senator turned Governor Malloy appointed Supreme Court Justice-- Andrew Macdonald, having a crucial and official role in this decision regarding Prospective Death Penalty sentencing?
Macdonald had considerable clout insofar as the State's original tenacious and insistent repeal of the Death Penalty. Indeed he was part of both the concept of abolishment, which at first was officially presented to the public as a money saving measure for a ballooning State Budget - although prior to this, the people of this state that wanted to keep the death penalty as its capital punishment (which repeated Quinnipiac polls proved were a 60-75 percent majority) were en masse chastised for being a blood thirsty and vengeful people and then as it rolled along, the Repeal gathered the usual fare; that it is archaic, that it is inequitably used as a sentence and the like. Oh yeah and then there's that monetarily wasteful part; due to the obscenely ludicrous automatic appeals process that in essence crippled it's actual application. That's the part that they don't generally mention.
In any event Jurist Macdonald should have indeed recused himself from the entire Supreme Court oversight of this already inappropriately designated issue that had no business being heard within the Sacred confines of our States Highest Court having in effect played political leap frog and making a farce of our State's already corrupt and crony - ridden Criminal/Judicial system
If hope is the thing with feathers, then dread is the thing with claws. A story like that of the Petit family sinks its talons into you and refuses to let go. “One of the worst crimes in Connecticut history,” as The New York Times called it, was notable neither for a sensational body count nor for brainwashed perpetrators, à la the Manson “family.”
Only three people died on the night of July 23, 2007, at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive in Cheshire, Connecticut. Car crashes routinely exact a greater toll. Gang violence on the South Side of. Chicago might take five times that number on any summer weekend. But dread is unencumbered by statistics, just as it is immune to reason.
When photos of the victims appeared on television screens the night after the crime, many Americans saw slightly better versions of themselves. The Petits—an endocrinologist and his nurse wife—were well-off but not rich, good-looking but not striking. Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, was starting to show her age; Dr. William Petit Jr., 50, could lose some weight.
Their house, two beige stories in the colonial style, was no gaudy McMansion of a Wall Street derivatives baron. Their daughters were next-doorish, their smiles for the camera always properly awkward, as befitting that more innocent era before duckface. Hayley, 17, was going to attend Dartmouth. Michaela, 11, liked Rachael Ray. If their lives could be so thoroughly rent apart, then so could yours. So could anyone’s.
The two men who intruded on the Petits’ blissfully average existence were Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky. They too, in a sense, were average, at least as far as criminality was concerned. They weren’t people-hurters but, rather, stuff-takers. They dealt drugs and took drugs. They were, until that night, two down-and-out white guys in a state with some of the richest white people in the nation. They later said they thought the robbery at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive would be a simple transaction, conducted with minimal violence.
Arriving at the Petit house a little before 3 a.m., they went around back and found Dr. Petit asleep in the sunroom, where he had been reading reports for work. Komisarjevsky beat the doctor over the head with a baseball bat. The doctor awoke, horribly confused. The two men tied him up. Later, they took Petit down to the basement, where they bound him to a pipe. Komisarjevsky propped him up on some pillows. He presumably did not want the doctor, who was bleeding, to be uncomfortable.
Upstairs, Michaela was in bed next to her mother, having fallen asleep while reading a Harry Potter novel. Hayley was snoozing in her own bed. All three women were bound, and pillowcases were put over their heads.
Hayes and Komisarjevsky spent the next several hours looking for valuables and cash, without finding much of anything. By morning, they were frustrated. Around 9 a.m., Hayes took Jennifer Hawke-Petit to a Bank of America branch, where she withdrew $15,000. In the midst of doing so, she was able to alert a bank teller. The teller told a manager, who called the police.
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That first call came at 9:21 a.m. “We have a lady who is in our bank right now who says that her husband and children are being held at their house,” the manager said, adding that the woman who withdrew the exorbitantly large sum appeared to be “petrified.”
Police did not intercept Hayes, who drove away from the bank with Hawke-Petit. Maybe if he were a little smarter, he would have left Hawke-Petit on some stretch of suburban road and fled, $15,000 in his pocket. But instead of bolting, he dutifully returned to 300 Sorghum Mill Drive and discovered that while he had been at the bank, Komisarjevsky had performed oral sex on Michaela, an act he captured on his cellphone.
It remains unexplained why, as the police circled the house at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, nobody even thought to knock on the door, ring the bell, just call the house phone. Something so simple could have saved three lives.
At 9:51 a.m., a bloodied Dr. Petit emerged from the basement. His feet still bound, he rolled across the lawn toward the house of a neighbor, who emerged in confusion, not recognizing the bloodied form before him. A police officer also approached.
“The girls are in the house!” Dr. Petit shouted.
The exact sequence of events is unclear, but it seems that, in quick succession, Dr. Petit escaped from the basement and Hayes strangled Hawke-Petit in response. Then the two men doused the house in gasoline, in hasty preparation for a gruesome final act they had not known they were about to stage.
Both men later said the other lit the match.
At 9:56 a.m., Hayes and Komisarjevsky burst out of 300 Sorghum Mill Drive. They tried to drive away in the Petits’ SUV but rammed a police vehicle and were quickly apprehended. The Petit house, meanwhile, burned as a summer rain fell on Cheshire.
By the time firefighters made it inside, there was nobody left to save. Michaela had died of smoke inhalation in her bed while Hayley managed to free herself, only to succumb to fire and smoke at the top of the staircase.
In the eight years since the crime, the two killers and the night’s lone survivor have spoken haltingly and contradictorily to the press, so that some of the most fundamental questions about 7/23/07 remain unanswered.
McDonald allegedly paid Komisarjevsky $300 for his story and in the course of visiting and corresponding with him, appears to have been charmed by the killer. McDonald’s affection for “Joshua” is almost as creepy as “Joshua” himself.
Two years ago came an HBO documentary, The Cheshire Murders, which was the first time many outside Connecticut saw images of the crime: the charred remains of the Petit house, baby photos of the girls, jerky security camera footage of Hawke-Petit at the bank, looking like an average suburban mother, which is exactly what she had been until the previous night. “People in town refer to it as ‘Cheshire’s 9/11,’” a friend of the Petits says in the HBO documentary. “Life was one way, and then it’s another.”
The pairing of Komisarjevsky and Hayes would have been comical, were it not so horrible. The duo were a malevolent Quixote and Panza, transplanted from dusty Spain to Connecticut, a state of silent factories, hedge fund mansions and strip malls, rivaled only by New Jersey in its juxtapositions between wealth and poverty.
Steven J. Hayes was a pudgy crack addict who could barely mastermind a ham sandwich. As a child, he was abused by a baby sitter, which a forensic psychiatrist would later testify led him to develop a sneaker fetish. His two brothers, both of whom appear in The Cheshire Murders, show an arresting absence of compassion for their sibling, their bloodlust at once deeply personal and utterly dispassionate.
“Fuck the trial,” says Matthew Hayes. “Flip the switch.”
“I hope it doesn’t even go that far,” says Brian Hayes. “I hope somebody puts a bullet in his head outside the courtroom.”
Hayes was an adolescent when he started drinking and smoking weed. He was first arrested at 16; by the time of the Cheshire murders, when he has 44, Hayes had been in jail or prison on 26 separate occasions, mostly for minor stuff that portended no murderous intent.
This was a guy who prowled the parking lots of parks, looking for cars in which joggers or walkers had left purses or wallets. When he wasn’t stealing or doing time for stealing, he worked in restaurants.
Joshua Komisarjevsky is the more intriguing of the two, a kid with money and looks who never managed to trade on either. He was adopted at birth by a family that, on the paternal side, boasted both White Russians and New England blue-bloods.
His adoptive grandfather was Theodore Komisarjevsky, one of the preeminent figures of belle époque Russian theater. After Theodore Komisarjevsky died, his widow, Ernestine Stodelle, a dancer, married John Chamberlain, a Yale man who wrote for The New York Times. A good deal of Joshua Komisarjevsky’s childhood was spent on Chamberlain’s 65-acre Cheshire estate.
Komisarjevsky’s adoptive father, Benedict, was an electrician, while his mother was a school librarian; both parents were devout Baptists who sometimes spoke in tongues. As a child, Komisarjevsky was diagnosed as having oppositional defiant disorder. He was abused by an adoptive brother and, later, abused an adoptive sister. His mother pulled him out of school and educated him at home and, for a time, at a Christian academy.
Whether out of boredom or psychic distress, Komisarjevsky started to come apart around the time he turned 14. His mother later said he came under the influence of a “satanic cult,” though it may have been only some local hooligans.
Whatever the case, “he was breaking into an average of eight houses a week in Cheshire” by 1994, according to McDonald. “There was something sexual about the act of burglarizing houses for Joshua.” The following year came the death of his grandfather, Chamberlain, whom Komisarjevsky would call “one of the most pervasively inspiring role models of my life.”
Shortly thereafter, Komisarjevsky was sent to a psychiatric hospital, after what appears to have been a suicide attempt.But, as McDonald wrote, his parents were distrustful of psychiatric medicine: “For the Komisarjevskys, Jesus Christ was the answer to their son’s problems.”
They sent him to a religious camp in Maine where he’d previously spent summers. He toured with a Christian music group, which proved a happy time, maybe the happiest time.
Back in Connecticut, he joined the Army Reserves, less out of duty than as a way to escape jail (stolen sneakers, concealed knife). He wanted to become a sniper, but he left after basic training and drifted, once again, back to Connecticut.
There, he dealt drugs and used drugs. “He was out of money,” McDonald wrote, “and had very few friends.”
In 2006, both men were at a halfway house in Hartford. The narrative of ablution and renewal must have been, to them, both familiar and preposterous, an official fairy tale meant to pacify castaways. In Connecticut, an ancient colony of Puritans, there were some who had clearly been blessed by that severe and silent God, graced by good things from birth. Others, though, languished in the shadows, mired in some cosmic disfavor they could not escape.
If there is a sacrosanct ritual in American civic life shared by all constituencies, ethnic and otherwise, then it is surely the visit to the supermarket: the selection of cereals, the palpation of produce, the bored gazes at celebrity tabloids and dieting magazines in the checkout line. It was outside just such a temple of culinary commerce, in the Stop & Shop parking lot, that Komisarjevsky noticed Hawke-Petit and Michaela, a budding gourmand who wanted to pick up some groceries for the pasta dinner she was going to make that night. He waited for them to emerge and followed them home.
Komisarjevsky later told detectives that he “started thinking it's a very nice house and very nice car and thought it would be nice to be there someday.” Note that his main desire, at least here, was to simply occupy the Petit household. It’s like he wanted to be adopted all over again.
That evening, Hayes and Komisarjevsky met up in the same Stop & Shop parking lot. They went for “a few beers” at Sports Rock USA in Bristol, according to McDonald’s book. They considered mugging people leaving bars or withdrawing money from ATMs, but these both seemed insufficient means of enrichment.
So they drove to the very nice house Komisarjevsky had seen earlier that day. It was now nearly three hours past midnight. At 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, they went around the back, where Dr. Petit was sleeping in the sunroom.
“I hit him in the head with the baseball bat,” Komisarjevsky told the cops the following day, until a bewildered and bellowing Dr. Petit “finally backed up into the corner of the couch and quieted down and was just staring at me with wide open eyes, just sheer confusion.” They tied him up and proceeded upstairs, where the Hawke-Petit and the girls were sleeping.
A few years ago, you could listen to a confession like the one Komisarjevsky made only if you wrote letters and made phone calls, pestering the cops and courts until they finally relented, though probably not without calling you a voyeuristic creep.
Today, you can hear the roughly 90-minute audio recording of the confession on YouTube, the screen filled with a mug shot in which Komisarjevsky looks like a kid still too drunk to know where he has woken up. Whether you should listen to that confession is a complicated question. The recording proved so unnerving when played in court that the judge excused the jury for the day partway through. So caveat emptor.
It’s not that Komisarjevsky offers especially gruesome detail; nor does he have a psychopath’s equanimity, a chilly lack of affect. He sounds, instead, like a freshman in the principal’s office, aware that he has fucked up big time but still confident in his innate goodness and, maybe, his ability to get out of this very large pickle. He is definitely a killer, but he is just as definitely a child: “Obviously, I should have done better.”
In The Rising, D’Agostino argues against any such aspersion. He is not the first to speak on the record with Petit, who has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and others. But in the book, he gives an apparently full detailing of that night. D’Agostino wrote that Petit, who was taking a blood thinner at the time, “had lost seven pints of blood [and] thought the two able-bodied men upstairs had a loaded gun.” D’Agostino describes Petit as “almost lifeless” as paramedics rushed him to a hospital in Waterbury.
Somewhat improbably, The Rising, a book about a triple murder, ends on a happy note: Petit is once again a father and a husband, “trying to add bricks and mortar to his new life, a little more every day,” in D’Agostino’s words. Petit sought—and got—the death penalty for both men (although the state’s highest court recently ruled against capital punishment, effectively relegating both men to life in prison). He also started a charitable foundation commemorating his wife and daughters, which he continues to run today.
The best true-crime books—Fatal Vision, Helter Skelter, The Onion Field—hit with a nihilistic thunderclap. Petit’s survival tempers that blow, introducing the discordant element of hope. On television during the trials of Komisarjevsky and Hayes, Petit, with his graying mane and plangent voice, looked the part of a modern-day Lear: deposed, injured, furious at fate yet refusing to surrender his fundamental dignity.
Some in the state’s Republican establishment wanted him to run for office, but Petit refused, citing a desire to spend time with his family. It was his second family. He knew it could be taken away, just like his first.
Newsweek Aug 30 2015 Note: As many of you may know I've written about the Petit Murders and the accompanying trials extensively. I've got my own Post coming regarding the book and my experiences hearing about and writing about these crimes. An entire state and indeed country and beyond were devastated by these crimes and the aftermath. I am comforted by the tremendous amount of good that has come from the evil that precipitated the murders of three beloved people.
In April, several days after North Charleston, South Carolina, police officer Michael Slager stopped Walter Scott
for a busted taillight and then fatally shot him, the usual cable-news
transmogrification of victim into superpredator ran into problems.
The dash cam
showed Scott being pulled over while traveling at a nerdy rate of
speed, using his left turn signal to pull into a parking lot and having
an amiable conversation with Slager until he realized he'd probably get
popped for nonpayment of child support.
At which point he bolted out of
the car and hobbled off. Slager then shot him. Why didn't the cop just
jog up and grab him? Calling what the obese 50-year-old Scott was doing
"running" really stretches the bounds of literary license
But maybe the question to ask is: Why did Scott run? The answer came when the New York Timesrevealed
Scott to be a man of modest means trapped in an exhausting hamster
wheel: He would get a low-paying job, make some child support payments,
fall behind on them, get fined, miss a payment, get jailed for a few
weeks, lose that job due to absence, and then start over at a
lower-paying job. From all apparent evidence, he was a decent schlub
trying to make things work in a system engineered to make his life
miserable and recast his best efforts as criminal behavior.
Recently, two more deaths of African Americans that have blown up in the media follow a pattern similar to Scott's. Sandra Bland in Texas and Samuel DuBose
in Cincinnati were each stopped for minor traffic infractions (failing
to use turn signal, missing front license plate), followed by immediate
escalation by the officer into rage, and then an official story that is
obviously contradicted
by the video (that the officer tried to "de-escalate" the tension with
Bland; that the officer was dragged by DuBose's car). In both cases, the
perpetrator of a minor traffic offense died. Continued
Men, women, and children are sold into a $150 billion annual
market for sex and labor. This is happening globally, and domestically;
in urban and suburban areas; in hotels, restaurants, and on street
corners. Slavery is wrapped up in almost every industry’s supply chain,
tainting the food we eat, the clothes we buy, and the electronics we
love. After the international drug trade, trafficking of humans is tied
with arms dealing as the second- largest criminal industry in the world.
Human trafficking is the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force
or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the
abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or
receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person
having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation
Sex trafficking is often highlighted in the media but is not the
primary form of modern-day slavery. Using coercion, violence and
deception, labor traffickers force victims to work against their will in
industries that range from small mom-and-pop shops to enormous mineral
extraction camps for commodities such as gold. Some individuals enter
into work agreements willingly but accrue enormous debt to the
trafficker in the form of food, shelter, documentation, and travel fees.
The traffickers inflate these costs and tack on enormous interest rates
that condemn their new hires to a life of underpaid labor or slavery.
Victims of sex trafficking are forced to work in the commercial sex
trade against their will. Physical and emotional violence is an
intrinsic part of this industry, which preys on individuals in
conditions of physical, economic, and psychological vulnerability. To
keep them working, victims are threatened, lied to, and beaten by
traffickers and pimps, who control their money. This practice exists
within all sectors of the sex industry, including street prostitution,
strip clubs, residential brothels, pornography stores and massage
parlors.
C.S.E.C is the sexual abuse of a minor for economic gain. The
majority of child victims come from environments of extreme instability,
and most have suffered sexual abuse prior to their commercial
exploitation. Homeless and street youth, or those facing food and
shelter insecurities are also easy targets.
Traffickers can be strangers or acquaintances, family members or
friends. The economic, physical and social vulnerability of most victims
makes them easy prey for traffickers, who lure them in with promises
for a chance at a better life. Many come from the same country or
cultural background as their victims, enabling them to easily exploit
the particular vulnerabilities of their targets. Other traffickers
employ violence to kidnap and maintain control over their victims. There
is abundant money to be made, soaring demand and little risk due to
difficulties in identification of the crime. A high burden of proof for
legal teams lowers the barrier of entry for the men and women who profit
from human trafficking.
Why does modern-day slavery exist?
Because there is skyrocketing demand
Consumer demand for cheap products, labor and services is
enormous. In the commercial sex industry business is booming.
Traffickers can work in virtually every country around the world and
move to wherever the greatest profit can be extracted. Their prime
recruitment zones shift rapidly to best exploit opportunities. Combating
the crime is complicated. Its covert nature coupled with improperly
trained government and civic bodies, corruption and lax enforcement of
laws and statutes create the perception of low risk for traffickers.
Dear friends,
In the past three months, the remains of dozens of victims of human
trafficking have been uncovered in jungle camps in Malaysia and
Thailand. These gruesome discoveries are painful reminders of the
reality of modern-day slavery in Southeast Asia and around the world.
Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 30
million people enslaved today — and, as the U.S. State Department’s new
Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report shows, the international community
is not doing nearly enough to fight it.
The countries ranking among the worst offenders for human trafficking in
the latest TIP report include Thailand, Belarus, North Korea and Iran.
Malaysia, surprisingly, was removed from its place in the lowest rung of
the TIP report.
I urge you to join me in using today — World Day Against Trafficking in
Persons — as an opportunity to raise your voice against modern-day
slavery. Please join me in the fight by learning more, spreading the
word, and supporting survivors of human trafficking. You can play an
important part in ending modern slavery at home and overseas. Please Help. Not For Sale Campaign
Close to 1,500 people lined up to run and walk in the GE 5K road race supporting the Petit Family Foundation on Sunday.
Karen Patane had never raced before, but she decided a year ago she wanted to train for this race.
“I
really wanted this one. This was on my bucket list to learn to run.
The cause, it’s wonderful. 5K’s when you have a charity behind them,
they bring something special,” said Patane.
She
started training a year ago. Sunday, she finally reached her goal as
she crossed the finish line. Patane doesn’t know the Petit family
personally, but she knows their story.
“They’ve come through and made something wonderful out of a horrible tragedy,” said Patane.
In
2007, Doctor William Petit lost his wife, Jennifer and two daughters,
Hayley and Michaela in a violent home invasion in Cheshire. The
following year, the inaugural race was held and it’s been growing ever
since.
“The turnout and everything they do is just so wonderful for the community,” Jan Campbell, of New Milford, said.
Race director Bob Hesline added, “It touches my heart every year to do this. It’s a personal thing.”
By
the end of 2015, the Petit Family Foundation will have raised $2
million for charity, half of that coming through the 5K race over the
past eight years. The rest was raised through the annual golf
tournament.
“It’s really been a team effort with the community and the region reaching out to help other people,” Dr. Petit said.
He
chose charities that were close to his family's heart. The first is
education for women in science, because his daughter Hayley wanted to
follow in her father’s footsteps and become a doctor. Money is also
donated toward MS education, which his late wife suffered from. The
final piece of the foundation is money to support those affected by
violence.
“Obviously
this was devastating violence and violence affects many people with a
ripple out to the communities, so we thought helping people affected by
violence was critical,” said Dr. Petit.
Dr. Petit hopes his family's legacy will live on as he turns a personal tragedy into change.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has signed legislation to honor
Michaela Petit's life by establishing a children's state flower in her
name.
The 11-year-old Cheshire girl and her 48-year-old mother
and 17-year-old sister were murdered in a shocking home invasion in July
2007.
Michaela also coined the Petit Family
Foundation's "Be the Change" Mantra, via her Favorite quote on Facebook
which was " You must be the Change that you wish to see in the world"
These
words were originally spoken by Mahatma Gandhi, and came to the
attention of the State and far beyond when it was discovered that at a
mere eleven years old Michaela Petit had the sensitivity idealism and
kindness of a much older soul.
The www.Petitfamilyfoundation.org is a non profit organization that was formed
in the wake of the home invasion that took Michaela her sister Hayley
and her mother Jennifer's lives in July 2007.
P.F.F
sponsors many now annual events that benefit victims violent crime
people suffering with chronic illness such as Multiple sclerosis as well
as giving scholarships to girls and women especially in medicine and
the sciences. Lone survivor Dr.William Petit was an endocrinologist,
his wife Jennifer a pediatric nurse and Hayley was about to enter her
first year of school at Dartmouth where she was planning to be a doctor
like her dad.
The Milford Police Department received
notification from the State of Connecticut Medical Examiner’s Office
Monday afternoon regarding the cause of death in the investigation of
the death of off-duty Milford police officer Michael Compare.
“It
was determined that Michael Compare died of a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.
On behalf of Chief Keith L. Mello and the Milford Police Department,
this day is a tragic loss for the family; friends and community Michael
belonged to and so proudly served. We thank you for your kind words and
support regarding Michael. Michael will be greatly missed,” the Police
Department said in a statement.
Description: As we develop a deeper and more complex
understanding of the underlying root causes of violence against women
and children, we have been challenged to examine our current approaches
to engaging with men and boys. Understanding male socialization and the
history of childhood exposure to violence and trauma is critical to our
ability to develop prevention and intervention responses that are
humanistic & compassionate and don’t minimize responsibility. Our
presenters share their passion for creating change, taking risks and
believing in the possibility of healing and transformation for all. Learning Objectives:
Expand our understanding of the broader impact of male socialization and trauma on women, men and children.
Increase knowledge and techniques for applying a compassion and accountability framework to engaging with men and boys.
Explore promising multicultural intervention and prevention approaches to engaging with men and boys.
Speakers:
Juan Carlos Areàn, Director of the National Latin@ Network for Healthy Families and Communities, a project of Casa de Esperanza
Erik Bringswhite, Youth Consultant, Motivational Speaker, Trainer, Community Engagement, Youth and Adult Diversion
Terri Strodthoff, Founder and Executive Director, Alma Center, Inc.
Sam Simmons, SAFE Families Manager, Be More Project and Healing Generations
