Thomas Breen photo
Chantell Hamilton with husband Nate Lewis.
Chantell Hamilton left her West River apartment to walk her 4‑year-old daughter a block away to a school bus stop.
She returned a half hour later to find cops waiting to arrest her for allegedly leaving her 3‑year-old daughter and 4‑month-old son alone at home. Marched out in handcuffs in front of a wall of TV news cameras, she was subsequently slapped with a $25,000 bail bond and sent to lock-up at 1 Union Ave. for the afternoon until a neighbor bailed her out.
Hamilton, 28, told her side of what happened before, during, and after her June 6 arrest in a Thursday interview with the Independent in her and her husband’s second-story apartment at 80 Sherman Ave. She said she was glad, after her public shaming, to have a chance to speak for herself.
“It felt disgusting,” Hamilton said in tears as she recalled the humiliation of having her name and face plastered over the Internet after her arrest. “I cried when I got out. I stayed in the house for three days. Didn’t eat. Didn’t do nothing.”
Alerted by a housing authority inspector to the presence of unattended children in her apartment, police arrested Hamilton and charged her with two felony counts of risk of injury to a child. See below for a full account of what led to the arrest, as described in a police report obtained by the Independent through a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request.
Hamilton’s pending arrest made it over the police radio. A WFSB crew arrived on the scene in time to record officers leading Hamilton in handcuffs and with a sweatshirt over her head out of her apartment building and into the back of a police van.
Later that day, the police department’s spokesperson sent out a press release publicizing the arrest, the charges, the $25,000 bail amount, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) taking of custody of Hamilton’s three kids, and her mugshot. Nearly every local news outlet then ran with that picture. Meanwhile, Hamilton remained behind bars on Union Avenue, even though she has no criminal record.
James, a friend of Hamilton who lives on the first floor of 80 Sherman (and who declined to share his last name for this story), said he drove down to 1 Union Ave. later that day and paid a bail bondsman $1,200 in cash to free his neighbor the day before her arraignment. “I had it, and they didn’t,” he said about why he paid his friend’s bond. He said he knew that Hamilton and her husband are good people, that she didn’t have a record, and felt compelled to help out a friend in need.
Hamilton said DCF has told her and her husband Nate Lewis that they have to attend therapy and domestic violence counseling in order to regain custody of their three children in six months.
Meanwhile, Hamilton is scheduled to appear in state court on June 28 at 10 a.m. before Superior Court Judge James Spallone, who upheld Hamilton’s $25,000 bail amount at her June 7 arraignment.
The Police Version
Hamilton in the kitchen, showing off a full fridge.
According to an incident report written by Officer Rykema Stone on the day of the arrest and released to the Independent Friday, she and Officer Joseph Staffieri were dispatched to 80 Sherman Ave. at 8:45 a.m. on June 6 to investigate a risk of injury complaint.
Upon arrival, the officers met a maintenance worker at the building; the local housing authority Section 8 rental subsidy program inspector who had called in the initial complaint; and Hamilton. They were all standing outside the building on the front sidewalk with Hamilton’s two young children.
The housing authority inspector, Ahmadi Aimal, told the officers that he was on site to conduct a routine inspection of Hamilton’s apartment.
“He stated as he knocked on the door” of her unit, the police report reads, “he heard a small child’s voice, but no one answered the door.” After three minutes and several knocks, he asked the building’s maintenance worker, Carlos Mercado, to open the door to the apartment.
When he got into the apartment, the inspector said, he found “a black belt that was connected to the outside door knob of the child’s bedroom and the outside door knob of the bathroom. He stated there was a small crack that allowed him to see there was a child trapped inside the bedroom and the belt was preventing the child from being able to exit the bedroom. He stated he also noticed there was an infant sleeping in a crib inside the mother’s bedroom.”
The inspector said he called Hamilton, who said, “I’m at court.” Then he called the police.
The maintenance worker said he had seen Hamilton leave the house at around 8:20 to walk her 4‑year-old child to the bus stop at George Street and Sherman Avenue, just a block away from her apartment. He said she was gone for about 25 to 35 minutes.
When the officers spoke with Hamilton, according to the report, she said she had left her children home with their father, Nate Lewis.
In person on Thursday, Hamilton said she had actually left her children at home with her husband’s friend, who she said left the apartment before she returned. That friend, she said, was the one responsible for locking her 3‑year-old in her bedroom. The police report, however, notes that the arresting officers overheard Hamilton admitting to sometimes locking her child in her bedroom to keep her from “going through the refrigerator or opening the front door.”
The arresting officers then called DCF, who sent a social worker and a case worker to the scene. The DCF staffers said they were familiar with “prior cases” involving Hamilton and her family, and said they would be taking Hamlton’s children into temporary custody.
Lock-Up “Nightmares”
A shelf of diapers in Hamilton’s bedroom.
In her interview with the Independent, Hamilton told a story largely similar to what’s outlined in the police report.
She insisted she is not the one responsible for locking her child in the bedroom.
She that she was not far from home the morning the inspector found her kids alone in the apartment.
“I was just walking my kid to the bus,” she said. “I didn’t have to go to court. I didn’t have to do none of that.”
She said she and Lewis take good care of their children, showing off pantries full of groceries and a bedroom shelf stacked with diapers in the apartment.
With no prior criminal history, she said, she was shocked to be given a $25,000 bail amount and sent immediately to lock up.
As someone who suffers from asthma and seizures, she said, spending just a few hours in lock-up was a harrowing experience. “I still wake up with nightmares,” she said.
How Police Set Bond
Capt. Anthony Duff.
Police spokesperson Capt. Anthony Duff said that police, a state bail commissioner, and a judge set bail amounts based on a variety of criteria: the defendant’s risk of flight, criminal history, potential dangerousness, the severity of the alleged crime, and affordability.
“That’s not meant to be punitive,” Duff said about bail. “It’s just meant to ensure the person’s appearance in court.”
When Hamilton was taken into custody on the felony charges, Duff said, the facility supervisor at the 1 Union Ave. lock up determined her bail in the same way that city police do for all people charged with felonies: They consult a chart, developed by city police in conjunction with the state’s attorney’s office, that recommends certain bail amounts based on the offense.
The New Haven Police Department typically applies $10,000 in bail for every alleged “unclassified” felony, he said, such as risk of injury to a minor. “Classified felonies” like murder and assault typically earn bail amounts in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
Then, the facility supervisor conducts a search of state and national judicial records to see if the person arrested has any history of similar convictions or failures to appear. Just because Hamilton does not have any other convictions according to the external facing state judicial database, he said, that doesn’t mean that the sergeant on duty didn’t find something of concern in the department’s internal database or in a national repository.
Police headquarters at 1 Union Ave.
After the facility supervisor sets the initial bail, he said, a state bail commissioner investigates the appropriateness of that bond by conducting a background check of sorts to better understand employment status and home conditions. Bail commissioners and judges often reduce bail amounts from the initial levels set by the police, he said, since the latter look primarily at the alleged offense and criminal history and not as much at other extenuating circumstances.
In this case, Judge Spallone likely didn’t change the bail because Hamilton’s neighbor bailed her out the day before the arraignment.
Plus, he clarified, Hamilton was taken into custody in the first place because city police always bring to lock up everyone charged with a felony.
“For a felony, there is no equivalent for a misdemeanor summons,” where no bail is set and the person charged is just given a date to appear in court.
“Extracting Wealth From The Poorest”
New Haven Arts Paper / Lucy Gellman photo
Ana María Rivera-Forastieri.
Ana María Rivera-Forastieri, the co-director of the Connecticut Bail Fund, questioned how much criminal history and affordability actually played into the setting of Hamilton’s bail, considering that she has no past convictions and that she is currently unemployed and on Section 8.
“In this case,” Rivera-Forastieri said, “there’s absolutely nothing from the charges or anything I’ve read” that would justify a bond as high as $25,000.
The bail system as it functions today is devastating for defendants, she said, particularly for low-income defendants like Hamilton.
On the one hand, from a legal perspective, a high bail means that a person is incarcerated in pre-trial lock up and unable to communicate in a meaningful way with a lawyer. That hinders that person’s ability to craft a viable defense, she said. “Often we see people pleading out to charges just so they can get out of the cage,” she said.
On the other hand, from an economic and moral perspective, she said, “bail is extracting wealth from the poorest communities. It puts people in really precarious situations. They might lose their jobs, their kids, their housing. It’s very damaging.”
The Connecticut Bail Fund isn’t the only group making that argument. According to a February 2019 bail reform report and guide for state and local policymakers that was published by the Harvard Law School’s Criminal Justice Policy Program, nonprofits are working to eliminate money bail in 36 different states. Over 40 community bail funds are active across the country, the report finds, to post bail for people who would otherwise remain in pretrial lockup simply because they don’t have enough money to get out.
“On any given day,” the report reads, “American jails imprison nearly half a million people who have not been convicted of a crime — many of whom remain in jail only because they cannot afford to pay for their release. Across the country, increases in pretrial detention rates are ‘responsible for all of the net jail growth in last twenty years.’
“Awaiting trial from a jail cell,” the report continues, “these individuals suffer worse case outcomes and risk losing their jobs, their homes, and custody of their children. Some innocent people plead guilty just to get out of jail. The harms of our pretrial systems fall disproportionately on communities of color, as Black and Latinx people accused of crimes are more likely to be detained pretrial than similarly situated white people.”
Rivera-Forastieri said the bail system is difficult to rationalize. “It’s a very inconsistent and arbitrary system that people have to deal with,” she said. “Unfortunately, a lot of money is lost to the bail bondsman.”
One key piece of bail reform recently approved by the Rules Committee of the state Superior Court, she said, is a 10 percent cash bail rule that would allow defendants to pay 10 percent of their bail in cash directly to the court, and then have that money returned to them after the case is over.
That option is currently available at the discretion of judges, she said. The newly adopted practice book change requires that option to be automatic.
As Hamilton sat slumped on her couch in a large and sparsely furnished living room, she said she just wants to get her kids back. And she bristled at the memory of being taken out of her apartment, in handcuffs, and sent to lockup for what she said was only walking her kid to school and leaving her infant and toddler with an irresponsible friend.
“You don’t treat no human like that,” she said.
I'm for abolishing cash bail, but is this woman really the face representing that cause? Thank God that the house didn't catch fire with the kids locked alone in the house. She doesn't seem to accept responsibility or take seriously her actions