188 Cop Awards Honor Heroics

City police officers Scott Shumway and Eric Pesino received the department’s highest honors for their responses to an Elm Street shootout last year.

Both officers were shot and injured during the incident; they and their colleagues still managed to arrest the suspect without any lives lost.

Shumway and Pesino were the officers at the center Friday afternoon of an hour-and-a-half long New Haven Department of Police Services 2018 Awards Ceremony.

Both officers received the department’s Police Cross, awarded to those injured in the line of duty, as well as the department’s Medal of Honor, its highest medal awarded for bravery, for the gunshot injuries they incurred while responding to a Sep. 2017 incident on Elm Street where a youth worker was shot multiple times by her husband in a violent domestic dispute. With the help of the city’s SWAT team, fire department, and neighboring police departments, the suspect was apprehended, the victim survived, and no officers or civilians died.

“Thank you for exemplifying what it means to be a New Haven police officer,” Police Chief Anthony Campbell said to Shumway, Pesino, and the dozen other city officers who responded to the Elm Street shootout last September.

The awards ceremony, the first such public celebration of officer accomplishments to be held since May 2016, brought out around 150 officers, family members, friends, and community supporters to the Wilbur Cross High School auditorium on Mitchell Drive. The event, organized and emceed by Sgt. Rob Clark, saw distribution of 188 different certificates, citations, and awards to high achieving city police officers.

Click here to download the ceremony’s program, which contains a full list of awards and awardees.

The awardees included members of the fire department and other regional police departments. There were also civilian honorees who helped solve crimes, such as Sajjad and Ali Chaudhary of Whalley Avenue’s Dynamic Auto, who helped chase down a hit-and-run driver who struck a woman with his car. (Read about that here, and see the above video taken of the incident.)

“You embody the great progress under way in the New Haven Police Department and in the city,” Mayor Toni Harp said from the auditorium’s brightly lit stage during her introductory remarks. ​“You showcase the talent embedded throughout this department and you make it easy to see how and why the New Haven Police Department is a national leader in community-based policing, forging partnerships in crime prevention, effective use of technology, and steadily decreasing crime rates.”

“Today is a day of joy and celebration,” Chief Campbell said next, ​“because we get a chance to honor those men and women who have put their lives on the line, who have stepped up and answered the call when other human beings needed their assistance.”

And indeed, Friday’s event offered a glimpse en masse into some of the more dangerous, courageous, selfless, and skilled police work undertaken by city officers and detectives over the past two years.

It also shed some light on the types of police work that the department deems most worthy of commendation: work where officers put their own lives at risk to rescue suicidal citizens, get guns and drugs off the street, and pursue and apprehend violent offenders without harming innocent bystanders.

For each award given, Clark read a brief description of the police work that earned each officer that particular citation.

Officer Steve McMorris, a 46-year-old Beaver Hills native and 16-year veteran of the city’s police force, racked up multiple awards over the course of the ceremony, including one for helping to secure a Fair Haven home engulfed in flames and helping to evacuate tenants in adjacent properties in 2017, and one for rescuing someone threatening to commit suicide near the Fire Training Academy on Ella T. Grass Boulevard in 2016. Clark also praised McMorris for his commitment to community outreach, even while working midnight shifts.

Officers Brian Jackson and Douglas Pearse received for climbing onto a cliff’s edge on East Rock in June of this year and rescuing another woman on the brink of committing suicide.

Jackson also received an award on Friday for responding to an incident in Fair Haven in 2016 where an emotionally disturbed person charged him with a knife in a lobby crowded with eight other people. Jackson shot, injured, and apprehended the man in the narrow lobby without hurting anyone else in the room.

Officer Frank Grillo also received multiple awards, both making a traffic stop in Fair Haven that led to arrests and the apprehension of illegal handguns and narcotics. Officer John Gregorcyzk received an award for flagging down a kidnapped infant, recovering the child, and making a felony arrest.

And Ryan Macuirzynski earned the title of 2017 Detective of the Year for his investigative work that led to the arrests of eight members of the Goodrich Boys gang.

At the end of the ceremony, Clark awarded Shumway and Pesino with the Police Crosses and Medals of Honor.

“There is nothing more unnerving for a police chief than to learn that two of your officers have been shot,” he said. He praised Shumway, Pesino, and the rest of the officers who responded to the 2017 Elm Street incident for securing a perimeter, protecting neighboring residents, apprehending a violent suspect, all while dealing with the extreme stress of knowing that two fellow officers had been shot.

Reflecting on the shooting over a year after it happened, and over 10 months after he first returned to work, Shumway said that he has not let the incident deter him from doing his job to the fullest.

“I made a point not to let the situation make me recoil,” he said. In fact, he said, he thinks he may handle some of the more tense parts of the job even better now, having survived such a traumatic incident.

He now volunteers with a peer support group within the department that connects mentors with officers struggling with any kind of stress.

“It’s another layer of help,” he said.

The citizens and members of partner agencies who won awards included Firefighter Patrick Sheiffele, Citizen Katie St. Jean, Citizen Raymond Vernet, Citizen Sajjad Chaudhary, Citizen Ali S. Chaudhary, Citizen Librorio Castillo, Citizen Maria Torres, Citizen Mark O’Ferrall, Citizen Christopher Guarino, Citizen Richard Spreyer, Trooper Paul Makuc, Trooper First Class Matthew Warren, K9 Porter, Officer Christopher Reddington, Officer Johnathan Andino, Sergeant Craig Michalowski, Officer Kyle Savo, Trooper Steven Corona, Officer Maurice Martin, Officer Brandon Esterby.

Click on the Facebook Live video to watch Mayor Toni Harp’s introductory address at Friday night’s ceremony.