Paul Bass Photo
Thanks to a relative’s social-media discovery, Sgt. Elisa Tuozzoli found herself on I‑95 headed to a Massachusetts city where she hoped to find a kidnapped 14-year-old boy.
A cousin who has legal custody of the boy in the Fair Haven Heights neighborhood first reported him missing last Friday. A “silver alert” went out; silver alerts cover kids under 18, seniors above 65, as well as adults with psychological problems. Almost every day police send out a silver alert, often for kids who habitually run away and turn up soon.
“The way it was reported, even though it met the silver alert criteria, there was nothing to make it immediately stand out,” said Tuozzoli, who among various assignments heads the department’s three-woman missing-persons unit. It was one of 553 missing-person reports the unit has received this year, including 14 current open cases as well as six actively-pursued cold cases.
On Monday morning relatives of the Fair Haven Heights boy came to the New Haven police detective division to find out what progress had been made on the case. The detectives had none to report.
In the course of conversation, one of the relatives mentioned that she had noticed on a social-media website that the missing boy had recently had contact with his mother. That was bad news: A court had ordered the mother, a convicted sexual predator and aggressor, to stay away from her children.
Tuozzoli (pictured above) and the detectives on her team kicked into gear. This wasn’t just another missing-persons case.
A subsequent social-media search revealed that the mother had arranged to come with the boy’s aunt to New Haven to pick him up. The aunt drove the car; the mother instructed the son to delete their messages.
Checking databases, Detective Ann Mays found an address for the mother in New Bedford, Mass. They contacted the police there. Police also worked with cellular companies to track down the location of the aunt’s and mother’s phones.
A New Bedford officer went to the mother’s address. No one was home.
“We felt we needed to follow through,” Tuozzoli recalled in an interview Thursday in her third-floor 1 Union Ave. office.
In her two years running the unit, Tuozzoli hadn’t encountered a case like this one: “It’s not often that you see a mom who is a sexual predator.” Tuozzoli, who has been on the force since 1998, said she and her two detectives, Mays and Jessie Agosto, are “very passionate about finding” missing children. All three have children of their own. “Our hearts went out to the guardian who has custody of the child.”
Tuozzoli arranged with an ambulance company to send a vehicle to New Bedford. Then she and Officer Michael Mastropetre (pictured) left New Haven around 5:30 p.m. in an unmarked department SUV. They arrived in New Bedford about two and a half hours later.
Meanwhile, back at headquarters, Detective Mays prepared an arrest warrant for the mother and aunt. Detective Agosto touched base with the boy’s social worker and doctor to gauge what kind of help he might need; she obtained a medical committal form, which enables police to bring someone to a doctor for an evaluation. She brought the order to Yale-New Haven Hospital so the paperwork would be there if the boy were found.
In New Bedford, Tuozzoli and Mastropetre stopped first at a police precinct, where with Sgt. Emanuel Cabral they drew up a plan: Separate teams of officers would hit a nearby hospital, the aunt’s home, and the mother’s address.
Six New Bedford officers accompanied Tuozzoli and Mastropetre to the mother’s third-floor apartment in a low-income housing complex. They knocked on the door, were let inside. They discovered 10 people, including the boy and his mother, hanging out in the living room and the kitchen. “They didn’t understand why we were there,” Tuozzoli said.
Tuozzoli explained. “Mom was real quiet, just chain smoking. She didn’t want to talk,” she said. The New Bedford police seemed to have a good rapport with the people in the apartment, Tuozzoli observed.
Tuozzoli took the boy to a bedroom to speak with him. A Spanish-speaking New Bedford detective George Lozado translated.
The boy covered his mouth with his hand. He looked down; “his leg was twitching a mile a minute” as he sat on the bed.
“My main concern was to keep him calm and get him out of there” before officers arrested the mother, Tuozzoli said. She knew the boy has a history of mood swings and out-of-control reactions to stressful situations; he hadn’t brought his medication with him. She wanted to make sure the situation didn’t escalate.
“Mom’s going to have to go through court procedures for you guys to be together,” she told him. She told him an ambulance was waiting outside, that he’d be warm inside it. She, Mastropetre and another officer escorted him outside to the ambulance, whose driver transported the boy back to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Contributed Photo
Mays & Agosto at 1 Union Ave.
Before going back inside the apartment, Tuozzoli received a call from Detective Agosto: A judge had signed the warrants for the mother and the aunt. Agosto proceeded to fax copies of the warrants to the New Bedford police headquarters.
Back upstairs in the apartment Tuozzoli and other officers explained the situation to the mother. She did not resist arrest. As she was taken away, another woman called out, “Write down my number to give to her.” A man borrowed Tuozzoli’s pen and pad. As the woman said her number aloud, the man began to write it down. Tuozzoli didn’t recognize the woman. She did recognize the number — it was the number of the aunt, who looked different in person from the photo the police had taken from a social-media site and brought to New Bedford.
Police then arrested the aunt too after positively identifying her.
The pair were charged with being fugitives from justice. Police charged the mother with risk of injury to a minor, custodial interference, and kidnapping; they charged the aunt with conspiracy to commit those same offenses. The aunt, who is 32, has since been released on $200 bond. The mother, also 32, is in jail in Massachusetts awaiting extradition to Connecticut.
Tuozzoli and Mastropetre arrived back in New Haven.
“I was relieved that we got the boy back,” she said. “I feared for his safety.”
The boy has since been released from the hospital, where he was treated for emotional, not physical, concerns. He is back living with his cousin. Tuozzoli has stayed in touch with clinicians from the Yale Child Study Center, who are working with the boy as well as his family, including a younger brother. Now that the mother has learned where the boys live, “they are fearful” about what might happen next.
“The case is closed, but we like to stay in touch with the family. We obviously don’t want this happening again,” Tuozzoli said. “We want to be supportive with the family, especially the juvenile not to run away and get himself in the same predicament.”
This week’s rescue reflected the passion and perseverance Tuozzoli and her two detectives bring to the job, observed one of her supervisors, Assistant Chief Al Vazquez. “She takes to her heart her job,” he said of Tuozzoli. “She’s very compassionate — not just for the child, the runaway who’s missing, but also the family members. She’s keeping contact with those family members. She tries along with her unit to to find the root cause of the issues, especially when we’re dealing with runaways, juveniles — why the kids keep running away and need help.”
Arriving home in the early hours Tuesday, Tuozzoli gave hugs to her two sleeping children, one of whom, like the child she’d just rescued, is a 14-year-old boy. “Every day I come home, I hug them extra tight,” she said. “Every day’s a blessing.”
Tuozzoli and Agosto at an event on the Green handing out ID kits for parents to fill out for their kids.
Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:
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• James Baker
• Lloyd Barrett
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• Paul Bicki
• Paul Bicki (2)
• Sheree Biros
• Bitang
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• Anthony Campbell
• Darryl Cargill & Matt Wynne
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• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
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• Carlos Conceicao
• Carlos Conceicao (2)
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