Facing Firing, Thrice-in-Trouble Cop Quits

A city police officer with a history of domestic violence resigned from the force — days before he could have been fired for a repeated track record of not telling the truth on the job.

The officer, Alex Morgillo, worked as a city cop for more than a decade after graduating from the police academy in 2008.

According to Police Chief Karl Jacobson, Morgillo formally resigned from the New Haven Police Department on Friday. 

Morgillo put in those resignation papers right before the Board of Police Commissioners was scheduled to hold a special meeting Monday night to hear and vote on the police chief’s recommendation that Morgillo be fired from his job.

Because Morgillo resigned before that hearing could take place, Monday’s scheduled police commission meeting was canceled.

Morgillo’s resignation comes roughly three years after the then-city cop was arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. Against a state prosecutor’s objections, a state judge allowed Morgillo to participate in a pre-trial Family Violence Education Program in exchange for having his case dismissed — even though Morgillo didn’t dispute in court that he called his girlfriend a ​“little whore,” punched her in the face, threw her to the ground, and spat chewing tobacco at her. 

That past incident of domestic violence, however, wasn’t what led to Morgillo’s potential firing Monday night.

Rather, Jacobson recommended that the police commission terminate Morgillo’s NHPD employment after an Internal Affairs (IA) investigation found that he had been untruthful in a memorandum he wrote up about an incident in which he allegedly failed to respond to a shooting where officers had requested assistance; failed to complete an incident report in a timely manner after a car crash; and swore in frustration at a supervisor.

Morgillo denied all wrongdoing in that incident. He told an IA investigator that he had been singled out for unfair criticism because he is a white male.

A so-called ​“credibility assessment” as part of that IA investigation also revealed that Morgillo had previously been suspended for six months in late 2019 for ​“incorrectly and untruthfully documenting several domestic violence incident reports.” 

That prior IA investigation found that Morgillo violated general orders requiring officers to be truthful in all matters and to put together reports that ​“accurately and truthfully reflect information received during the course of the investigation.”

That 2019 suspension led Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney David Strollo to write a letter to the department indicating that Morgillo’s ​“numerous instances” of ​“untruthful behavior” meant that his involvement as a cop in a criminal case ​“would have a negative impact on such prosecution.” 

The IA investigation was ordered back in September 2021 by then Interim Police Chief Renee Dominguez. Sgt. Brendan Canning completed the investigation in March 2022. The Independent obtained a copy of the report on Monday via a Connecticut Freedom of Information Act request.

Canning’s review — which was limited in scope to only whether or not Morgillo was untruthful in a memorandum that Sgt. Martin Feliciano had ordered him to write up — found that Morgillo had violated a department rule of conduct stating that ​“Employees are expected to be truthful in all matters.”

“This wasn’t his first time of untruthfulness,” Jacobson told the Independent in a Monday night phone interview about Morgillo’s resignation and recommended termination. ​“We expect our officers not to be perfect, but at least to be truthful.”

Click here to read the IA report in full.

Alleged Dispatch Dodge, Lying Memo

The incident that led to Jacobson recommending Morgillo’s firing took place on Apr. 8, 2021. 

In the associated IA report, Sgt. Canning outlined a narrative of events based on reports, memos, and interviews with witnesses and Morgillo himself.

At around 1:35 p.m. that day, Morgillo was dispatched to a car crash with minor injuries at the intersection of Dixwell Avenue and Hazel Street. 

GPS records indicated that Morgillo left the scene of the crash at 2:03 p.m.

In a memorandum that he wrote later that day, however, Morgillo claimed that he had still been finishing up responding to the crash at 2:30 p.m.

At around 2:30 p.m., shots were fired at 83 Sheffield Ave.

“The shooting was initially chaotic, and the officers who responded requested additional officers respond to assist them,” wrote Canning. ​“The area of the accident … is located in close proximity to the scene of the shooting.” 

Officer Morgillo did not make an effort to assist with the shooting. 

GPS Coordinates show that Morgillo drove away from the car crash at 2:03 p.m., and that he appeared to park behind NHPD headquarters by 2:15 for the rest of his extra-duty shift. 

The GPS records contradict Morgillo’s own account of events in the memorandum, in which he stated that he arrived at the headquarters and parked his car at 2:45 p.m.

When Morgillo returned to the NHPD headquarters, he told his supervisor, Sgt. Feliciano, that he was unable to respond to the shooting because he’d been investigating a car crash at the intersection of Dixwell and Hazel.

Feliciano did not order Morgillo to return to the scene of the shooting, but he reprimanded the officer. 

According to Feliciano and Sgt. Ryan Macuirzynski, who was also present at the time, Morgillo replied to Feliciano’s admonition by saying ​“Get the fuck out of here” as he walked out of the station. (During his separate interview with IA, Macuirzynski said that Morgillo ​“screamed” that remark.)

Morgillo offered a different narrative of events.

“I don’t know where he made that up. I would never,” he said of Feliciano’s claim that he told his supervisor to ​“get the fuck out of here.” He said he responded to Feliciano’s reprimand with one word: ​“Ridiculous.”

Feliciano requested that Morgillo write a memorandum about the interaction. He wrote up Morgillo for violating four general orders: that incident reports be completed quickly and by the end of shift; that police should be courteous to one another and the public; that police should not ​“commit any act contrary to good order and discipline or constituting neglect of duty”; and that part of an officer’s responsibility to investigate criminal activity includes writing up ​“complete reports.”

Morgillo told the IA investigator that he saw another officer who had not shown up to the shooting scene either, and who said (according to Morgillo) that he hadn’t been reprimanded. 

“In my first hand observation this Officer was the only early beat car from either district 6 or 7 located in patrol to be asked why I did not respond to the person being shot or told they should have responded being that district 7 was the initial district area of the call,” Morgillo wrote in the memo.

When Canning questioned the officer in question as part of the IA investigation, that officer replied that ​“he was not aware of this incident as described,” according to the report.

Morgillo told Canning that ​“Sgt. Feliciano has never liked him, even before this incident.”

“I’m being unfairly targeted here,” Morgillo said.

Morgillo accused Feliciano of discriminating against him because he is a white man. ​“This is why we’re here … The only reason why he wrote me up is because we had a disagreement at the window,” he said. ​“I was discriminated against. Point blank. A white male. [Sgt. Feliciano has] been targeting white males for over a year now. He’s on a rampage, this guy. This guy needs to be investigated himself.”

In his own Internal Affairs interview, Feliciano told investigators that Morgillo is ​“100 percent right when he says we’re not friends. As far as negative interactions [before the incident]… I don’t believe we’ve had any.”

Internal Affairs director Lt. Manmeet Colon asked Morgillo why he had written that he’d arrived at police headquarters at 2:45 when his GPS contradicted that account. 

Morgillo explained that he had meant to indicate that he signed out of patrol at around 2:45.

He said that he had been typing up a car crash report in his cruiser. He said he never completed that car crash report. 

The IA report states that Morgillo claimed that ​“the [car crash] report never saved into the system, so he had to pull up another accident report and do it all over again.”

When Colon questioned Morgillo about another discrepancy between the GPS coordinates and Morgillo’s account — pertaining to when he had left the scene of the car crash — Morgillo responded that he didn’t know the precise times of his actions that day.

“While reviewing the documents in the disciplinary investigation/write-up for Officer Morgillo, several untruthful facts/inconsistencies in Officer Morgillo’s signed memorandum to Sgt. Feliciano were noted,” the IA report concludes. ​“As a result, Interim Chief of Police Renee Dominguez ordered the Officer of Internal Affairs to investigate the matter further on September 14th, 2021. The scope of the internal investigation was to determine if Officer Morgillo was truthful/accurate with the facts he documented in his signed memorandum to Sgt. Feliciano.

“During this internal investigation, it was confirmed that Officer Morgillo documented several untruthful and inaccurate facts in his signed memorandum to Sgt. Feliciano.”

Thomas Breen contributed to this report.