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Tamara Boyd: “My voice was not heard.”
A 37-year-old woman ended up spending the night in the police lock-up after an officer apparently misread a protective order and thought she was its target — rather than the protected domestic-violence victim.
Acting New Haven Police Chief Renee Dominguez told the Independent she has ordered an internal affairs investigation into the incident.
She has not put the officer who admitted making the mistake on paid leave. He remains on patrol.
“I feel like my voice wasn’t heard,” the woman, Tamara Boyd, told the Independent.
“I was the victim. I was supposed to be protected. Somebody dropped the ball. Somewhere up the chain of command, something was wrong.”
Elijah Sanders, the man against whom Boyd had a protective order — and whom the police ended up arresting after realizing their mistake with Boyd — also criticized the police. He claimed people charged him and blamed him for their own error.
So the internal investigation will be exploring three very different versions of what happened that night. Following are the three versions.
The Cop’s Version
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Acting Chief Dominguez: No comment until investigation’s complete.
The officer, Christopher Acosta, offered his side of the story in three reports written on Nov. 16.
The first report describes a call he responded to at 12:25 a.m. He went to McDonalds at 250 Whalley Ave., where he met with Sanders, 41, who had phoned police.
Sanders told Acosta that he had left Taurus Cafe on Winchester Avenue after Boyd showed up. He said Boyd followed him to McDonalds. He allegedly told her “to leave him alone,” Acosta wrote, at which point Boyd allegedly told Sanders, “You got what’s coming to you.”
Acosta claimed in the report that Sanders said he’d called police because he had a protective order against Boyd.
Boyd told Acosta a different story, according to Acosta: She “explained that she was hanging out for the night with Elijah at the Taurus Club” and she “was confused why [he] called the police, and stated that she did not know there was a protective order between” them.
Acosta wrote that he subsequently did a records check, which “confirmed” that Boyd “is listed as the defendant in a full no contact protective order against” Sanders. He arrested her on a charge of violation of a protective order, then had her complete a condition of release form.
Acosta’s second report begins with a visit to the records room later that morning, at 7:45. He went there to print out his arrest report. “Elian Lesane [sp],” a records clerk, handed him the report and told him she thought he made an error by listing Boyd as the arrestee — since the protective order was in fact issued against Sanders, not Boyd, who was the protected party.
“Another records check was conducted and confirmed this to be true,” Acosta wrote: the order declared that Sanders should have no contact with the girlfriend.
Acosta wrote that he notified two supervisors of “this terrible error.”
One of the supervisors, Sgt. Louis DeCrecenzo, “instructed me to immediately make contact with the boyfriend” to arrest him, and to prepare a BOLO (Be On the Look Out order) and arrest if unsuccessful.
According to Acosta’s third report, he found Sanders at his Hamden home.
The officer blamed Sanders for the officer’s misreading of the protective order. He wrote that he “explained” to Sanders “that when he called for police assistance he called stating that there is a protective order on Tamara Boyd who keeps following him.” The officer further “explained … that by him stating it in that way — that it presented a different understanding, leading me to think that he was calling for police assistance due to Tamara violating a protective order. In hindsight I believe this perception led me to make an error when conducting the initial records check. I mistakenly transposed who the defendant was and who the protected party was. Upon reviewing my body-worn camera footage it was clear that Records Clerk Elain Lesane [sp] initially stated it correctly.”
Sanders, Acosta continued, “clarified, now giving me the understanding he was initially calling for police assistance — knowing that he was the defendant in the protective order and that he was calling with the intention of protecting himself, knowing that he’s not supposed to have contact with Tamara, yet she is following him.”
Acosta arrested Sanders for violating a protective order, a felony, and brought him to the police station lock-up, He described Sanders as “respectful and very cooperative during this encounter.”
Boyd’s Version
Boyd: Handcuffed, released, told to get to court.
Boyd, who lives in Hamden, offered her version in a conversation Wednesday with the Independent.
She said that three weeks prior to the incident on Oct. 22, Sanders had “punched me in the face with a clothespin” in the parking lot of the Whalley Mobil gas station. She called police. Sanders was charged with third-degree assault and second-degree breach of peace, charges to which he has pleaded not guilty. A judge granted a protective order for Boyd, instructing Sanders not to have contact with her.
On Nov. 16, Boyd said, Sanders called and asked her to meet for a drink at “the Jump,” aka the Taurus.
She said he bought her a drink. They had a “discussion,” which he “didn’t like” because “I was holding him accountable and responsible” for his actions.
They left the bar, and Sanders suggested they go to the McDonald’s parking lot, a place where they often hang out and talk at night while Sanders sells recorded-music “wares,” Boyd said.
She said they spoke for maybe 10 – 15 minutes there when police arrived. She didn’t realize that Sanders had called the police. She said she told the officer who approached her that she hadn’t called.
Then Sanders informed the officer that he had called, Boyd said. He said Boyd was following him in violation of a protective order and was threatening that he’d get what he “deserves.”
The officer then asked Boyd if she meant “karma” by that comment, Boyd said. “Yes sir,” she said she responded.
She said she told the officer that the protective order wasn’t against her. To her surprise, she said, the officer took her to the police station, and arrested her.
She said she was reluctant as a black woman to raise objections. “I didn’t argue. I’m not arguing with the police given the nature of the climate today,” she said.
“I feel like my voice wasn’t heard. If this was a white woman, this would have been totally different. If this was a white woman at this time of night, they probably thought nothing of this.”
So Boyd was taken to the lock-up — a fact not mentioned in the police report.
She said she had trouble sleeping in the lock-up, where it was “very cold” and “not clean. I was sick to my stomach. I could barely get a cup of water. It took forever to get toilet paper.”
The next morning, she was handcuffed and taken to the prisoner transport van for a ride to court to face her charge.
Then she heard, “Get that girl! Get that girl!”
“I didn’t know they were talking about me,” she said.
They were. They brought her back inside, released the handcuffs. “There’s been some type of mix-up,” she said a supervisor told her. “You were arrested and you weren’t supposed to be arrested. You’ve got to get to court right now.”
But her car was still in the McDonald’s lot. She walked to the train station, got a cab to McDonald’s, retrieved her car, made it to court.
Later that morning she appeared before a judge. She did not have a lawyer at the time, she said. The state did not drop the charges; they nolled them, meaning she still faces repercussions if she is arrested for another charge over the next 13 months.
Sanders’s Version
Elijah Sanders, meanwhile, contested both other versions.
He denied that he ever hit Boyd on Oct. 22. “I never touched this woman a day in my life. I never even screamed at her,” he claimed. He denied that he asked her to meet him at the Jump on Nov. 22.
He also denied that “she was ever my girlfriend.”
He was hanging out there with friends, outside the Jump, when she pulled up, Sanders said. He said he therefore left, and she followed him.
“She chased me and ran red lights. I called the cops,” he stated in a conversation Wednesday with the Independent. “This is crazy. We have no protection.”
He was concerned about being charged with violating the protective order, he said. He said he followed a direction from the judge who had issued the order: “The judge told me, ‘If this lady contacts you, get away and call the police.’”
When police arrived at the McDonald’s lot, he never claimed that the protective order was against Boyd, Sanders claimed. “I said, ‘Listen, she has an order of protection against me. She’s following me.”
Sanders has pleaded not guilty in the case. His next scheduled court appearance, on charges connected to both incidents, is Jan. 4.
Next Steps
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Paola Serrecchia: Abusers often “manipulate system” to portray victims as harassers.
Frank Cirillo Jr., an attorney representing Boyd, said he is preparing a legal action against the city over the incident to “to send a message that officers can’t be doing this.”
“I don’t understand how this can happen. You have computer programs that will pop up. She had to suffer a night’s worth of embarrassment. She had to be in jail overnight,” Cirillo said. “Once they realized they made a mistake, they should have profusely apologized.”
Meanwhile, internal affairs investigators should be able to check the veracity of Acosta’s account, because, he wrote, he had his body-worn camera activated during these encounters.
Dominguez said she has not taken Acosta off duty pending the outcome of the investigation. She also declined to discuss any of the specifics of the case. She has repeatedly said that she is committed to taking a strong stance on domestic violence — including in this case, in which she recommended a six-month unpaid suspension for a sergeant who made errors in supervising officers’ work on a domestic violence-related call.
“We are looking at the entire incident” to learn what happened and “to see if” discipline is “appropriate.”
Paola Serrecchia, who manages the HOPE Family Justice Center to help people affected by domestic violence, was not aware of this incident when informed about it on Wednesday. Based on what she heard, she said she detects a familiar thread.
“I don’t think there was anything that the officer did intentionally. But I do know this: When there is a protective order on abusers, oftentimes what they’ll do as part of retaliation is that they’ll say the victim is the one harassing them. That is very common.”
“There would not be a protective order unless there was an arrest and the police believed there was a crime that was admitted,” she added.
Grammar/Spelling Trouble Ahead?
Officer Acosta received a three-day suspension earlier this year for his role in a separate, unrelated case involving the non-arrest of an inebriated New Haven firefighter after the firefighter broke into his ex-girlfriend’s home — and hours later killed himself. Acosta’s offense, according to an IA report: failure to activate his body-worn camera. He told investigators it was an inadvertent mistake that “he was focused on initially exiting the cruiser to determine if the officer was still on the scene and forgot to” activate it.
That same IA report revealed another offense the department is apparently taking seriously: grammatical and spelling mistakes in written reports. An officer involved in the incident was found to have committed those errors — and a supervisor, Sgt. Jasmine Sanders, was accused of signing off on an arrest report with those errors. That offense was cited among several others that led the acting police chief to recommend suspending Sanders without pay for six months, a recommendation that met with some skepticism this week at a hearing of the Board of Police Commissioners. At the hearing, the author of the IA report again brought up Sanders’ alleged failure to correct errors in grammar and spelling. (The IA citation included not just grammar and spelling errors, but a more consequential failure to charge an arrestee correctly; the supervisor apparently ignored a computer warning about the charging error.)
If the spelling/grammar standard will continue to apply to IA investigations, Officer Acosta may be in for deep trouble. The supervisor who signed off on the three reports he filed in this latest protective-order case may be as well. Even though the reports may contain fewer typos than, say, a typical New Haven Independent article (including a typo a reader caught two paragraphs above), they nevertheless feature numerous missing commas, improperly spaced hyphens, a nakedly misplaced modifier, and two different spellings for records clerk Elaine LeSane — both of them wrong.
Nora Grace-Flood contributed reporting.
"a nakedly misplaced modifier"
LMAO....good one