How A Gun Chase Turned Less-Lethal

The fleeing man probably has a gun, the police officers chasing him figured.

One officer chased him with his own gun out. The other ran while pointing a taser.

If they needed to fire, they were hoping the latter weapon would do the trick.

That was the scene shortly before 2 a.m. earlier this month on Daggett Street outside the Wilson Branch Library in the Hill neighborhood.

Four officers were responding to a shooting. They had a suspect in their sights. 

Recounting the tense encounter in an interview, the four Hill-based officers — the patrol partner teams of Trevor Canace, 26, and Daniel Smith, 29; and Nick Samartino, 28, and Thomas Brunski, 29 — spoke of the bonds they have developed patrolling the Hill on the post-midnight C shift. They work together a lot.

Three of the four Hill cops are among 80 officers who have begun their careers in the Covid, post-George Floyd era, new NHPD members filling in thinned ranks at a time when the rules of their profession have changed. They constitute almost a quarter of all 335 current sworn officers. (The fourth Hill officer, Samartino, completed his field training and started patrolling two months before the pandemic hit.)

On the one hand, the departure of so many veteran officers in recent years (75 slots remain vacant) has drained the force of decades of institutional knowledge and experience. It has required officers to work draining double shifts.

On the other hand, it has made room for new officers to bring fresh energy and perspective to the department. It has presented New Haven with an opportunity to modernize its approach to policing.

Along with a fifth officer who was off this particular evening, the Hill officers call themselves the ​“Kimberly 5.” They have a group chat by that name. The two patrol duos find themselves working C shift at the same time at least three overnights a week. They coordinate their overtime schedules in order to work together as much as possible.

“They’re awesome. They’re hardworking,” remarked their supervisor, top Hill cop Sgt. Jasmine Sanders. She noticed how they have bonded, how that has helped them succeed as a group. They regularly volunteer as a team to help her out on extra morning-midday or early-evening two-person overtime walking beats to respond to hot spots and interact with neighbors and business owners.

The trust and chemistry they’ve developed pays off, for themselves, for the public at large, for the people they stop and question and sometimes arrest, they said.

Case in point: That overnight incident on Daggett.

Apple Watch Heads-Up

The four officers had just finished responding to a domestic call at 1:53 a.m. on that overnight, Feb. 3, involving a woman worried about her son’s safety. He turned out to be OK.

They returned to their cruisers. Canace was the only one still outside when he heard four gunshots. He told his colleagues.

Brunski checked his Apple Watch, which receives ShotSpotter alerts. He received a notice that four shots had been fired at Howard and Washington Avenues. The report had not yet come over the police radio.

The officers were nearby. All four drove to the corner in less than a minute, approaching from different angles. Brunski informed the others over the police radio that he saw people walking from the scene up Washington. He thought he saw someone walk through an alley behind the Wilson Branch Library, which anchors the corner of Daggett and Washington.

“I’m not sure if one of them came behind the library building,” he radioed.

Canace pulled up to the corner.

“I have a hella [lot] people out here,” Canace reported. The people he saw carried blankets and shopping bags and backpacks. The officers are used to seeing them at night, sometimes staying warm at the grates by the APT Foundation clinic a block away, sleeping outside. ​“They looked like they belonged,” Canace recalled later. ​“Their being here made sense.”

“Hear any gunshots?” Canace asked a woman walking by.

“No.” She kept going.

The police dispatcher reported that a call had come in that a ​“49” — shooting victim — had been struck in the stomach at the Washington-Howard spot.

Still on Daggett, Canace saw a man emerge from the shadows of the alley behind the library. He wore blue pants, a sweatshirt under a puffy black jacket, and a ski mask covering most of his face.

That looked suspicious to Canace. It wasn’t particularly cold, he said. The man looked better dressed than the homeless regulars. And he was coming from the shooting scene.

“Hey, come out here,” Canace called.

“What’s up brother?”

“Where did you just come from?”

“I just came from over there around the corner.”

“From around the corner?” Canace asked.

“Yep,” the man responded calmly.

“Ok, Cool. Come over here.”

“Sure. What do you need?”

The man had his hands in his pockets. That — along with his glance to the side and the ski mask — struck Canace as what the officers had learned at the academy to consider ​“pre-flight indicators.”

“Take your hands out of your pocket,” Canace instructed the man.

The man complied (pictured), pulling out a bandana from one pocket, a phone from the other

Canace grabbed his wrist with the intention of searching his pockets.

“Why you grab me?” the man asked — then took off, across the parking lot toward Congress Avenue.

Canace chased after him. So did his partner Smith, who had arrived at the lot.

Fearful that the man had a gun, they drew weapons. Canace drew his service semiautomatic handgun, Smith his taser. The idea is to have lethal force available if, say, someone points a gun at them — but also have ​“less lethal” force (taser) available if they need to subdue someone without a threat to their lives.

The partners talk about who would draw which weapon or whether to start running after the man. From training together at the Class XXIV academy, then continuing to patrol as a duo ever since they completed field training in 2021, they slip automatically into tandem. Same as when they split up to cover different doors at other calls — they sense each others’ moves, trust each other for back up.

The man had at least five strides on the officers as he reached a waist-high spiked wrought-iron fence at the lot’s border.

“Put your fucking hands up! I’m gonna fucking shoot!” the officers called.

Smith fired both prongs from his taser. They hit the man’s puffy jacket. The prongs did not penetrate through it.

The man did stumble to ground. He managed to squeeze through an 18-inch gap just before the officers caught up with him.

With his vest and belt on, Canace figured he couldn’t squeeze through the gap. He took a leap — and cleared it. (“We jump fences all the time,” he said.)

Smith did manage to squeeze through without jumping. The officers rushed onto Daggett Street.

The man had opened a 12-stride lead.

New Rules, New Generation

The Kimberly 5 adopted their name after a call that at first sounded equally serious. It came in as a report of a man with a gun at the Kimberly Avenue Mobil Super Stop gas station. A potential armed robbery.

They arrived to find no one with weapons. They did find that the person calling in the report had a car with a broken windshield. They then discovered that the car was reported stolen. They then learned the person had nine outstanding warrants.

They found someone else there with illegal drugs for sale. No one at the scene was being robbed. But someone did have a protective order out against them.

The officers were gelling as a team through their late-night work in the Hill. They started a group chat to keep in touch at different times of day, update each other, check in, offer support. That night they dubbed their group chat channel the Kimberly 5. A team nickname was born.

That’s just one example of how the dozens of young officers have not just reengineered a depleted department’s ranks over the past three years, but have done so as a group entering a changed profession.

The officers involved in the Daggett/Washington incident hear all the time from older officers about how the job has evolved.

“I had to train on body cameras. These guys are coming on knowing body cameras” from the start, observed Assistant Chief David Zannelli, who oversees patrol. ​“ShotSpotter wasn’t there” when he started walking a beat. The younger officers in general have an ingrained sense of technology as well that helps them in their job, he noted — the way Brunski’s Apple watch, for instance, gave the quartet a crucial head start on the responding to the shooting before it came over the police radio.

“This style of policing is the only policing we know,” Brunski said. Not just the technology, but the guidelines.

For instance, officers may no longer search a car at a motor vehicle stop based on smelling marijuana. In fact, they may no longer search a car by asking permission unless they have probable cause of a crime unrelated to a motor vehicle offense. They need an unsolicited offer to search. Nor may they pursue suspects driving away from a crime scene unless a supervisor OKs it.

That has been an adjustment for veteran officers.

“It’s a new world,” Brunski said. ​“We’re used to it.”

Footwear Failure

Back on Daggett Street, the fleeing suspect ran into a yard. He had lost his sandals while running. (“That was not the proper footwear to run from the police,” Canace noted.) The officers were right behind. 

This time Canace got close enough to fire his taser (pictured above). The coat again seemed to have blocked the prongs. But the man stumbled, and the officers jumped on top of him.

“Don’t fucking move!” one instructed the man repeatedly, while the other radioed in their location.

They searched the man …

… and retrieved an unregistered .9mm Taurus G2C handgun from his front right jacket pocket. The gun had one live 9mm round in the chamber, 2 more in the magazine, which had a 12-round capacity.

Back-up officers arrived, including Brunski and Samartino. The two had been following the chase from a distance; having heard the loud ​“pop-pop” of the taser, they had feared that their colleagues had been shot with a handgun. Their hearts stopped pounding when they learned otherwise.

The man’s pockets contained other contraband as well: 37 paper folds of heroin, 28 grams of crack cocaine, 6 grams worth of MDMA.

The officers handcuffed the man, who was complying with them. Canace brought him to a cruiser.

The man said he felt sick. An ambulance was called. Canace allowed him to step outside the cruiser, and he vomited. He was taken to the hospital emergency room, released soon after for booking at 1 Union Ave.

Brunskin and Samartino returned to the original shooting scene at Howard and Washington. The shooting had occurred outside an apartment building there.

Earlier, before the chase, Brunski had walked to the back of the building— and seen three people by a first-floor open window. One was inside. One was outside. And one was being pushed through a window. He had asked the people to show their hands, and they complied. Brunski hadn’t seen weapons. He hadn’t seen blood. Because an emergency was unfolding, he concluded it was safe to leave the scene temporarily to help catch the suspected gunman, and return later.

Now it was later. Brunski and Samartino learned that the shooting victim had been taken to the hospital. They found four 9mm shell casings on the ground. 

Brunski spotted a blood trail leading into the house — and to the apartment where the man was earlier being pushed out of the rear window.

The officers went inside. They found at least nine people in the apartment. They separated the group into two bedrooms.

“Someone just got shot. There’s blood in here,” Brunski remembered explaining. 

They took people’s information. They met the girlfriend of the shooting victim. Brunski learned the man had been shot three times in the pelvis.

Detectives arrived. The case was now theirs.

Detectives are still investigating the shooting. (The above video features Officer Canace’s body camera footage.)

The arrested man, who had been convicted of a previous felony but was not wanted at the time of the incident, has for now been charged with criminal possession of a firearm, possession of a high-capacity magazine, possession of controlled substances, including with intent to sell, and interfering with an officer. 

The arrestee, who is 33, has been released on $400,000 bond, and has not yet entered a plea, according to the state judicial database. He exercised his Miranda right to decline to answer questions at the time of his arrest; a woman answering a knock at the home address listed in the police report said he doesn’t live there and she never heard of him.

Assistant Chief Zannelli said the arrestee remains a ​“potential suspect” in the actual shooting. The department is waiting for test results on the ballistics and DNA evidence gathered at the scene, he said. He said the victim remains hospitalized in ​“stable but critical condition.”

Zannelli praised the officers for ​“working hard and putting their own lives at risk” in responding to a shooting and safely making an arrest.

The officers themselves credited their teamwork and trust for the outcome, especially the quick, coordinated response.

“Thirty seconds later, he would have gotten away,” reflected Canace, who’s the son of a retired New Haven police officer.

In general, he said, the four officers’ working relationship keeps them safer and the public, including detainees, in situations like this: They more effectively maintain control and back each other up. They can step in to calm a situation if one of them grows agitated.

By 7 a.m., the 4 Kimberly 5ers were still on scene at Howard and Washington. The adrenaline rush had long passed. They were ready to kid each other as usual — teasing Smith, for instance, about whether he would spell ​“Daggett” right when he wrote up the report. They knew how to ease the tension after a harrowing evening that could have certainly ended as no laughing matter.

Previous stories about officers on the beat:

• Shafiq Abdussabur
• Yessennia Agosto
• Craig Alston & Billy White Jr.
• Joseph Aurora
• James Baker
• Lloyd Barrett
• Pat Bengston & Mike Valente
• Elsa Berrios
• Manmeet Bhagtana (Colon)
• Paul Bicki
• Paul Bicki (2)
• Sheree Biros
• Bitang
• Kevin Blanco
• Scott Branfuhr
• Bridget Brosnahan
• Craig Burnett & Orlando Crespo
• Keron Bryce and Steve McMorris
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia (2)
• Dennis Burgh
• Tyler Camp
• Anthony Campbell
• Darryl Cargill & Matt Wynne
• Elizabeth Chomka & Becky Fowler
• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
• Sydney Collier
• Carlos Conceicao
• Carlos Conceicao (2)
• Carlos Conceicao and Josh Kyle
• David Coppola
• Mike Criscuolo
•Natalie Crosby
• Steve Cunningham and Timothy Janus
• Chad Curry
• Gabrielle Curtis, Tyler Evans, Justin Julianelle
• Gregory Dash
• Roy Davis
• Joe Dease
• Milton DeJesus
• Milton DeJesus (2)
• Rose Dell
• Brian Donnelly
• Renee Dominguez, Leonardo Soto, & Mary Helland
• Anthony Duff
• Anthony Duff (2)
• Robert DuPont
• Robert DuPont and Rose Dell
• Eric Eisenhard & Jasmine Sanders
• Jeremie Elliott and Scott Shumway
• Jeremie Elliott (2)
• Jose Escobar Sr.
• Bertram Ettienne
• Bertram Ettienne (2)
• Martin Feliciano & Lou DeCrescenzo
• Paul Finch
• Jeffrey Fletcher
• Renee Forte
• Marco Francia
• Michael Fumiatti
• Michael Fumiatti (2)
• Osvaldo Garcia, Marlena Ofiara & Jake Wright
• William Gargone
• William Gargone (2)
• William Gargone & Mike Torre
• Derek Gartner
• Derek Gartner & Ryan Macuirzynski
• Tom Glynn & Matt Williams
• Jon Haddad & Daniela Rodriguez
• Michael Haines
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer (2)
• Dan Hartnett
• Ray Hassett
• Robert Hayden
• Heidi
• Patricia Helliger
• Robin Higgins
• Ronnell Higgins
• William Hurley & Eddie Morrone
• Derek Huelsman
• Racheal Inconiglios
• Juan Ingles
• Bleck Joseph and Marco Correa
• Shayna Kendall
• Shayna Kendall (2)
• Paul Kenney
• Hilda Kilpatrick
• Herb Johnson
• John Kaczor & Alex Morgillo
• Jillian Knox
• Peter Krause
• Peter Krause (2)
• Amanda Leyda
• Rob Levy
•Kyle Listro & Joseph Perrotti
• Anthony Maio
• Dana Martin
• Reggie McGlotten
• Steve McMorris
• Juan Monzon
• Monique Moore and David Santiago
• Matt Myers
• Carlos and Tiffany Ortiz
• Tiffany Ortiz
• Doug Pearse and Brian Jackson
• Chris Perrone
• Joseph Perrotti
• Joseph Perrotti & Gregory Dash
• Ron Perry
• Joe Pettola
• Diego Quintero and Elvin Rivera
• Ryan Przybylski
• Stephanie Redding
• Tony Reyes
•David Rivera
• Luis & David Rivera
• Luis Rivera (2)
• Salvador Rodriguez
• Salvador Rodriguez (2)
• Brett Runlett
• David Runlett
• Betsy Segui & Manmeet Colon
• Allen Smith
• Marcus Tavares
• Martin Tchakirides
• David Totino
• Stephan Torquati
• Gene Trotman Jr.
* Elisa Tuozzoli
• Kelly Turner
• Lars Vallin (& Xander)
• Dave Vega & Rafael Ramirez
• Earl Reed
• Daophet Sangxayarath & Jessee Buccaro
• Jason Santiago
• Herb Sharp
• Matt Stevens and Jocelyn Lavandier
• Jessica Stone
• Jessica Stone & Mike DeFonzo
• Arpad Tolnay
• Mike Torre & Ray Saracco
• John Velleca
• Manuella Vensel
• Holly Wasilewski
• Holly Wasilewski (2)
• Alan Wenk
• Stephanija VanWilgen
• Donald White, Brandon Way, & David Santiago
• Elizabeth White & Allyn Wright
• Matt Williams
• Michael Wuchek
• Michael Wuchek (2)
• David Zannelli
• Cailtin Zerella
• Caitlin Zerella (2)
• Caitlin Zerella, Derek Huelsman, David Diaz, Derek Werner, Nicholas Katz, and Paul Mandel
• David Zaweski