Gun Was Loaded — & A Block Away

Tyler Camp had to make an instant decision: Wait for the team. Or run ahead and try to get the gun on his own.

Camp, a 28-year-old New Haven police officer with two years on the force, faced that decision one evening last week on Grand Avenue.

In New York, the ball had just dropped for New Year’s Day. 2023 was beginning.

In New Haven’s Fair Haven neighborhood, someone had just shot four bullets into the air. Another year of street gunfire was beginning.

Camp drove around the neighborhood looking for the shooter.

He spotted a man who fit that description, down to his footwear. He called across an intersection for the man to stop. The man walked away instead.

Camp now had to decide how much to put himself at risk to protect other people from risk.

New Year's Eve Fireworks

He was one hour into his second consecutive eight-hour shift of the night, at around 12:10 a.m., when the incident began. 

Because of New Haven’s cop shortage (mirroring a nationwide shortage), officers like Camp are regularly working several 16-hour double shifts a week. They have no choice. The department has no choice but to make those assignments, either, until it can get more officers through the training academy.

In between shifts, Camp had swung by the 1 Union Ave. police headquarters around 11 p.m. to pick up a freshly charged body camera and hit line-up again. The sergeant at line-up had advised the officers: It’s New Year’s Eve. Expect to hear fireworks that sound like gunshots.

Camp returned to his East Shore patrol district. He was driving by Quinnipiac Avenue and Ferry Street when he heard about ShotSpotter detecting four apparent blasts coming from the direction of the other side of the Q River.

“Might be fireworks,” he reasoned.

Or it might not. So he headed over the Ferry Street Bridge to Chambers and Houston Streets in Fair Haven, where someone had indeed called in a complaint about gunshots.

Camp met up with two fellow officers at the scene, Christopher Nguyen and Isiah Whiting. Camp looked around in the dark — and spotted four shell casings on the ground.

“Clearly,” he realized, ​“this isn’t fireworks.”

The officers met with the neighbor who had called in the complaint. The neighbor showed them home security camera video footage of the incident. It showed a man in a light colored sweatshirt, jeans, and high-top sneakers firing the four shots into the air. It showed a heavyset woman next to him.

Officers Nguyen and Whiting remained to hold the scene until the Bureau of Identification could arrive for the evidence. Camp returned to his cruiser to cruise Fair Haven to search for the alleged shooter.

Even though it was New Year’s Day morning, not many people were out on the streets, probably because it was raining.

Around 1 a.m., Camp did spot two people walking west on Grand Avenue approaching the Blatchley Avenue intersection. One was a heavyset woman. One was a man wearing … a light colored sweatshirt, jeans, and high-top sneakers.

Camp checked the computer video screen in his cruiser: He saw that no other cops were nearby. He hesitated to approach a possible gunman on his own. He knew it would be safer to have several officers involved.

He called Officer Whitney. ​“Listen, I think I got a suspect,” he said. ​“Where are you?”

Officer Whitney was heading back to 1 Union Ave.; because of the rain, the department decided not to hold the scene, so he was bringing the casings in himself. He now would turn around and head over to Grand and Blatchley first.

Camp watched the suspect cross the intersection. He parked on the east side of the intersection. He put on his flashing lights.

Then he got out and called out to the man, asking him to stop.

The man responded that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He resumed heading west.

Camp asked him again to stop, said he’d explain why.

He also noticed the man ​“immediately grab his groin area” as he spoke. That was another ​“red flag.” Camp was accustomed to ​“seeing how people act when they’re nervous. They give away a lot,” especially about where they’re hiding something.

Camp kept shouting out to the man in hopes of stalling until backup could arrive. It wasn’t working. The man was moving farther away.

Hence the choice of running after him without team support, or letting a potential gunman escape.

Teamwork = Dreamwork

Camp has always loved working with a disciplined team trained to pursue a common goal, he said in an interview. That’s in part why he became a cop.

That’s what he loved about football when he was growing up in the town of Monroe. He started playing in third grade, through high school, where he suited up as a linebacker on the team.

That’s also why he joined the Marine Corps after high school graduation. He spent four years on active duty, deployed to the South Pacific with a sniper platoon. He trained in joint exercises with allied forces from Japan, Germany, Australia, and South Korea. ​“I wouldn’t trade anything” for the experience, he said. ​“It was cool how we were able to work together” and learn from each other. He never ended up firing a weapon in combat. Rather, he took part in a humanitarian effort distributing water and food amid emergency civil-war conditions in Papua New Guinea. ​“It was awesome” being able to do that, he said.

Looking to lay down roots rather than ​“live out of a bag” forever, Camp returned stateside to study sociology and psychology at the University of Miami with hopes of pursuing a criminal justice career.

He enjoyed his studies. Then in 2019 a childhood friend, Jack Cardi, called from Connecticut. Jack had become a NHPD officer. ​“We’re hiring,” he told his friend. ​“New Haven’s a great place to work.” By September 2020, he was wearing the badge of a new team.

In that split second on Grand Avenue, Camp decided to take the risk. He worried that otherwise the man would get away and possibly shoot someone.

He started running solo after the shooting suspect.

The man kept moving, too.

“Don’t walk away from me!” Camp called out.

“I didn’t do nothing!” the man responded, continuing to flee.

Camp caught up with him. ​“I needed to get this person under control as fast as possible,” he later recalled thinking.

“I didn’t do nothing!” the man insisted again. ​“I came from my mom house!”

Camp grabbed the man by the left wrist, placed his other hand in the pocket of his rear shoulder blade, and brought him to the ground. The suspect — who weighs a little more than half as much as the officer — did not resist.

By that time Officers Whiting and Nguyen (pictured above) had arrived.

The police body camera video, viewed by the Independent, showed Camp calmly explaining the stop. ​“There were gunshots over here. There’s a video,” he said. ​“That video showed a male and a female that match the description of the both of you.”

The officers patted down the man.

“What’s that right there? What is it?” one asked about the bulge near his groin.

“It’s a handgun,” the man acknowledged. ​“I didn’t shoot nobody. I didn’t do no shooting. They just killed my friend yesterday — I’m nervous.”

The officers retrieved the gun. It was a Smith & Wesson SW40V. They also had an illegal extended magazine capable of holding 30 rounds. A bag the man was carrying had a clear plastic bag containing 18 .40-caliber bullets. It also had marijuana, digital scales, and empty cannabis packaging, according to the subsequent police incident report.

Camp checked out the gun. It was not registered. And the suspect, as a felon, did not have legal permission to carry it.

The officers called for an ambulance crew after the arrestee said his hand hurt from the tackle. After the crew checked him out, he declined further medical treatment. Officers took him and the evidence to 1 Union Ave. for booking on felony charges of criminal possession of a firearm and ammunition; carrying a pistol without a permit; and illegal possession of a high-capacity magazine. Police did not immediately charge him with actually firing the four shots, because detectives have to piece together ballistic evidence to tie the weapon to the casings. That takes a while.

Targeting Gun Crime

The arrestee, who is 28 and lives in New Haven, has not yet entered a plea in the case. He is being held on $250,000 bond on the gun charges as well as a pending violation of probation charge related to a 2019 felony risk of injury to a child offense to which he pleaded guilty. He has pleaded not guilty to a pending felony narcotics-sale charge for which he was arrested last June.

Assistant Police Chief David Zannelli, who oversees patrol, said after reviewing the body camera footage and case file that Camp made all the right moves: Stopping someone with just cause, not at random; acting swiftly and professionally to catch an alleged shooter soon after the incident; taking time to explain his actions to the detained man.

Zannelli called the arrest an example of the hard work cops are doing to get guns off the street during a period of low staffing and an uptick in street violence. New Haven has seen three homicides already in the year’s first 10 days. The Smith & Wesson was one of nine illegal guns officers have seized in the same period.

“If you fire a gun illegally in the city, it will not be tolerated,” Zannelli stated.

Since the New Year’s Day arrest, Camp has ​“replayed it over in my head,” he said. He said he recognizes that one officer, or one police force, cannot solve America’s gun violence problem. But an arrest like this one showed how an officer can make a difference, he said.

“It felt good. We got a gun off the street. A firearm off the street is potentially one less person getting shot. It makes the job worth it.”

Camp filed his report from his cruiser after logging in evidence at 1 Union Ave. and parking on South Orange Street. He headed home at 7 a.m. after his 16-hour shift passed, grabbed a few hours sleep, and headed back to 1 Union Ave. for the 3 p.m. start of another work day.

Previous stories about officers on the beat:

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* Elisa Tuozzoli
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