Ex-Top Cop Trial, Day 1: Alleged Domestic Abuse History Revealed

First, he allegedly choked his then-wife.

Two months later, he allegedly punched her multiple times in the head while their 1‑year-old son looked on.

Two months after that, he allegedly hit her so hard that she fell back against their shower’s sliding door, knocking it off its track. 

Finally, a few weeks after that, he allegedly threw a Lysol can at her face, threatened to shoot up his East Shore home — and was ultimately arrested by fellow city police officers.

That series of escalating domestic violence incidents emerged Monday during the first day of evidence presentation in the jury trial of Rahgue Tennant.

Tennant is a retired former New Haven police lieutenant who once oversaw the Dixwell policing district. He was arrested in September 2018 for allegedly assaulting his wife and holding his family hostage, and was subsequently charged by the state with one felony count of second-degree assault, one felony count of risk of injury to a child, and one misdemeanor count of second-degree breach of peace.

Tennant has pleaded not guilty to all three charges.

In a fifth-floor courtroom at the state courthouse at 235 Church St. on Monday, Assistant State’s Attorney Kelly Davis and criminal defense attorney Richard Silverstein spent all morning and afternoon eliciting testimony from the sole witness put on the stand during the trial’s first full day: Tennant’s ex-wife. 

Referring to her only by her initials, as is required in state court for victims of domestic violence, Davis and Silverstein questioned Tennant’s ex-wife about more than just the incidents that led to her then-husband’s arrest on Sept. 6, 2018.

The attorneys also reached back to the months and weeks leading up to those events. They elicited testimony from Tennant’s ex-wife about three other alleged incidents of physical and verbal violence perpetrated by the then high-ranking New Haven cop in April, June, and mid-August 2018.

Davis used her questioning of the witness to present these earlier alleged assaults as forming a clear history of abusive and malicious behavior by Tennant towards his wife — as evidence of his increasingly controlling and violent behavior in the months leading up to his arrest.

On behalf of the defense, Silverstein used his questioning of the witness to try to cast doubts on her credibility by strongly implying that the ex-wife was inventing these incidents, or at least exaggerating how bad they were, in order to destroy her ex-husband’s career and keep him from ever seeing his kids again.

Time and again on Monday, State Superior Court Judge Jon Alander made clear to the six jurors and two alternates seated in the plexiglass-barriered jury box that they they can take these alleged prior incidents of domestic violence — which he referred to as ​“uncharged misconduct” — into consideration on only a very limited basis.

That’s because these alleged incidents never resulted in Tennant’s arrest. The only criminal charges that the former top neighborhood cop faces stem from what allegedly took place between Aug. 30 and Sept. 6, 2018.

Alander told the jurors that the state brought up these three alleged prior incidents on Monday only to try to ​“show intent for [the] assault” that allegedly took place at the end of August. 

The state was ​“just showing intent” to try to make its case that the Aug. 30 alleged assault was not a mistake, the judge said after one such stretch of the ex-wife’s testimony; and that ​“the defendant had malice towards this witness” when he allegedly threw a Lysol can at her face, threatened to shoot himself and others, and held her hostage in their East Shore home for roughly a week.

Tennant is being represented in this case by Silverstein and fellow criminal defense attorney Jamie Alosi. The lead state prosecutors in this trial are Davis and Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Jason Germain.

"He Just Started Punching Me"

After Alander and his clerk swore in the jurors and explained the charges at the center of this case, Davis spent all morning and part of the early afternoon questioning Tennant’s ex-wife about their decade-long marriage, their three children, and the various alleged domestic violence incidents that took place in 2018.

Sitting calmly in the witness stand for hours on end, wearing a black blazer and a lilac blouse and with curly dark hair coming just down to her shoulders, Tennant’s ex-wife described a marriage that started out strong — and then fell violently apart.

She said that she, like Tennant, was born and raised in North Philadelphia. She once worked as a licensed practical nurse but, by 2018, she no longer had a job.

“I wasn’t allowed to work,” she said.

“Who didn’t allow you to work?” Davis asked.

“My ex-husband,” she replied.

When she and Tennant started dating, she said, ​“I thought I had met somebody who was mature.” ​“It was good,” she said about the first five years of their marriage. They bought and renovated a multi-family house on Peck Street. In July 2018, they moved into a house on the East Shore.

Was there any infidelity in your marriage? Davis asked.

Yes, Tennant’s ex-wife said. She said that Tennant, during an argument in 2017, admitted to having had an affair with a female city police officer.

Why did you stay with him after finding that out? Davis asked.

“I stayed because I wanted my marriage to work,” she replied. 

That led Davis to question the ex-wife about three incidents of alleged domestic violence that took place in the run-up to the events that led to Tennant’s arrest.

First, what happened in April 2018 between you and your then-husband? Davis asked.

She said that she and Tennant and their three young children had initially planned to go on a trip to Philadelphia, as they often did. ​“He said he wasn’t gonna take us,” she said. ​“That made me upset.”

She said she hadn’t gone grocery shopping yet that week, and that made Tennant upset. She said she told him that he’d have to watch their three kids as she went shopping, and he allegedly replied, ​“I’m not watching these fucking kids.”

“I was angry,” Tennant’s ex-wife said. Because she and the kids weren’t going to Philadelphia. Because he had spoken to her so rudely.

After a brief verbal argument, she said, ​“he put his hands around my neck and he started choking me” in the bedroom of their Peck Street house. He only stopped when ​“I kicked him in the balls and I kicked him off of me,” she said.

Davis then submitted as evidence and showed the jury a photograph that the ex-wife said she took after the choking incident. It showed the ex-wife looking into the camera, her neck red and apparently bruised.

“I was gonna leave him” after that, she said. ​“I was gonna tell” somebody about the assault. She took the picture to retain proof that it happened. But she didn’t leave Tennant, and she didn’t tell anyone about what happened, at least not then.

What happened on June 16, 2018? Davis continued.

Tennant’s ex-wife spoke about going to a good friend’s 40th birthday party that day. She said Tennant wasn’t at home when she got back that night. She said her phone had been stolen on a trip to Walmart the day before. So, instead of checking her email and her bank account and Facebook on her phone, as she would usually do, she used the family’s computer. She said she fell asleep at around midnight, even though Tennant still had not returned home.

The next morning, she said, Tennant woke her up with a start and said, ​“We need to get to the bottom of this.”

She said she went to the kitchen, where she found out that Tennant was upset because he had been looking through her Facebook and had found a year-old message from her ex-boyfriend.

After confronting her about that message, she said, she picked up their 1‑year-old son, ​“and he just started punching me.” She said she fell to the floor, and he punched her roughly three times with a closed fist.

Why are you doing this while holding our son in your arms? she recalled asking him.

She said his response was: ​“I want my son to know what it’s like to fuck with a bitch like you.”

The ex-wife said she later called a friend and told her about this incident, and then called a domestic violence hotline. ​“I told them I wanted to leave. I didn’t know where to go,” she said. She said she stopped reaching out to a local domestic violence support organization called the Umbrella Center because she recognized the name of one of its staffers as someone whom Tennant used to work with at the police department.

“I was scared it would be relayed to him that I was making plans to leave,” she said. So, again, she stayed with her husband. And she bought two replacement phones — one on the family’s phone plan, one with a pre-paid account that she kept separate from her then-husband. 

Why buy a second phone? Davis asked.

“I felt like I was being monitored,” the ex-wife replied.

And what about mid-August 2018? the state prosecutor asked. What happened then between the ex-wife and Tennant?

She said she took her two daughters to the beach with a friend. She didn’t tell Tennant about the beach outing, ​“and he was angry about that.”

Upon returning home, she remembered telling Tennant: ​“You are so overbearing.”

And after she said that, ​“he hit me in the side of the face so hard that I hit the shower door,” and it fell off its track.

Did Tennant say anything to you after hitting you so hard? Davis asked. 

Yes, the ex-wife remembered. He said that if she ​“fucked with anything I’ve worked for, you won’t live.” 

What did you take that to mean? Davis asked. 

That if she exposed any of his violent behavior towards her, Davis said, then ​“he will kill me.”

"Whoever Comes In Is Getting Lit The Fuck Up"

All of that led Davis to ask the ex-wife to detail exactly what happened on Aug. 30, 2018 — the first day of a series of events that led to Tennant’s arrest.

The ex-wife said that she dropped her oldest daughter off at school, put her two younger kids down for a nap, and started cooking dinner: baked chicken, potatoes, and zucchini. One of her husband’s favorite dishes, she said. She said she was making it that night to try to put him in a good mood.

She said that Tennant got home at around 5 p.m. that day and was hanging out with then city police Commissioner Greg Smith, waiting for the Xfinity cable guy to come by.

The ex-wife said her family had moved into the house the month before, and she had not yet finished unpacking. 

“He pulled me to the side in the kitchen,” she said about her then-husband. She said he was upset about something related to the trash and the recycling. ​“He said, ​‘This floor is fucking nasty,’ ” she recalled.

She said he wound up changing his clothes, drinking some wine, and then going out for a ride on his motorcycle.

She put her three kids to bed, she said, and fell asleep in the same bed with them, as she often did at that time when she ​“didn’t want to be in the same room as” Tennant.

She said Tennant came home at around 9 p.m., walked into the bedroom, turned on the light, and said, ​“You didn’t make my any fucking dinner.”

“I jumped up right away,” the ex-wife remembered. She said two of her kids followed her into the kitchen as she started making Tennant a plate of food.

She said that Tennant was standing on the other side of a partition separating the kitchen from another room, spraying a fly with a can of Lysol and complaining about what he thought was a messy house.

“The next time you have to throw some trash out,” he said, according to his ex-wife, ​“take your lazy ass outside to do it.”

“That’s not gonna work,” the ex-wife remembered responding in a sarcastic tone. ​“We’re gonna have to come up with another solution.”

After she said that, she remembered, she turned around with Tennant’s plate of food, and ​“he threw the [Lysol] can at my head.”

“It just felt like a hard object that hit me,” she told Davis. ​“It was painful.” She remembered dropping the plate and the food falling all over the floor. She then went to the bathroom and, after looking in the mirror, ​“I started screaming because there was a big knot on my head, and it was bleeding.”

Davis submitted as evidence and showed the jury photographs that the ex-wife had taken of herself immediately after getting hit by the Lysol can, and then in the days afterward as the bruise above her right eyebrow and all around her right eye became more and more pronounced.

Why did you take these pictures? Davis asked.

“I didn’t think anybody would believe what he did,” the ex-wife said.

Initially, the ex-wife said, Tennant said he was sorry. He brought her a bag of frozen vegetables and asked her to put it on her bruise to stop the swelling.

She remembered saying that she needed to go to the hospital. Her then-husband initially agreed, but then said, ​“If you go and tell them anything, you’ll lose everything,” she recalled.

She said that his facial expression changed ​“from his being apologetic to being angry.”

What did you take that to mean? Davis asked.

“That he’ll hurt my children,” she said.

So she decided not to go to the hospital. She remembered Tennant saying to her that night: ​“I fucked up, and I’m going to lose everything, and I just want to die.”

The ex-wife said that she didn’t leave the house the next day, because, as she remembered her then-husband telling her at the time, ​“no one can see my face like that.”

She said that Tennant acted ​“strange” all week. She said he took the kids to school every day, which he didn’t normally do. He did all the grocery shopping. He bought concealer make-up for her at Walmart for her to try to cover her bruise. And he installed a motion-sensor Ring doorbell that recorded movement and interactions at the house’s front door.

“I didn’t leave the house all week,” she said.

The ex-wife also said that, sometime mid-week, Tennant brought a small cardboard box into the bedroom. Inside that box was a magazine for a gun. She said she later walked in on him in the master bedroom ​“loading bullets into a magazine for an AR15” assault rifle.

As he loaded the bullets, she recalled, the AR15 long gun sat right in front of him on the bed.

Was this typical behavior of his? Davis asked.

“No,” the ex-wife replied. ​“He never did that.” When she walked in and saw him with the bullets and magazine and the gun on the bed, she said, ​“He told me to ​‘close the fucking door.’ ”

How did that make you feel? Davis asked.

“Terrified,” the ex-wife replied. She said that she knew her husband had four guns in the house: the AR15 and a pump shotgun, which were kept in the attic, and two handguns, which were kept in a safe.

During Monday’s trial, Davis showed the jurors all four of the guns, laying the two long guns out on a table before the judge.

The ex-wife said she later called the domestic violence hotline to try to find a shelter for her and her kids to escape to. She said the Umbrella Center lined up a place for them to stay in Greenwich. She said she hoped to leave that Friday, Sept. 7, 2018, when she knew her then-husband would be in Philadelphia at his aunt’s funeral.

Before that Friday came around, she said, she didn’t try to leave the house. ​“I wanted life to seem normal” for Tennant and their kids, she said. Also, she said, she didn’t have the keys to the van, which made it difficult for her to leave with her kids in tow, even when Tennant wasn’t at home.

But on Sept. 6, she said, a day before she had planned on leaving with her kids for good, the state Department of Children and Families (DCF) — notified by the domestic violence support center that the ex-wife had called — sent two workers to her East Shore house.

The ex-wife said she opened the door and told them her husband wasn’t home. She said she knew that the interaction was being recorded on the Ring doorbell camera, and was afraid to speak up about her plans of leaving the next day.

She said when Tennant got home later that day, ​“he told me he heard the whole conversation through the Ring doorbell.”

The ex-wife said she tried to ​“downplay” why the DCF workers had come to their home, saying that their visit had something to do with an unrelated matter at her daughter’s school.

Why did you try to minimize the reason for the DCF workers’ visit? Davis asked.

“I didn’t want him to get angry,” the ex-wife said.

But Tennant was angry. 

“He said, ​‘No one’s coming in this house,’ ” the ex-wife remembered. She said he told her: ​“Whoever comes in this house is getting lit the fuck up.”

What did you take that to mean? Davis asked.

“That he would shoot anyone who came in the house,” the ex-wife replied.

Soon thereafter, the ex-wife said, Tennant got a call from then-Assistant Chief Otoniel ​“Tony” Reyes, who was not just a colleague of Tennant, but also a close personal and family friend. At that same time, she said, Reyes’s wife Lily, who was also a close friend, called the ex-wife’s cellphone.

“She was trying to get to the bottom of what was going on,” the ex-wife said. But because Tennant was standing right in front of her listening, she said, she again sought to minimize what was going on, and to convince Lily and Tony that everything was OK. ​“I said, ​‘I’m fine,’ ” she remembered telling Lily.

After she got off the phone with Tony and Lily Reyes, she said, Tennant went to the bathroom to take a shower. When she heard the door close and the water turn on, she thought to herself, ​“We need to run.”

So she picked up her two youngest children and, with her oldest daughter by her side, ​“I ran out of the house to the neighbor next door.” She said she was wearing only tights and a shirt, and didn’t have shoes on. ​“I ran there because I felt that was my only chance to run.” 

She banged on her neighbor’s door. Even though she didn’t know the neighbor well, she opened the door and let herself in and locked the door behind her, she recalled.

She said she then called Lily Reyes back and told her all about what had happened. ​“She told me we were on speaker,” she said, and Tony Reyes was listening as well.

She said she spoke with a number of police officers over the phone during that call, and they all told her to go into the center of her neighbor’s house.

Then, through her neighbor’s window, she saw that police had filled the street. ​“I saw police officers in bushes all across the street,” she said. 

She said that then-Asst. Chief Herb Sharpe drove her and her kids from the neighbor’s house and to the nearby East Shore police substation, where she saw ​“a ton of cops.”

How did that make you fell?

“Embarrassed,” the ex-wife said. ​“Ashamed. I recognized a lot of them.”

It was at the police substation that she was interviewed by and gave a statement to Sgt. Shayne Kendall and Det. Cherelle Carr.

Ever since that day nearly four years ago, the ex-wife said, she’s been in the witness protection program. (She said the program helped cover the costs of relocation, but that she hasn’t received any money from them since 2018.)

"How Do You Hold Someone Hostage Mentally?"

At around 2:35 p.m. Monday, Davis wrapped up her questioning of Tennant’s ex-wife — and defense attorney Silverstein got his chance to start cross-examining the witness. (Judge Alander adjourned the day’s proceedings at around 4:35 p.m., and Silverstein said he plans to continue cross-examining the ex-wife when the trial resumes Tuesday morning.)

Wearing a powder-blue suit, a red tie, and white dress shoes, Silverstein paced back and forth across the courtroom, sometimes standing right next to the jury box as he questioned the witness, sometimes standing behind his client, his hands resting on Tennant’s shoulders.

Throughout his cross-examination, Silverstein sought to cast doubt on the ex-wife’s testimony, her character, and her motivations.

As he put it in an aside to the court towards the end of the day’s proceedings, Tennant’s ex-wife has ​“motive and acrimony towards my client, and malice.” 

He frequently ran up against objections from the prosecutor and the judge.

“Mr. Silverstein,” Alander said after one such stymied line of inquiry, ​“you’re prefacing your questions with arguments. If you could just cut to the question, we’d be able to move on a little bit quicker.”

Several times over the course of the afternoon, the roughly 12 people who turned out to show their support for Tennant and who sat in the public area behind the defense table murmured their approval for the ex-cop and his lawyer. That was particularly the case when Silverstein’s questions pressed on the ex-wife’s alleged personal malice towards Tennant, or on apparent contradictions between her testimony at the trial and statements she had given to local and state law enforcement back in 2018.

“Are you ever gonna let him see his three children again?” Silverstein asked Tennant’s ex-wife. Nearly four years have gone by, and he hasn’t seen his kids once. ​“They’re his children too.”

“It’s hard to say,” the ex-wife replied. ​“As of now, I don’t feel safe with them around” her ex-husband.

“When did you stop loving him?” Silverstein asked again and again. Was it when he allegedly admitted to cheating on you with a female New Haven police officer?

“That helped me like him less,” the ex-wife replied.

Did you know what would happen to a cop of Tennant’s standing if he were arrested for domestic violence? Silverstein asked. Did you know that any aspiration and chance he had to become the city’s next police chief would end with such an arrest? ​“Any aspirations he had with the New Haven Police Department were done when you said he assaulted you,” Silverstein said.

“I didn’t care about that,” the ex-wife replied.

Which led Silverstein back to a favorite question of his.

“When did you stop loving him?”

“I can’t answer that,” the ex-wife said.

Most of Silverstein’s questions focused less on love, and more on why on why the ex-wife did not have photographs documenting every time she was allegedly abused by Tennant — and on why she did not leave her then-husband when she appeared to have so many opportunities to do so.

Between Aug. 30 and Sept. 6, 2018 — the time of the incidents that led to Tennant’s arrest — the ex-wife ​“elected to stay” at their East Shore house, even though she had testified that Tennant was not at home every night, Silverstein said. 

Why? Because you didn’t have the keys to the van?

That was one of the reasons, the ex-wife replied.

“Ever heard of Uber?” Silverstein asked. ​“If he was such a monster, why didn’t you leave when you had the opportunity?”

“I had a safety plan to leave that Friday,” the ex-wife said.

Silverstein pushed back. ​“You had opportunity after opportunity to leave the house with your children,” he said. ​“You had ample opportunities to leave him” that week.

The ex-wife recognized that Tennant ​“didn’t physically hold me there” that week.

“You were a mental hostage,” Silverstein said, quoting from the statement that the ex-wife gave to the police back in September 2018. ​“How do you hold someone hostage mentally?”

“By threatening their life,” the ex-wife replied.

He took umbrage with media reports that Tennant had held his family ​“hostage” and had ​“barricaded” himself in the East Shore home. 

Tennant never held anyone at gunpoint, he said. Tennant never ​“barricaded the house.” 

“The whole week you claimed you were mentally held captive, he never brandished a weapon?” Silverstein asked.

“Not that week,” the ex-wife replied.

What about that incident when Tennant allegedly punched you multiple times in the kitchen while holding your 1‑year-old son at his hip, Silverstein asked. Why did you not take photos of your alleged bruises after that?

“I don’t have photos for every incident,” the ex-wife said.

What about the incident in mid-August, when Tennant allegedly hit you in the face so hard that you fell back and knocked the shower door off its track? Silverstein continued. Why no pictures of the bruises from that incident?

“I just don’t have a photo for every incident,” the ex-wife repeated.

Besides yourself, Silverstein told the ex-wife, there are no witnesses to any of the alleged incidents of domestic violence that you described on the witness stand today. Isn’t that true?

That’s not true, she said. ​“Our children” were witnesses.

“Do you want your children to testify” in court during this trial? Silverstein asked.

“Objection,” state prosecutor Davis intervened. The judge, shaking his head at Silverstein, sustained the objection.

See below for previous articles about Rahgue Tennant’s arrest and criminal case.

• Slow Start To Picking Ex-Cop’s Jury
• Ex-Top Cop Gambles On Trial
• Ex-Top Cop Seeks Diversionary Program
• Top Cop Retires, Heads To Trial
• Top Cop Rejects Battering Plea Deal
• Arrested Top Cop Keeps Running Out Clock
• Top Cop Benefits As Case Drags On
• Top Cop’s Domestic Violence Case Continued Again
• Accused Wife-Beating Top Cop Staying Sober
• Top Cop Domestic Violence Case Continued
• Cop’s Alleged Threats, Violence Detailed
• Cops Suspend Lt. After Armed Standoff