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The 45-year-old woman struck by a cop cruiser Tuesday is back from the hospital nursing her wounds — and her resentment about how she said police reacted to the incident.
An officer turning his cruiser onto Chapel Street from High struck the woman, LaTanya Autry, at 1:08 p.m. Tuesday.
Autry, the Marcia Brady Tucker fellow in photography at Yale University Art Gallery (read about her work here), said she was crossing Chapel to grab lunch at Atticus Book Store-Cafe.
According to the official version offered by department spokesman Officer David Hartman, the cop in the cruiser had stopped on High Street just south of Chapel. Then the traffic light turned green. He slowly drove onto Chapel, then struck Autry, who was not walking in the crosswalk.
Hartman said surveillance video obtained by the police proves she had walked outside the crosswalk. The video did not capture the crash itself, Hartman said. (The Independent has asked the records division for a copy of the video; Hartman does not handle video releases.)
Autry (pictured) offered a somewhat different version of events in a conversation with the Independent Wednesday.
“I waited to see if the officer would turn. It did not appear that he was turning,” Autry said. So she crossed the street. She said she’s confident she was within the crosswalk most of that time. But she acknowledged that she may have veered slightly outside it as she arrived near the sidewalk to head into Atticus, which is one storefront in from the corner.
She said that as she lay on the ground after the collision, the officer never approached her, never checked to see if she was OK.
Autry was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she was told she had not broken any bones. She did sustain injuries to her arms and legs, and said Wednesday she was in considerable pain. Hospital doctors told her she should not be at work for the rest of the week.
After returning home Tuesday and reading the police version of events, Autry posted the following message on her Facebook page:
“This afternoon as I was crossing Chapel Street (at the corner of High Street) to get lunch a police car struck me. I had waited for the light to turn green. I was walking across the street. When I reached about midway in the street the police car that had been waiting at the corner of High Street, the intersection, to turn left just started coming right at me.
“Now that I’m reading this news report I see that the New Haven Police has determined that I was at fault completely and not the police officer. That’s a surprise!
“Witnesses at the scene told me the police officer was on his cell when he hit me. He never came over to me when I was lying in the street.”
The Independent spoke with one eyewitness who asked not to have her name used, for fear of retribution from police.
“Me and my husband were standing in front of the clock by the art gallery, we was right there,” the woman said.
“I saw the young lady first. She was standing on the corner. Next thing you know we turned around and the policeman came around the corner, he was on his cell phone, I seen him come around the corner he didn’t pay no attention to her. Bam! He came right at her and she flipped right on top of his car. In the whole logistics of it all, he didn’t even make sure she was OK. He put his phone in his top pocket and that’s when he decided he wanted to get on his walkie talkie. If I was any closer we would have been hit together.”
Officer Hartman said he does not have information about whether or not the officer driving the cruiser was on his phone. He said that police have a legal exemption permitting them to speak on cell phones while driving. “It is a communication tool just like a radio or anything else. Whether he was on [the] phone not been given to me.”
He also noted that eyewitnesses often err in reconstructing events like a car accident — which they’ve often not noticed much while it occurred. For instance, someone seeing an officer on the phone right after the fact, calling in an incident, may in retrospect believe he saw the officer with the phone at the time of the crash.
“in this particular case, we know that one witness’s account was incorrect,” Hartman said. That witness claimed the officer had sped through a red light, which the video disproved, he said.
Hartman also said members of the public should never fear repercussions for providing information to the police. He noted that in cases where a member of the public feels he has reason to object to police conduct, “we have a very well-known open door policy. You don’t even have to go into our building to go to” internal affairs.
Autry has had a rough year: This is the third time she has sustained injuries in an accident. In June she was a passenger in a car that was involved in a crash. Earlier, in March, a computer fell on her foot; she still walks occasionally with a special boot because of an injury sustained that day. She’s wondering, she said, whether she has somehow been cursed.
Paul Bass contributed reporting.
Maybe, just MAYBE pedestrians will begin to obey crosswalks and signals. Maybe we'll remember what we were taught as children and look both ways before cross rather than arbitrarily step into traffic. Maybe. Doubtful; but maybe.