The man handcuffed in the cruiser wasn’t beating me, the woman on the Green insisted. She begged to take his place.
The emotional scene took place on the Green Thursday afternoon.
It began with a man rushing off a bus, a tangle on the sidewalk, a series of pleas. It ended with an arrest on a misdemeanor charge.
In the annals of problems police encounter every day, this one wasn’t destined for the blotter or the 6 o’clock news. It did demonstrate the challenge officers face when they encounter routine domestic violence complaints or violent incidents in public view — and they have to make a decision that will affect the participants’ lives.
The two lives in question Thursday belonged to a 53-year-old man and a 35-year-old woman.
The man was riding the westbound B bus home from a job at a big-box department store at around 11:50 a.m. The bus approached the corner of College and Chapel. The man urgently told the driver, Ellis Birks, that he had to get off.
Birks stopped the bus. The man jumped out.
Paul Bass Photo
Eyewitness Lakia Wilson called 911 from the bus.
According to Birks and others on the bus, the man rushed out of the bus and toward a woman on the sidewalk. “He got off and was grabbing her hair and beating her,” Birks said later.
A young man in the back of the bus claimed that he’d seen a knife in the man’s right front pocket.
Lakia Wilson (pictured), who was on her way to Whalley Avenue to pay her rent, watched what she too said was a beating. She called 911 on her smartphone.
A dispatcher put out a call on the radio: A black man with a knife was beating a white woman.
Two Yale cops arrived on the scene. They put the man in handcuffs and in a cruiser parked a half-block up College in front of Yale’s Phelps gate. They began trying to sort out the story.
The woman stood feet away trying to keep her composure.
“Baby, did I hit you?” the man called out.
“No!’
“Come to court” to tell that story, he urged her.
“Court?!” she exclaimed.
The woman told a reporter that she had been meeting up with the man on the corner. She said they do that every day around the same time as he gets off work from the 3 a.m. shift at the store and she heads to a therapy program. She said they usually jump on each other and kiss hello. “He would never hurt me,” she insisted.
The two are engaged, she said. She said he has helped her stay clean and sober. She was worried about his getting arrested because he would face years in jail based on old convictions.
The only trouble that occurred on that sidewalk, she insisted, involved two teens who were “making rude comments about my ass. I’m not being funny. Men are really nasty with their mouths.”
The woman insisted that race played a factor in the man’s arrest. “If he was a white man it wouldn’t have gone down like that. He’s big and black; does it [then] look like he was hitting me?” (The woman is white; the people on the bus were black.)
“Doesn’t Work That Way”
New Haven Police Officer Ralph Consiglio arrived on the scene. As the man sat in the Yale police cruiser, the woman approached Consiglio to ask him to let the man go. (Click on the play arrow on the video at the top of this story for a snippet.)
“He adores the ground I walk on!” she said.
“I understand,” replied Consiglio, who walks the same Wooster Square beat his father Andrew did when he was on the force. “But people [made] complaints that he’s beating you up.”
The man would probably appear in court Friday, he said. “You can go as well. Tell them there’s nothing like that. I have a whole bus saying other things.”
“I came home in October,” the woman continued. “We’ve been clean almost 8 months. He’s got an 8‑year cap [to stay out of trouble]. Do you have any idea what he does on a day-to-day basis as a drug addict to make mine and his life better?
“I understand,” Consiglio said.
“No you don’t. He’s got an 8‑year cap. I’ve never been happier in my life.”
By now the woman was sobbing. Consiglio kept calm, waited for her to finish speaking.
“If you take that man and they violate him, you’re going to take that away from me for absolutely no reason,” she said.
“We’re not taking that away. We’re doing what we have to do. … We have complaints that he was beating you up …” Consiglio said.
“Then take me,” the woman pleaded.
“Nope.”
“Let him out and take me.”
“Nope. Doesn’t work that way.”
“I jumped on him. Take me.”
“Nope. Doesn’t work that way.”
“I can’t understand why I can’t be arrested and he go home.”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
“I don’t understand,” the woman said, choking back tears. “I’m telling you I jumped him. Why can’t I go to jail?”
“Because the witnesses didn’t say that …”
“I’m telling you I jumped on that man! You’re telling me I’m not going to go to jail?”
“You know why you’re not going to jail? Because the bus driver, witnesses and the nine cameras that surround the bus witnessed it.”
Consiglio informed the woman that he wouldn’t arrest the man on assault charges. He was citing him with second-degree breach of peace.
“That’s a misdemeanor, right?” the woman asked.
Right.
Officer Andy Gambardella arrived. The cops took the man out of the car; Gambardella patted him down. The man worried aloud about going to jail for “eight fucking years.”
Then the cops transferred the man to New Haven’s prisoner transport wagon and down to 1 Union Ave. to be booked.
"You know why you're not going to jail? Because the bus driver, witnesses and the nine cameras that surround the bus witnessed it."
Wait, where's the hue and cry about using the cameras now? They're good enough to provide evidence of a beating but not running a red-light?