5 Breaks Led To Serial Rape Arrest

A serial rapist was preying on prostitutes on New Haven’s west end. The cops couldn’t get any leads on him. Until one of his alleged victims turned on her new phone — and saw her attacker’s face pop up in her Google Cloud photos.

It was the first break in the case for investigators with the New Haven police’s Special Victims Unit (SVU).

You could call it a lucky break. But far more than luck was involved.

Through methodical work, the investigators caught five more ​“breaks.” As a result, they have now amassed five separate sexual assault cases against the suspect, with at least three, and maybe many more, in the pipeline.

It’s the biggest serial sexual assault case in town since the 2011 arrest of the ​“East Coast Rapist.”

Police have already arrested the suspect in connection with two separate sexual assault cases; they have obtained warrants to arrest him on charges related to three more attacks, which they plan to do when he next appears in court next month. They believe more cases may surface as well.

The suspect, 26-year-old New Havener Navardo Lockhart, is in jail on a combined $650,000 bond. He has entered not guilty pleas in his cases so far.

What may look to outsiders as lucky breaks stemmed from the SVU’s ​“behind-the-scenes work” with vulnerable citizens, with community groups, and with state prosecutors, said Police Chief Anthony Campbell.

“This case is relationship building at its best, and what can come of it if you do it right,” Campbell said.

If not for the meticulous work of the investigators involved and help from their allies, he said, ​“this guy would have continued his reign of terror.”

The SVU’s investigators do some of the highest-stress work in the police department. They regularly come face to face with people involved in child abuse, rape, infant deaths, and domestic violence. They attend mandatory quarterly Employee Assistance Program (EAP) sessions to process the horrors they encounter. They regularly talk about what they’ve seen among themselves as well to process, said unit chief Sgt. Mary Helland.

This case involves some of the most vulnerable victims in New Haven, sex workers who are often reluctant to go the police when attacked. Sometimes, observed Lt. Renee Dominguez, to whom the SVU reports, the women feel ​“ashamed” or else wary of police. So the cops need to build trust in order to build cases like this one.

Dominguez, Helland, and SVU Detective Leonardo Soto described in an interview how this continuing case came together over the past eight months. They made clear the hard ground work required to enable ​“lucky” breaks to occur. Breaks like the Google Cloud photos.

Break 1: ​“This Is The Guy”

The SVU had been on the lookout since last April for a serial sexual assaulter. Veteran homicide and cold-case Detective Mike Wuchek (who has since retired) had passed along information he had started hearing from women about a man attacking them on blocks around Edgewood Park, from near the Edgewood Avenue Bridge over toward Ella Grasso Boulevard.

Detective Soto and other SVU detectives checked in with sex workers and urged them to call the police if attacked.

“He has a good way of going out and letting people know he cares about them,” Helland said of Soto, a former paramedic who joined the New Haven force in 2008. Dominguez said the police urge sex workers at least to go to the hospital if they don’t want to contact police, so they can get treatment, including a “sex kit” that, while intrusive, produces evidence (such as DNA) that can be used to help catch an attacker.

On April 12, Sgt. Helland informed the district managers in Edgewood and Westville about the reports and general description of a serial rapist attacking sex workers at night around Edgewood Park. The district managers told their officers to keep an eye out. (Unfortunately, a couple of officers ignored or forgot that tip when they encountered Lockhart at the scene of one of the alleged assaults on May 20, ignoring the victim’s plea for help and failing to check to see that Lockhart had an outstanding motor-vehicle warrant. Read about that here.)

Reports came in about more attacks.

One occurred on May 24. Detective Joshua Kyle interviewed the victim.

According to a report Kyle wrote about the interview, the victim told him that she was walking by the intersection of Edgewood and the Boulevard when a stranger approached and “ran behind her yelling ‘lady lady’” as she tried to walk away fast. He asked her “if she wanted anything to drink and told her he had E&J and Coke in his cup.”

The victim refused; the assailant then “grabbed her by the neck and dragged her into Edgewood Park,” Kyle wrote. “He pulled out a gun and said not to say anything or I will kill you and instructed her to put her phone down. She said he brought her to a bench behind the bus stop. The male threw her on the bench and made her bend over at which point he pulled down her sweat pants. He then put his penis into her vagina and began to have sex with her.” He left behind a “clear colored condom .. on the ground by the bench,” Kyle wrote. He fled as she called police, who tried to catch up with the man. The police were able to locate the condom.

Another attack took place in the basement of a boarded-up apartment complex at 66 Norton St., where the attacker allegedly raped a sex worker at gunpoint. (Read about that here.) The attacker, who tended to rob his victims after sexually assaulting them, made off with the woman’s LG Android cell phone.

The victim reported that attack to the police, who found some evidence on scene. And she went to the hospital, where a crucial DNA sample was collected.

Soto said he made a point to check back with the victim that night, to let her know he was on the case.

On Sept. 6 the woman called Soto. She got a new phone, she reported. She synched the new phone to her old phone, which still was connected to her Google Cloud account. There she saw a disturbingly familiar face in some of the photos taken since the attack.

“This is the guy,” she told Soto, “who raped me.”

The SVU finally had something to work with.

Break 2: A Name

Back at 1 Union Ave., investigators got to work. They drew up and obtained a search warrant for phone records for the period in which the suspect was using the victim’s cell phone. They obtained logs of calls he had made. They used GPS tracking to see where the phone had been.

Detective Kyle went to work cross-referencing the phone numbers. He searched a national law enforcement database. He put the names of people he found into an in-house database at 1 Union Ave.— and came up with a person related to Lockhart.

He then checked reports involving that person. Lockhart’s name and photo surfaced in one of those reports — and his photo matched the photos in the victim’s phone.

“That’s how we knew,” Dominguez said, ​“it was Lockhart.” Now the SVU had a name.

And from one of the photos Lockhart had loaded onto the victim’s phone, the police had an identifying mark — a tattoo on the suspect’s arm.

Breaks 3 & 4: 2nd ID; A Medical Call

The detectives looked back at other reports of nighttime gunpoint sexual assaults and robberies near Edgewood Park. They came across two, from May 24 and May 27.

They went out looking for the victims. They also reached out to community activists associated with the Sex Workers and Allies Network (SWAN), with whom the police had developed a positive working relationship.

Detective Kyle caught up with the victim of the May 24 assault. She looked at a photo array and identified Lockhart as her attacker, according to the subsequent arrest warrant affidavit.

Now the cops went looking for Lockhart. They checked his known haunts. Helland went to line-up to describe the suspect to officers. Officers were alerted to his physical description.

Four days into the quest, on Sept. 15, Dwight/Edgewood Officer Daniel Tilley responded to a medical call. (The cops declined to detail the call pending completion of their investigation.) While there, Tilley noticed a man who fit Lockhart’s description — including the tattoo on his hand.

He asked Lockhart his name.

“Peter,” Lockhart responded.

“Is your name Lockhart?” Tilley pressed.

“Yes,” Lockhart responded.

The police now had Lockhart in custody. But they still had a lot of work to do, not just to solidify their case on the first two warrants, but to amass evidence on subsequent incidents as well.

Break 5: State Crime Lab Reports

Among the top remaining challenges: nailing down DNA evidence.

Lockhart had no prior convictions on his record. So his DNA would not be in a national law enforcement database.

Thanks to the cooperation of the victims in the two cases, the police had samples of the attacker’s DNA, including from the condom found at Edgewood Park. The samples — along with DNA collected from Lockhart with a search warrant after his arrest — were sent to the state Public Safety Forensic Science Laboratory.

It can take months, or longer, to get results from the overburdened, understaffed state lab. Unless cops convince the state’s attorney’s office to send a special request for expedited results —which the New Haven’s State’s Attorney’s Office did in this case.

Bingo: Not only did Lockhart’s DNA match the DNA collected as evidence in these two attacks, it matched that found in four other cases, one from 2017 and two from 2016, according to the police. Lockhart was now a suspect in six specific cases and counting. (One of them is the May 20 alleged attack by the Edgewood Park bridge.)

Kyle resumed trying locate more victims. He checked with relatives, employers, social services. He found two victims; they also positively ID’d Lockhart as the suspect, according to police.

Soto contacted the victim from the 2017 case, with whom he had worked, to deliver the news that the police now had a suspect.

“She was shocked,” he said. ​“She thought we had no leads. She was very pleased.”

The SVU now concluded it had five solid cases. Investigators went to work on arrest warrant applications. They now have three more warrants signed, ready to serve.

“The response by Sgt. Helland and her detectives to consult with our partners, support the victims and meet with officers was truly amazing,” stated Assistant Police Chief Herb Johnson, who oversees the detective division.

“I’m glad they took this seriously,” SWAN’s Beatrice Codianni said, promising to continue forwarding information about attacks to the police and pressing them to investigation.

The SVU team, meanwhile, still hopes to catch more breaks in the three outstanding cases to which police believe they have tied Lockhart, according to Lt. Dominguez.

Then — if the state obtains a conviction — Lockhart’s DNA can be entered into a national database. New Haven’s persistent special-victims investigators plan to see if they find more connections there, as well.

Read other installments in the Independent’s ​“Cop of the Week” series: 

• 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
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• Keron Bryce and Steve McMorris
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia (2)
• Dennis Burgh
• Anthony Campbell
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• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
• Sydney Collier
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• Carlos Conceicao and Josh Kyle
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• Brian Donnelly
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* Elisa Tuozzoli
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