Sgt. Tony Reyes picked up the phone. “I heard detectives were looking for me,” said a 21-year-old man on the line.
Indeed they were. They believed he killed somebody.
Reyes didn’t tell the caller that when he answered the phone in the police department’s detective bureau around 3 p.m. Tuesday.
Instead he said something to effect of: “Yeah, we want to talk to you.” They agreed to meet out on a street in the Hill.
The cops met the man soon after and arrested him on a murder warrant. They said he walked up to 19-year-old Robert Cirino last Friday night on a front porch in the same neighborhood, at Frank and West streets, exchanged some “unheated words,” then fired four bullets at him, two of which hit their target.
Another young black man shot to death in New Haven. It made headlines for a day, until the next murder — in the Hill — was reported two days later.
With the help of witnesses at the scene, detectives were able to prepare an arrest warrant for Cirino’s alleged killer within a day after the murder. Then came Tuesday’s phone call and arrest.
It was the latest in a string of “wins” for New Haven cops. The subsequent Hill murder was solved right away, too. Within three weeks, cops arrested the 17-year-old alleged killer of 20-year-old Tyrell Trimble, another recent murder victim. Old homicide cases are getting solved, too. (Read William Kaempffer’s account of the latest here.)
Yet, when police announced the arrest of Cirino’s alleged murderer alongside 14 of his survivors at a press conference at 1 Union Ave. Thursday morning, no one was celebrating.
Everyone praised police for working hard to solve another case, of course. But a sense of unfinished business, soaked with raw emotion, pervaded the event.
Police don’t yet have a motive for Cirino’s murder. But it was a larger “why” — the why of the continued carnage of young black New Haveners — that begged for answers. That’s a mystery that police aren’t paid to solve.
Renee Davis, Cirino’s 38-year-old mother, spoke at the press conference. Choking back tears, she posed the “why” to an amorphous entity not invited to the event: New Haven’s gangs.
And suddenly an all-too-routine official announcement became a cry from the heart.
Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch her remarks.
“I don’t know about these, these gangs and the colors,” Davis said. “But you guys feel like it’s your family? You remember when Martin Luther King marched? He marched for our freedom? We’re killing each other over crazy things. Why don’t you get up and do something to help yourself? To help the city? To help other young mans, instead of feeling sorry for your yourself?
“Everybody has a rough life. But you’ve just to got to understand you can make things better.
“Those gangs are not your family member. When you go to jail … they’re not doing that time when you kill somebody. You’re doing that time on your own. Wake up! If you need to get away from this place, get away from New Haven.”
She urged young black New Haveners to “make a change for yourself. Make a change for your siblings. Make a change for the black people. I’m not trying to be funny. But those are the ones that’s dying here. Yeah, they’re in jail. Dead. Selling drugs. And you’re not buying nothing with it [the drug money]. You’re not having no future with it.”
She didn’t ask anyone to make a change on her behalf, on behalf of a grieving mother.
But she did close by saying this: “I miss my baby. He was my only son for a long time.”
Paul Bass Photo
When she finished speaking, the room fell silent. Chief Dean Esserman (pictured) closed the press conference.
How do you juxtapose Davis’s words with encouraging day-by-day arrests and statistics?
Homicides are down by about 50 percent this year. Any number of factors can be pointed to as explanations: Revived community policing. Drug-gang sweeps. Luck. Weather.
Or locking up killers. Unlike the man arrested for Cirino’s murder, some of the others locked up in recent months by New Haven detectives are accused of repeated homicides. One-person crime waves.
For instance, a jailed man named Zackery Cody Franklin was arraigned Wednesday for the fourth alleged homicide police have pinned on him. So far. They’ve accused another man of participating in three. At least.
“When you get a guy like Cody Franklin off the street, you’re cutting murders,” Sgt. Reyes, who heads the department’s major crimes unit, said as Cirino’s family left Thursday’s press event.
“If you take the major players out, it definitely has an impact,” added Reyes’ supervisor, Sgt. Al Vazquez.
But there was no suggestion that Reyes and Vazquez and their colleagues would run out of work to do any time soon.
As he left the station, Cirino’s 40-year-old stepfather, Joseph Crudup (at right in photo with Davis), said he sees another hand behind the gunman who killed his stepson last Friday night, whatever the motive turns out to be.
“Older adults are giving the kids the guns,” Crudup said. “Older adults are sending them out” to kill.
Cirino’s grandmother, Lula Mae Davis, spoke at the press conference, too.
The question has always been "WHY". What cause another person that has the same heartbeat of the person you just killed to feel so much hate to pull a trigger of a gun as if it was part of a "hunger game". The sad part of it is "knowing" you will do bodily harm. I thank someone should do some research to find out why black males kill one another. Don't take this as a racists statement,take it as research for truth so we can stop these kids
from killing one another. There is no excuse for these killing. This is not a perfect world as the mother said, so deal with it without killing one another.....