When he caught a neighbor breaking into his son’s car, Ron Copeland (pictured) grabbed an axe handle — and ended up under arrest
And a police detective who happens to live on his block and came to the scene claims she, too, was almost arrested.
Copeland (pictured) — a 53-year-old retired prison guard and self-described “watchdog” of Roydon Road in the middle-class Beaver Hills neighborhood — was miffed about being charged with second-degree assault after sending the alleged break-in arrest to the hospital in the early-morning incident on Thursday.
“I felt like I committed the crime,” he said after being released later in the day, “and he was the innocent one!”
The incident began around 3 a.m. Copeland had returned to his second-floor bedroom after caring for his infirm 94-year-old mother on the first floor of his Tudor-style brick home at the corner of Roydon and Glen Road.
He started channel suring when “I heard a crash. Then I heard a car alarm.” He threw on clothes, rushed outside, to find his neighbor’s car windows smashed. He called up to the neighbor, Michael Knight. The two walked the neighborhood looking for the perpetrator, to no avail.
Copeland returned to his bedroom, undressed, watched the end of one Spike Lee movie—Do The Right Thing—segue into another, Mo’ Better Blues. Then he heard another crash.
He looked outside and saw the window to his son’s 1992 Nissan Maxima smashed. He woke up the son, Khalil, then redressed and rushed to the street.
He saw no one around, at first. Then he noticed a man inside the car.
“I’m gonna kick your ass!” the man told Copeland, according to Copeland. “I’m gonna kill you!”
Copeland said he “jabbed” the man with the axe handle, “aiming” for the torso. Then he told the man to stay in the car, where he lay down on the front floor. Click on the play arrow to watch Copeland describe what happened.
Copeland said he then told Khalil to call the cops. “We told them, ‘We got the guy!’ Our idea was for them to come get him before he gets violent.”
They waited ten minutes. Copeland, brandishing the axe handle, told the man to stay put.
Copeland decided to wake up his neighbor, Detective Hilda Kilpatrick, figuring maybe she could get officers to show up.
By the time Kilpatrick dressed and arrived on the scene, Officer Frank Canace had arrived — and, seeing a bloodied man in the car, put Copeland in a police cruiser and arrested him. The alleged thief went to Yale-New Haven Hospital with head injuries.
(He was later released. He told the cops he had been looking to steal money in the cars, according to police spokeswoman Bonnie Posick. The man, who’s 50, is unemployed, according to his wife, and comes and goes at unpredictable hours. The police charged him with criminal mischief in the third degree and criminal intent to commit larceny. He lives just two and a half blocks from Copeland, across Goffe Terrace; Copeland said he didn’t recognize him.)
Kilpatrick said she politely tried to speak with Canace at the scene but that he barked at her to stay quiet — or he would arrest her.
Khalil Copeland (pictured) told a similar story: “He got smart with her and said, ‘You’re interfering! I’m gonna arrest you!’ It was a shocke to me. She’s a detective! He was talking bad to her. She was just trying to talk to him.”
“Man, he gave her attitude!” agreed neighbor Knight. He was irate. He didn’t want to hear anything from anybody.”
Killpatrick asked Canace to call in a supervisor, which he did. Kilpatrick said Thursday that she’s filing an internal affairs complaint against Canace for his handling of the scene. She called him “arrogant” and disrespectful not just to her, but to the neighbors at the scene.
“He was going to lock me up for interfering,” Kilpatrick said. “Now I understand how other people get locked up for ‘interfering.’”
The police report didn’t mention Kilpatrick or any friction at the scene, according to spokeswoman Posick.
Capt. Steve Verrelli said later on Thursday that he “looked into the matter. I talked to the officer’s supervisor who was on the scene, who had a very different interpretation. Nothing that disrespectful happened.”
Ron Copeland was held at the police station on $10,000 bond, then sent to the state court on Elm Street to be arraigned. While he was waiting an officer arrived and arranged for him to go home on a promise to appear at a later date in court.
Meanwhile, the Copelands planned to fix the windows on Khalill’s Maxima, which was already for sale. Asking price — $1,300, or “best offer.”