Paul Bass Photo
If Officer Pete Ballolli had been in a patrol car, he said, the woman who robbed TD Bank Monday would have gotten away, at least for a while. Luckily, he was on foot.
Ballolli (pictured) was walking his daily downtown beat on Chapel Street between College and Temple around 12:45 p.m. Monday when a woman walked past him. It had been a quiet day on the beat.
A roving “downtown ambassador” named Joshua Harris came right behind the woman.
“That woman there,” Harris told Ballolli. “She’s got light red spray paint coming out of her jacket pocket. It looks almost like a dye pack.”
Harris had noticed the mist leaving her pocket.
At that point, the woman had crossed Temple Street and gotten on a bus.
Ballolli ran toward the bus. At that point two calls came over the police radio: a report that a teller had set off a panic alarm at the TD Banknorth at College and Chapel. And a call that the bank had been robbed by a short woman in a black jacket. The woman had come in, said she had a gun, demanded money. The woman Ballolli had just seen matched the description.
The woman was in line inside the bus when Ballolli boarded. She hadn’t paid yet. He asked her to step outside. He took her jacket and noticed red all over her hand.
“What’s on your hand?” he asked her.
“Blood,” she said.
He could tell it wasn’t blood.
She had a pack of bills on her — or, actually, four $20 bills sandwiching fake bills and the dye pack.
Soon supervisors arrived with witnesses: ambassador Harris and the bank teller. They both identified her as the robber. Police arrested the woman, who’s 40 and from Hamden, on robbery and larceny charges.
Ballolli, who has been a cop for 14 years, said walking the beat “absolutely” made the difference in catching the suspect.
“Had I been in a car,” he said later, “I would have never seen her to begin with. She would have gotten on a bus and been gone. First thing I would have done [after receiving a report in a car] would be to drive to the bank.” And the ambassador wouldn’t have seen him on the sidewalk to point out the woman.
Click here and here to read about two previous robberies at the same TD Banknorth branch. The video shows eyewitnesses talking about the first incident.
Basketball Court Shooting: A 36-year-old man said he got shot in his left leg on a Howard Avenue basketball court Monday morning. Police learned of the shooting after he showed up at Yale-New Haven Hospital at 11:41 a.m. with the wound, said mayoral spokeswoman Elizabeth Benton. “Officers checked several locations but could not locate a crime scene. There were no calls for gunshots in the area.”
Sunday Shooting: A 21-year-old New Haven man is in stable condition after someone shot him “multiple” times in the torso on Davenport Avenue around Sunday evening, Benton said. Someone called the shooting in to 911 around 7:20 p.m. The victim had been driven to the hospital. Cops found shell casings at the scene, a driveway on Davenport.