Sanders and Eisenhard on the beat.
As usual, it was Jasmine Sanders who suggested an extra lap: Let’s check out that parking lot one last time before ending our shift, she said.
As usual, it was Eric Eisenhard who responded with a shrug: OK, he said. That sounds good.
It was after 10 p.m. The two patrol cops’ shift would soon end. Partners since they began working on the force last year, they were walking their beat on Chapel Street in the Dwight/West River area. They were headed back to the neighborhood substation for the night.
Sanders needed to get there to use the bathroom. But, she recalled, she had “a hunch.” She and Eisenhard often check a parking lot behind a problem apartment building, Winthrop Terrace, at the corner of Chapel and Winthrop. Her hunch told her to check it one more time that night.
“It was her intuition,” Eisenhard recalled. “She always wants to go out there and do something more. Sometimes I might want to sit for a second; we do a lot of walking. She always wants to keep going.”
Sanders’ hunch paid off. By the time the pair went home, they had the biggest case so far in their budding careers.
“He Stuffed Something”
The “cookies.”
As soon as they entered the lot that night two weeks ago, they noticed a tan Toyota parked at the other end with no license plate, no lights on, but a man with his head down in the driver’s seat.
Sanders pointed her flashlight at the car as they walked over. The driver’s head remained down.
Sanders arrived at the driver’s side of the car, Eisenhard at the passenger side. He noticed the man inside the car fidgeting and placing “something big and white” in the door.
“Jazz,” Eisenhard (whom she calls “E”) said out loud, “he stuffed something.”
The man finally noticed the cops. He rolled down his window. As Eisenhard walked over to the driver’s side of the car, Sanders asked the man to step outside. He complied with no complaint.
“Very nonchalant,” Eisenhard later recalled. “Like he didn’t care.”
Sanders checked the inside of the door and found what the man had been hiding: a bag filled with blocks of white.
Both officers figured it was drugs. Probably crack. But they were startled: They’d never seen blocks of cocaine that large before. In fact, Sanders, who grew up in West Haven, and Eisenhard, who grew up in Norwich, said they’d never really seen cocaine or heroin up close (as opposed to on TV) until they became cops.
“It was like big cookies, multiple chunks of big cookies,” Sanders remembers thinking.
“You know those white shiny rocks? I honestly thought that’s what it was at first,” Eisenhard recalls.
Sanders took a look under the driver’s seat and found a 9mm Ruger semiautomatic handgun. She founds scads of tiny baggies as well, some already filled with retail-sized mini-rocks.
The two cops called in reinforcements from their policing district as well as the Bureau of Identification. Meanwhile they waited with the suspect, who felt like talking.
Sanders — the conversationalist in the duo — ended up in a conversation with him about his situation. She was a mental health case worker before becoming a cop, so she has had a lot of practice speaking with, and calming, anxious people. She enjoys it. (“I“m just not a conversation person,” Eisenhard said, though he does enjoy talking with neighborhood kids on his beat. “Sometimes she tries to have a long conversation with me,” he said, and he does his best.)
In this case, she didn’t need to calm the man down. Even as it became clear he was in a deep load of trouble.
He spoke of how he had just moved to New Haven from Puerto Rico, how he wanted to return home soon.
“He wanted to talk. I listened,” Sanders later recalled. “That’s what I do. I’m an officer; I’m also a person. I’m not judgmental [when] people make poor choices.”
The Ruger.
The Bureau of Identification tested the rocks with a Sirchie brand kit, which indeed produced a blue result, confirming they were crack cocaine. It turned out the handgun had 14 rounds in the magazine (though no bullets in the chamber.) It had been reported stolen from a location in Shelton.
Police arrested the suspect, who’s 26, and charged him with having an illegal weapon in a motor vehicle, carrying a pistol without a permit, theft of a firearm, and possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell, among other charges.
Those big rocks weighed in at 105 grams of crack.
“This is definitely a significant arrest,” said the pair’s supervisor, Dwight top cop Sgt. Steve Torquati.
Many of the duo’s police academy classmates have also had the same partners since graduating from the academy in July 2015 and completing training. The department keeps pairs together as long as they click. Sanders and Eisenhard click, despite (or perhaps because of) their different personalities and backgrounds. She dreamed of becoming a gymnast, or a dancer, or a lawyer, growing up, always full of energy. He studied urban planning at University of Connecticut; when he couldn’t find a position in the field (“They either want you to have a masters or have eight years of experience,” he noted; plus towns were cutting their budgets), he waited tables and worked landscaping jobs for years before landing the New Haven police job.
Sanders, who’s 28, is eager to become a detective, to work narcotics, to learn every job in the department and rise through the ranks. Eisenhard, 34, said he can imagine himself remaining a patrolman, happily, for his entire career. He rarely works overtime. Instead, he spends every day watching his 17-month-old daughter Annika while his wife is at work. On the three weeknights he’s on work duty (he also works two weekend nights), family members fill in watching Annika for the two or three hours between the time Eisenhard reports for the B shift at the police department and mom arrives home from work. Annika was happy, at peace, sitting on her dad’s lap during an interview for this story; they’ve clearly bonded.
“They’ve grown with each other,” Torquati observed. “They balance each other out. One can push; the other can say, ‘Not everything is run, run, run.’”
The Last Lap
Paul Bass Photo
Annika with her dad.
Sanders.
Sanders remembered she needed to go the bathroom a few hours after acting on her hunch, as she and Eisenhard arrived at police headquarters to file their report on their big bust.
Sanders wrote the report.
“She’s a perfectionist; it’s a good thing. I’m not,” Eisenhard reflected. “When she does reports, she makes sure everything is perfect in it.” He writes good reports, too, he added. “I get the job done.”
He finally headed home to his family around 2 a.m. Sanders left two hours later. When she felt she had the report done just right.
Read other installments in the Independent’s “Cop of the Week” series:
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* Elisa Tuozzoli
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