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Aurora: "Bittersweet" retirement call.
For the second time in 11 days, someone left behind a Molotov cocktail somewhere in New Haven.
“Think they’re connected?” Detective Joe Aurora’s supervisor asked him about the two incidents.
“I don’t know,” he responded. But he did know he was headed down a “rabbit hole.”
Aurora has headed down rabbit hole after rabbit hole the past five years as the NHPD’s arson cop. He spots a clue, gets a hunch, finds himself traveling to track down car dealers or grab ATM surveillance video or match DNA samples.
“I try to keep an open mind. I learned tunnel vision is your worst enemy,” Aurora said during an interview this week at Koffee? on Audubon Street. He sat down to discuss his career as a detective, specifically his most recent assignment investigating all the city’s blazes as part of the joint NHPD-NHFD Fire Investigation Unit.
Aurora, who’s 42, is retiring next month after 18 years on the job, the last four on the arson-beat call 24/7. (He was able to cash in years of accumulated unused sick time.) He’s finishing up the last 14 warrants from his final batch of cases.
“It’s bittersweet,” Aurora, who grew up the son of a plumber on the city’s east side and began working as a carpenter before becoming a cop, said about his pending retirement. (Click here to read a 2015 article about his career and his pre-arson work tracking down burglaries and robberies.)
“I like what I do. It’s very rewarding. Some people retire and feel they need to move on. I’m leaving a little bit early” because of the ongoing failure of the city administration and police union to agree to a new contract two years after the previous one expired. That has left retirement-qualifying officers concerned about losing benefits if they don’t leave before a new contract is reached. “I thought by now there would be a new contract,” Aurora said.
Aurora’s boss, Assistant Chief Bertram Ettienne, called him “the epitome of a well-rounded detective: He’s a fact-finder and truth-seeker. He is methodical. He is very thorough and resilient.”
Aurora has applied that approach in big headline-worthy cases like an arson that displaced 13 residents of a Bishop Street rooming house, for which Aurora’s arrestee was sentenced this month to 10 years in prison (suspended after two years).
The detective hunts just as far down rabbit holes connected to small fires that, if left unsolved, could lead to arsonists endangering lives with bigger fires.
He reviewed video surveillance, interviewed witnesses and an out-of-town niece, followed up on a long-shot tip from a fellow officer with whom he shared video still images, had a gas-filled Poland Spring bottle and a piece of cardboard lab-tested for DNA after someone lit two dumpsters on fire and sought to ignite convenience-store shelves of candy and potato chips at the gas station at the conjunction of Whalley and Goffe. Video captured the man, masked, using landscaping loppers to cut the surveillance camera’s wire, but was unclear enough that it left Aurora with only a ring and military fatigues to go on. Aurora eventually found a transient man in the hospital who goes by the street name “Justice.” Presented with the evidence Aurora had accumulated, Justice admitted that, high on PCP, he lit the fires to seek “justice” against the Pakistani clerk (“a short Indian dude with a cocky attitude”) with whom he had had tense interactions at the store. A judge sentenced Justice last month to 10 years in prison.
Aurora spoke in most detail about the rabbit hole he plunged into after the two 11-day-apart Molotov Cocktail incidents mentioned above. Step by step, the Methodical Detective spent months finding an answer to his supervisor’s question.
Terrorism?
Aurora was on Howard Avenue checking out a non-suspicious fire when he got the call about the first Molotov Cocktail.
It was around 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 2, 2020. People had called the cops to say an erratic driver was trying to run them over with a Mazda sedan, crashed the car, parked it in the driveway of the State Street train station, then fled on foot. Inside the abandoned car, which had a broken driver-side window, was a glass beer bottle with a purple cloth stuff into the mouth and a gas-smelling pale-yellowish liquid inside. The NHPD bomb squad “rendered the device safe,” as Aurora later wrote in a report, and state police dog “Cora” confirmed that the liquid was flammable.
Aurora noted the proximity of the train station.
“Was this terrorism?” he wondered. But he didn’t fix on that theory. He started pursuing evidence.
Like: Where did the car come from? it was unregistered. He checked DMV records to find the previous owner — who had a previous arrest for arson in the 1990s.
The previous owner, it turned out, had a practice of working on cars and reselling them, under the table.
”It sent me down the rabbit hole” at that point, Aurora recalled. “Did he hire somebody?”
Inside the banged-up Mazda now impounded at the NHPD’s Sherman Parkway garage, Aurora spotted a sticker on the battery showing it had been newly purchased at a Hamden AutoZone outlet. He visited the store. It had no record of the sale.
He found a receipt in the car for a withdrawal from a Hartford ATM. Aurora drove to Hartford to view the video footage of the withdrawal. A heavy-set woman, not the man seen fleeing the abandoned Mazda, was seen making the withdrawal. Aurora felt caught in a “spider web,” digging “all over the place,” wondering if pieces will match up.
Meanwhile, he sent DNA samples from the sedan’s driver’s side along with samples from the beer bottle to a state forensic lab for analysis.
Two days after he searched the sedan, Aurora got called to a home on Girard Avenue on the East Shore where two East Haven firefighters lived. Someone had left a Molotov Cocktail there on the back porch: A glass Miller High Life bottle stuffed with fabric and containing gas-smelling yellowish liquid inside. That someone had in fact lit this device, starting a small fire that burned itself out before catching.
That’s when Aurora’s then-supervisor, then-Asst. Chief Karl Jacobson, asked whether he thought the two incidents were related. Aurora made sure not to jump to conclusions — while he dived into both cases.
A break came on Jan. 29. NHFD investigator Douglas Wardlaw called Aurora to alert him to a call the NHFD had on a city bus. A man ODing on drugs had passed out. EMTs treating him found a handgun on him; the serial numbers were scratched off. They also found bags of heroin, city government payroll stubs — along with two empty Miller beer glass bottles along with a plastic spray bottle containing gas-smelling liquid.
Not to mention a house key and a vehicle key with a Mazda logo.
“Interesting,” Aurora thought — the abandoned vehicle on State Street had been a Mazda.
“What are the odds?”
Finding Mr. Smith
Aurora now had a name of a suspect, a Mr. Smith who was born in 1958 and had a felony criminal record including a sexual assault.
The detective was working his way through the information when, on Jan. 30, he followed another hunch. He got the hunch while directing traffic on an extra-duty shift. He waved at the driver of a city parks department truck. He noticed the driver had a yellow reflective vest. He remembered that the man seen fleeing the State Street Mazda wore a similar vest — and that the man named Smith found unconscious on the bus had city payroll stubs on him.
Just for the sake of it, Aurora phoned the city’s parks director, who confirmed that Smith had been a seasonal parks employee and driven an older-model black car with a broken driver-side window at the time. The director put Aurora in touch with a parks coworker who confirmed that Smith had indeed driven that car to work — until a few weeks earlier, when he reported it had been rendered inoperable in a crash.
By now light was shining into the rabbit hole. The state lab matched Smith’s DNA to the two glass Molotov Cocktail bottles as well as the car.
“It is the same guy,” Aurora could now confidently tell his supervisor.
He visited Smith in prison. Smith chose not to tell him anything. But Aurora had the evidence he needed. He applied for arrest warrants charging Smith with multiple felony offenses including manufacture of bombs and reckless endangerment. Smith plea bargained for a four-year sentence. Earlier this year, two years after his arrest, he was released on parole, according to the state judicial database.
“It felt good to wrap it up,” Aurora said. “It felt there was some closure.” Not complete closure: He never figured out Smith’s motive in these cases. He did figure out who committed the acts, and, as in other cases he pursued in the capstone years of his NHPD career, potentially prevented a more consequential case of arson.
