She ​“Geeked” The Killer Crashers

After a Mercedes Benz crashed into a Honda CR‑V, which then crashed into a Volkswagen Passat, a 65-year-old man lay dead on Howe Street. A 12-year-old girl clung to life. And the phone rang at Rose Dell’s house.

It was 10 p.m. Dell was settling into bed; she had be at the New Haven police department by 7 a.m. the next day for her regular job as an internal affairs investigator.

But Dell also is a trusted, skilled member of the police department’s Crash Reconstruction Team. When a driver kills somebody, the cops need the 41-year-old sergeant on the scene. Fast.

She didn’t mind getting dressed again and rushing out into the night. A new mystery awaited.

“I’m passionate about accidents,” she said. ​“It was another opportunity to learn.”

It was last Sept. 18. Dell took charge of the scene. The three-car crash made headlines for a news cycle or two. Then the public’s attention turned to the next tragedy.

Dell’s attention stayed focused. Five months later, she finished her investigation, complete with maps, lab results, video accounts and a constant time/distance formula calculation. And police arrested the driver of the Mercedes for manslaughter.

She kept after numerous investigations at once. Three days after the arrest in the Howe Street case, police charged the driver of a three-wheeled Polaris Slingshot motorcycle with negligent homicide in connection with a separate months-long Dell-led investigation, involving the death of a passenger in a crash at West Park and Whalley avenues.

One of only five, ​“level 3” crash investigators in the department, Dell is the only one certified in forensic mapping, and the only female on the reconstruction team. She has worked on 60 or more investigations since joining the squad in 2010, and she has led many of those investigations. Dell has made a name for herself, and made a difference.

Her investigation of a three-car, fatal crash on Howe Street shows how long those investigations can take, how much unglamorous work is involved. And how a self-described ​“geeky” Yale grad discovered a calling.

First Glance

The Sept. 18 collision was reported at 9:49 p.m. at the intersection of Legion Avenue and Howe Street. Six people were inside the Honda, including three kids. The driver, Manuel DeJesus Portillo (aka Jose Umberto Bardales Portillo), was sitting in the front seat when the Mercedes Benz struck it. Firefighters pronounced him dead at the scene. A 12-year-old girl, seated in the hatchback, was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening skull fractures and brain bleeding. (She would survive.) Two others in the car went to the hospital with injuries as well.

Dell saw the dead man’s body in the road when she arrived. She saw the three smashed cars and wondered: ​“How did they all end up facing in the same direction?”

Her crash crew of a half-dozen of got to work answering that and other questions.

Dell and Officer John Young walked the scene. They noticed the Honda had damage on the front end and both passenger sides. They looked at the skid marks. They reached a preliminary conclusion: The Mercedes had first hit the Honda, which then collided with the VW. It was a start.

A security guard at the 2 Howe St. building let the cops look at video footage from a surveillance camera. Yep, it showed the Honda traveling eastbound on Legion, the VW behind it, passing through a green light. The Honda entered the intersection; the light turned yellow. Then the black Mercedes zoomed through the intersection traveling north on Howe, through the red light, smack into the right front of the Honda, which rotated to the left into the VW’s front end. 

She assigned one officer to prepare a hand sketch, another to take photos, others to take charge of collecting physical evidence and compile notes. (Is the key in the ignition? Are the headlights on? Is the overhead traffic signal working?) They found no defects in the roadway that might have contributed to the crash.

It just so happened that two of the officers on duty that night wore body cameras; Dell, among her other duties, had been in charge of the department’s test of the cameras. She asked the officers to walk the scene and prepare videos.

Dell and two other officers measurements to prepare a scale diagram. She had taken an 80-hour forensic mapping course at the University of New Haven — one of several crash-related courses she has completed there and at the police training academy — to learn the skill.

A patrol officer canvassed the area for potential witnesses. He found two Yale-New Haven Hospital medical technicians who reported having a smoke break and seeing the Mercedes traveling at ​“an extremely high rate of speed.”

Officer Nicholas Katz interviewed the Mercedes driver in the hospital. The driver told the officer he had consumed ​“2 – 3 mixed alcohol drinks and smoked PCP” at a party two to three hours before the party.

A lot of the pieces seemed to come together in those first hours. But the investigation — the work of compiling an evidence-based case that could support an arrest warrant — had just begun.

Big Rubber Bands

A lot of beat cops don’t cherish handling traffic accident calls. Dell learned that when she started walking a beat in the Hill. She also discovered that she enjoyed working those calls, and had a knack for it.

“She has the mind” for this work, observed Officer David Hartman, the department’s spokesman. ​“She has the patience. It’s mathematical; you have to be very patient. There’s nothing that can be rushed. It becomes very frustrating” for many investigators.

In one sense, it was no surprise that Rose Dell pursued a public-safety career. Her dad was a New York City firefighter. Her five uncles were all cops and firefighters. Their kids became cops and firefighters.

But growing in the town of Smithtown in Long Island, Dell seemed on a different track. ​“I was geeky,” she recalled. ​“I was a nerd. I took all AP and honors classes. I was really into my schoolwork and getting good grades. I walked around with a stack of books with a big rubber band.” She diligently prepared flash cards to drill for her tests.

She also played violin, intensely. She studied with a Julliard teacher. By high school she was playing with a New York City youth orchestra — and performing at Carnegie Hall.

“I always had a sense of drive, the drive to get ahead, the belief that hard work pays off in the end,” Dell said.

She credits her violin playing for helping her get into Yale, where she majored in political science. After graduation in 1997 she married and settled down. She raised three children while her husband worked.

Ten years later, she and her husband divorced. Dell needed to go to work.

“I thought to myself: If I just graduated Yale and entered the work world, what would I have done?” The answer: Pursue a job with the FBI. But now she had three kids. She didn’t want to move them around. So she took a test to enter the family business, public safety, and landed a spot on the New Haven force.

“I returned to my roots,” she said.

One night in 2009, patrolling the Hill South beat, Dell responded to a crash at Howard Avenue and Sixth Street. A woman leaving the old Sage restaurant by the harbor had driven into a tree. She almost died; she was seriously hurt.

And seriously drunk.

Dell went to the hospital and obtained a urine sample. She interviewed the woman. The woman was ​“belligerent.”

“Just leave me alone,” she told Dell. ​“I had a couple of martinis. What’s the big deal? They were big martinis, let me tell you …”

Dell arrested the woman for driving while intoxicated.

Months later Dell ran into the same woman at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. The woman hugged Dell. And here’s what she said: ​“You’re a great officer! You saved my life. Was it a pain? Was my license suspended? Yes. But I turned myself around.”

Crash investigations not only posed intriguing puzzles. They also, it turned out, could make a human difference.

Doored To Death

A year later Dell readily agreed when veteran cop Lloyd Barrett asked her to join the crash investigation team. At first Dell worked full-time there; the department had a backlog to work through.

She took up a cold case from Fair Haven, in which a 14-year-old boy riding a bike crashed into an opened car door on Front Street and died. Police later found the car, which had been stolen, on Bailey Street. The ignition had been popped.

That happened on Jan. 15, 2011. Eight days later, on Jan. 23, another cyclist was doored on Front Street.

Dell noticed that four other incidents had occurred on the east side of town on Jan. 23. In one, four teen males punched and robbed a victim, then fled in a stolen Dodge Caravan. Cops later recovered the van; the ignition had been popped. The cops also arrested four young males.

They also arrested the same group of teen males for striking and robbing a woman, then fleeing in minivan.

Not long after those incidents, a pedestrian reported being struck by an opened passenger side door of a Dodge Caravan; and another man was beat up by muggers traveling in a minivan.

Those cases seemed related.

Dell obtained a search warrant for the DNA of the arrested foursome and planned to match it to blood samples found in the van used in the incident for which they’d been arrested. One of the foursome was in prison. She suspected that person — who was 14 at the time of the crimes —had killed the cyclist in the unsolved case.

Dr. Henry Lee helped her in the investigation.

It would take months at least to obtain results of the DNA test from the state crime lab. In the meantime, Dell went to to speak to the three young men not in jail.

“Listen, we’ve got Dr. Lee involved in this case,” she told them. And she told them ​“we’ve got your DNA.”

The kids folded, gave up the fourth member in prison as the driver who killed the cyclist by deliberately dooring him.

That wouldn’t prove the case. But it was a lead. Dell obtained a search warrant to monitor the imprisoned teen’s phone calls. She overheard him telling relatives that he knew the other three had spoken with police. Over time, he confessed that he had killed the cyclist — first to his stepfather over the phone. Combined with the previous statement, Dell had what she needed for an arrest warrant.

Laser Check

Search warrants also proved crucial as Dell investigated the three-way Sept. 18 crash.

It turned out that the hospital did not test the blood of the Mercedes driver for drugs. Hospitals keep blood samples for seven days. She had to scramble; she obtained a search warrant for the blood, and was able to collect the sample by the sixth day. She sent it to the state lab for analysis.

That’s the biggest delay for investigations: it takes months and months to get reports back.

So while Dell waited, she proceeded with other parts of the case, in between completing her daily assignments for internal affairs, where she was now posted full time; her oversight of the body-cam experiment, and her other crash-team assignments.

“Crash investigations are real detailed,” observed Dell’s supervisor on the team, Lt. Rob Criscuolo. ​“She stayed with it.”

Dell obtained warrants to search the vehicles involved in the three-way crash. She listened to 911 calls; no important finds there.

She observed videos from the hospital showing the cars approaching the intersection. She had evidence of the Mercedes driver running red lights. Dividing her computer screen into four segments, she tracked the driver’s progress through different blocks and calculated the progress by the time stamps.

Then she revisited Howe and Legion. She took a handheld laser to measure the distances, then turned to the calculation she learned at the police academy supplemental course: ​“distance divided by time equals velocity.” ​“I tell people it was harder than anything I took at Yale,” she said of that course. Dell ascertained that the driver had traveled 452.4 feet in five seconds ​“at a velocity of 90.48 per second,” equivalent to 61.71 miles per hour.

“I like that kind of intricate, high-detail work,” Dell reflected.

Dell visited engineers at the city traffic and parking department. They searched their records for her and reported that the traffic lights had been working; they had no accounts of malfunctions for two weeks prior to or after the crash.

Digging through court records, she learned that the driver had a criminal record, and had been driving that day with a suspended license. His 12 previous convictions included driving with a suspended license and weapons-related offenses.

The lab results arrived in January, confirming the driver indeed had been high on PCP during the time of the crash. Now Dell had her map, her calculations, her court records, her video evidence, and all the material she needed to convince the prosecutor to submit, and a judge to sign, the arrest warrant.

Officers arrested the driver on nine charges: first-degree manslaughter, second-degree manslaughter with a motor vehicle, second-degree assault with a motor vehicle (three counts), misconduct with a motor vehicle, reckless driving, operating under the influence, operating under suspension.

The defendant, who remains behind bars, has yet to enter a plea. His next scheduled court date is Feb. 29.

Meanwhile, Rose Dell has other crashes left to solve. She hasn’t had time to play or perform with her violin for decades. She has been busy mastering other instruments like those used to produce this arrest — and, playing them like a fiddle, she is making a difference.

Read other installments in the Independent’s ​“Cop of the Week” series: 

• Shafiq Abdussabur
• Craig Alston & Billy White Jr.
• Joseph Aurora
• James Baker
• Lloyd Barrett
• Pat Bengston & Mike Valente
• Elsa Berrios
• Manmeet Bhagtana (Colon)
• Paul Bicki
• Paul Bicki (2)
• Sheree Biros
• Bitang
• Scott Branfuhr
• Bridget Brosnahan
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia
• Keron Bryce and Osvaldo Garcia (2)
• Dennis Burgh
• Anthony Campbell
• Darryl Cargill & Matt Wynne
• Elizabeth Chomka & Becky Fowler
• Rob Clark & Joe Roberts
• Sydney Collier
• Carlos Conceicao
• Carlos Conceicao (2)
• Carlos Conceicao and Josh Kyle
• David Coppola
• Mike Criscuolo
• Steve Cunningham and Timothy Janus
• Roy Davis
• Joe Dease
• Milton DeJesus
• Milton DeJesus (2)
• Brian Donnelly
• Anthony Duff
• Robert DuPont
• Jeremie Elliott and Scott Shumway
• Jeremie Elliott (2)
• Jose Escobar Sr.
• Bertram Ettienne
• Bertram Ettienne (2)
• Martin Feliciano & Lou DeCrescenzo
• Paul Finch
• Jeffrey Fletcher
• Renee Forte
• Marco Francia
• Michael Fumiatti
• William Gargone
• William Gargone & Mike Torre
• Derek Gartner
• Derek Gartner & Ryan Macuirzynski
• Tom Glynn & Matt Williams
• Jon Haddad & Daniela Rodriguez
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer
• Michael Haines & Brendan Borer (2)
• Dan Hartnett
• Ray Hassett
• Robert Hayden
• Patricia Helliger
• Robin Higgins
• Ronnell Higgins
• William Hurley & Eddie Morrone
•Derek Huelsman
• Racheal Inconiglios
• Juan Ingles
• Paul Kenney
• Hilda Kilpatrick
• Herb Johnson
• John Kaczor & Alex Morgillo
• Jillian Knox
• Peter Krause
• Peter Krause (2)
• Amanda Leyda
• Rob Levy
• Anthony Maio
• Dana Martin
• Reggie McGlotten
• Steve McMorris
• Juan Monzon
• Monique Moore and David Santiago
• Matt Myers
• Carlos and Tiffany Ortiz
• Chris Perrone
• Ron Perry
• Joe Pettola
• Diego Quintero and Elvin Rivera
• Ryan Przybylski
• Stephanie Redding
• Tony Reyes
• David Rivera
• Luis & David Rivera
• Luis Rivera (2)
• Salvador Rodriguez
• Salvador Rodriguez (2)
• Brett Runlett
• David Runlett
• Betsy Segui & Manmeet Colon
• Allen Smith
• Marcus Tavares
• Martin Tchakirides
• David Totino
• Stephan Torquati
• Gene Trotman Jr.
* Elisa Tuozzoli
• Kelly Turner
• Lars Vallin (& Xander)
• Dave Vega & Rafael Ramirez
• Earl Reed
• Daophet Sangxayarath & Jessee Buccaro
• Jess Stone
• Arpad Tolnay
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• Manuella Vensel
• Holly Wasilewski
• Holly Wasilewski (2)
• Alan Wenk
• Stephanija VanWilgen
• Elizabeth White & Allyn Wright
• Matt Williams
• Michael Wuchek
• Michael Wuchek (2)
• David Zannelli
• Cailtin Zerella
• Caitlin Zerella (2)
• Caitlin Zerella, Derek Huelsman, David Diaz, Derek Werner, Nicholas Katz, and Paul Mandel
• David Zaweski