Suddenly, It Looked Dead Serious

A woman said she spotted a gunman. A half-block away, a man was waving his arms and yelling about a shooting. Down the block, someone stopped a customer driving away from a barber shop, got into his car, and ranted about ​“dead bodies.”

Those reports emerged within minutes of each other Monday morning as police began responding to an anonymous threat of a mass shooting at Yale University. It was a pivotal moment. It changed the way officials, and then the city at large, responded to the unfolding incident, sparking a daylong panic in downtown New Haven.

The initial threatening phone call, less than 30 seconds long and made at 9:48 a.m. from a public phone on Columbus Avenue in the Hill, reported that the caller’s alleged roommate was headed toward Yale to start shooting people. Police took the brief call seriously enough to summon battalions of officers to campus, just in case.

For many officers, at first that was just a necessary precaution. The call itself seemed likely to turn out to be a hoax.

That perception changed almost instantly in the rush of seemingly connected events.

“We thought,” recalled New Haven Assistant Police Chief Luiz Casanova, “‘We probably do have a gunman here.’”

It took hours more of SWAT teams scouring locked-down Yale dorms, and state and federal agents in helmets and riot gear joining local cops on blocked-off downtown streets, and detectives simultaneously running down leads across town, to ascertain for sure that the whole episode was probably a hoax.

The day probably wouldn’t have turned out that way before April 1999, before names like ​“Columbine” and ​“Virginia Tech” and ​“Sandy Hook” etched the image of school mass shootings into the public psyche — and led educational and public-safety officials to err on the side of caution at any hint of potential campus violence.

Before then, cops reacted to potential threats by trying to calm people first and slow events down, observed New Haven Police Chief Dean Esserman, who commanded the joint city-Yale-state-federal law-enforcement response Monday.

“All of us are chastened by what is now 14 years of events” beginning with the Columbine shootings, he said. ​“The world has turned a few times since then. We have learned the very, very hard way not to slow it down.”

In coming weeks city officials plan to review what happened Monday for future lessons, according to city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts.

Meanwhile, conversations with city, campus, and federal officials and cops involved in Monday’s events about their minute-to-minute decisions reveal how the intense pressure created by the rapid succession of disturbing developments within the first hour led those in charge to believe a catastrophe might have been brewing in New Haven. They felt they had no choice but to act swiftly.

Sandy Hook Echoes

Monday began with mass school shootings already in the forefront of public consciousness in Connecticut: The state planned to release later that day a long-awaited 48-page report on details of the Dec. 13, 2012, mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

At 9:48 a.m. a man called 911 from a public phone outside the Columbus Market and Deli on Columbus Avenue in the Hill, a world removed from Yale’s campus. The store’s video surveillance camera captured the man making the call.

The man spoke for between 5 and 30 seconds. He spoke of a ​“roommate” who planned to head over to Yale and start shooting people, according to officials who heard the ​“confusing” call. He was not at any point believed to be a Yale student, or to have been referring to a Yale student gunman.

The cops immediately informed Yale. After a senior at Virginia Tech University shot 32 people to death in 2007, that school’s administration came under criticism for waiting two hours after the rampage began to notify students about it by email. Universities have since gotten the message: Inform people fast. Yale did that Monday. Yale Police Chief Ronnell Higgins had an alert about the phone call sent campus-wide by 10:17 a.m. It advised all employees and students to stay inside buildings. (Most students had left campus for Thanksgiving break.) Overall, Yale notified 35,000 people of the threat by email, phone, and loudspeakers (attached to campus ​“blue phones”), Higgins said later

City cops had no reason to believe the threat was real. But they had every reason to make sure.

“It was all hands on deck,” recalled Assistant Chief Casanova, who oversees patrol units. Upon hearing over the police radio about the phone threat, he ordered all on-duty ​“long-gun” cops, those trained with rifles, to head toward Yale’s campus, ​“just in case we had to put them into action.” Yale cops did the same.

“I’m a big believer that you err on the side of caution. When a call like this comes in, you jump into action immediately and you hope for the best,” Casanova said.

Chief Esserman was near campus at the time, at a meeting at the U.S. Attorney’s Office on Church Street. He left the meeting and headed right to Phelps Gate on the Old Campus and met up with Yale Chief Higgins. Esserman ordered all his top cops to gather at High and Chapel streets and set up a command post.

En route, minutes after Yale’s 10:17 a.m. alert, Esserman received word that a Yale employee had phoned in a sighting of a gunman.

At the time, the employee was inside Linsley-Chittenden Hall, a classroom building on the Old Campus, for a work appointment. Esserman and other top cops went over to interview her personally.

She told them that, looking through an outer door’s glass window, she had seen a man ​“with a dark mask” running ​“with a gun.”

“What kind of gun?” Esserman asked.

“A rifle,” she said.

She was clear, coherent about what she’d seen. To those present, she sounded credible. ​“She was completely genuine and truthful. She was completely in control,” as one officer put it.

“When she mentioned it, our alerts skyrocketed. We thought, ​‘We probably do have a gunman on the loose here,’” Casanova recalled. Yale concluded the same.

Esserman ordered Yale police to stick with the witness. Then he received another report: A Yale undergraduate was acting bizarrely right outside Old Campus’s gates, on High Street, ​“talking about how there was going to be shooting on campus.” An ambulance crew was with the undergraduate, who lives in Yale’s Calhoun College. Esserman ordered that the undergraduate be held at the ambulance for the moment; he sent detectives to interview him in the ambulance.

The undergraduate’s jacket appeared that it could roughly match the jacket described by the woman who saw the man running across Old Campus with the rifle, according to Casanova. The police had their first ​“person of interest” of the day. He would not be the last.

Moments later, police received a third report: A Branford man had called to say he was leaving the Y Haircutting barber shop on High Street when a man stopped him at the intersection of Chapel, waving his arms. He talked his way into the Branford man’s car, asked for a ride. The passenger ranted. ​“I know where the dead bodies are,” the passenger remarked.

The driver turned onto Elm Street, encountering a Yale security officer (not a cop). He managed to leave the ranting man with the officer. The driver proceeded home, called the city police, then agreed to return downtown for an interview.

The ranting man who had earlier in the car was the same person police were now already holding in the ambulance. But officers didn’t realize that at the time. They thought a third, separate report had come in within minutes, pointing to a situation at risk of careening out of control.

Yale, meanwhile, sent out a new alert, through email and again broadcast through speakers on outdoor phones: ​“Confirmed report of a person with a gun on Old Campus. Shelter in place at once. This is not a test.”

Esserman ordered a perimeter set up around Old Campus. That meant stationing teams of two cops at each of six potential exit points. In most cases a Yale cop was teamed with a New Haven cop, and their bosses stayed in regular radio contact with them, to ensure that people on both forces would remain in the loop.

Starbucks Is Truly Closed

Top Yale and city cops convened at the corner of High and Chapel. They contacted the state police and the FBI. Agents began arriving on the street, carrying rifles; soon four SWAT teams from the various departments would be on site. Nearby, Gateway Community College and Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School went into precautionary lockdown.

Lt. Jeff Hoffman, who commands New Haven’s patrol division and reports directly to Casanova, noticed coffee-drinkers sitting by the window of the Starbucks on the corner. He walked in the front door.

“I need to evacuate,” he called out. ​“If everyone could just leave through the back door and not go toward Chapel Street …”

“It was the quickest I ever saw people comply with a request,” Hoffman later observed.

Hoffman returned to the corner. Esserman asked him to set up a command station in Starbucks. Too late, Starbucks’ staff had left, too, and the door was locked. Hoffman moved down the block and arranged to set up in Panera.

Chiefs Esserman and Higgins and their top brass settled in there for the better part of the rest of the day, into the evening. The female eyewitness was brought there, too, and placed in a booth.

Besides the SWAT team, the FBI sent agents to work with the crisis management team at Panera as well as to join in neighborhood canvases, according to Patricia Ferrick, special agent in charge of the FBI’s statewide headquarters, in New Haven.

New Haven detectives brought in the video from the Hill grocery. An FBI tech produced enhanced photo stills of the original caller at the pay phone.

Ferrick spoke later of the close working relationship her agency has developed with New Haven and Yale cops. (One or two of her agents can regularly be found at weekly city police data-sharing CompStat meetings, and the agencies have worked closely on large-scale drug and gun cases.) ​“Interagency alliances are not always a given in cities throughout the country,” Ferrick noted. ​“Those relationships need to be developed so that in a crisis the entire focus is on resolving the situation at hand.”

With the photo, city detectives went off in search of suspects. Meanwhile, other cops responded to a stream of calls — some from students fearful of sounds in the hallways outside their locked dorm rooms, others from citizens with possible leads.

One report came in of a man on the roof of a George Street building allegedly holding a gun. It turned out he was there just smoking a cigarette.

Another call sent cops back to the Hill, where someone reported seeing a man roaming the street carrying a gun and trying to hide it. Police arrived to find a man with a child and toy gun. (Someone claiming to be that man later submitted this comment at the end of an Independent report: ​“Im the man with the bay and his toy they talked about and im furious that i was frisked and treated like and animal in front of my wife and child and that the police officers laughed at me in front of my family when i told them i felt violated while they were searching my record for warrants. This is NOT OK in any world and this needs to be accounted for.”)

Traffic was snarled for hours, through rush our, as blocks of Chapel, High, Elm, and College remained closed off. Some patrons spent hours at Atticus Book Cafe, sustained with free muffins; businesses found creative ways to try to salvage some of the day’s lost business. (Click here to read more about that.)

Esserman assembled the commanders of all four SWAT teams — from the city, state and Yale forces and FBI — at Panera for an update. Then they were dispatched to search Calhoun College, the dorm of the student in the ambulance; and then the Old Campus.

Meanwhile, exaggerated reports appeared from out-of-town news sources, feeding what had become a national frenzy of sorts. ​“Yale Active Shooter,” screamed a headline on the University Herald news site, which promptly spread onto Twitter. Parents of Yale students from across the country were following along, with the help of email communications from the college dean’s office, according to Yale Chief Higgins.

Meanwhile, no new credible reports of a shooter were coming in. In the booth at Panera, Esserman and Assistant Chief Archie Generoso reinterviewed the original female witness. Her story remained consistent.

Then they conducted a third interview. It was now early afternoon.

“What did you see again?” they asked.

The woman repeated seeing the black mask.

Esserman pointed to a black visor he was wearing. ​“Is it like this?” he asked.

No, she responded. It was tightly woven, she said. She then used a word she hadn’t previously used to described the mask: ​‘shiny.”

Esserman looked around Panera. He focused on ski masks the Yale cops were wearing. It dawned on him: That might be what the woman saw.

“Maybe,” he thought, ​“maybe she made an innocent mistake.”

It turned out that Yale cops carrying rifles had been on the Old Campus moments after the original 10:17 a.m. campus-wide alert went out.

And by now, the cops had long figured out that the disturbed Calhoun undergraduate had had nothing to do with the original phone call from the Hill.

Like Esserman, many of the cops were returning to a skeptical view on the original phone call. They didn’t let up on the search for a gunman; the lockdown remained in place. But official statements to the press reflected the evolving view. Only one eyewitness report was now being cited, rather than the ​“several” originally under discussion. And it was now revealed that police believed the eyewitness may have mistaken a Yale cop for the alleged gunman.

At 3:30 p.m. Chiefs Esserman and Higgins (pictured) conducted a crowded press conference in temporary media headquarters established in the lobby of the Shubert Theater, a block from Old Campus on College Street. Now the official position was that the eyewitness had ​“likely” made an innocent mistake.

By that time, Yale had lifted the lockdown at most of its buildings. It remained in effect at Calhoun College and on the Old Campus for a few hours, as agents knocked on doors and followed up on more wild reports, such as one of a grenade-toting man inside an Old Campus library. By now no one was expecting to find such trouble. But every lead still had to be checked. Just in case.

The Morning-After Drill

Plenty of work remained on the scene Monday night. For detectives, the investigation into finding the original caller was just beginning. But the assessments were already beginning. Most people praised the police response; a few people questioned the need for such a large response, and suggested Yale gets more intensive protection than other parts of town. (Click here to read an extended reader discussion.)

City Chief Adminsitrative Officer Smuts said it usually takes a few weeks after a major incident like this one for his staff to prepare an ​“after-action report” to analyze how it went. His staff will prepare such a report soon in this case, too, he said.

“We’ll learn from these things. Understanding what the appropriate response is is something law enforcement agencies are still working out” in the wake of the anthrax scares following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon and the procession of mass shootings on campuses, Smuts said.

Smuts, City Hall’s point person throughout Monday, said he never got to the point where he believed ​“there was something more than this was just an overabundance of caution. There weren’t any shots fired. For me, there was enough that we really had to take it seriously. But I still didn’t really think there was anything going on.” Still, he said, he can’t think of any different actions those in charge should have taken: ​“Mass shootings happen. We do have to take it seriously.”

Board of Aldermen President Jorge Perez took a similar view, noting that officials ​“can’t take the risk of somebody getting killed.” He said he looks forward to a review of what happened, not to second-guess anybody, but ​“to look in the future how we respond to situations like this.”

Mayor John DeStefano was out of town, in Florida, Monday. He stayed in touch throughout the day by phone with Smuts and Esserman, as well as Yale Vice-President Linda Lorimer, he said. (“We go back 20 years on this stuff,” he said in reference to Lorimer.) He called the city’s and Yale’s responses Monday ​“absolutely appropriate.”

“There was consensus that the coordinated response and investigative efforts of all the law enforcement agencies who responded was impressive, particularly with Yale and New Haven police,” concurred a top Yale cop, Assistant Chief Steven Woznyk,

Esserman received perhaps his most rewarding kudos from a number of parents of Yale students. They phoned from out of town to thank him after the crisis passed.

“I was following you all day on the internet,” said one parent of law students, from Los Angeles. ​“I knew you must be a parent. I feel my child is safe in your city.”