Rookies Guided To Get Guns Off Street

Jake Wright watched Officer Osvaldo Garcia finish questioning a witness about a stolen gun. He recognized the last question — because Garcia had asked it already.

“What was the color again?” Garcia asked.

The witness repeated what he had said earlier: The top of the gun was silver. The rest was black. It was in a black holster.

“That’s something I wouldn’t have thought to do,” Wright said later about the repeated question. ​“It’s something OG does.”

Wright is a rookie New Haven cop. He has graduated from a police academy. He’s now an officer in training, or OIT — in the midst of an eight-week period of hitting the streets with veteran cops to learn and gradually assume the duties of a full cop.

Garcia was his field training officer, or FTO, assigned to have Wright shadow him and help him out.

Garcia’s repeated question helped him quickly assemble enough of a case to have the police arrest a man and recover a loaded, stolen weapon within hours of its theft.

And it was the second time in recent weeks that the cops recovered a loaded stolen weapon, thanks to work Garcia did in conjunction with an OIT.

The two cases reflect why Garcia so often finds himself assigned to serve as an FTO — at a time when the police department is fielding dozens of young rookies to replenish the ranks after a years-long exodus of experienced officers. Twenty-five rookies just finished field training and hit the streets on their own. Five more, like Wright, are finishing up their eight-week OIT stints. Another six are expected to start their stints in October.

The FTOs play a crucial role in molding those officers, said Assistant Chief Renee Dominguez, who oversees patrol.

“Every officer remembers who their FTO was. They mold you; you’re malleable at that stage,” Dominguez said. ​“We want the best of the best to be training our officers, because these are officers who will be with us for the next 25 years.”

The department turns often to Garcia to serve as an FTO because of his breadth of talents, Dominguez said: He’s known for being ​“proactive” during downtime (as in this case and this one). He’s ​“excellent with the community.” He’s done well enough working with shrinks in the Yale Child Study program — helping children who witness traumatic events — that he trains other officers in the approach.

Garcia can’t even recall how often he has served as an FTO — and he has been on the force only seven years. On such a young force, that does make Garcia ​“the veteran in my district,” observed his supervisor, Hill South top cop Sgt. Justin Marshall. ​“He’s the veteran the younger officers look up to.”

As was clear in the two recent cases Garcia oversaw with his OITs.

A Call From Smilow

Jake Wright called Garcia ​“sir” when Garcia started out as his FTO.

Garcia wasn’t having it.

“It’s not ​‘sir,’” Garcia informed him. It’s ​“Garcia.” Or ​“OG,” for his initials.

Wright settled on OG.

The OITs start and end their eight-week training accompanying a primary FTO. In between, they serve with two other FTOs. They start out mostly observing their FTOs’ work; the FTOs gradually shift them to taking on more of the responsibilities in responding to cases.

Wright, who is 23 and grew up in Terryville, was in the second of his four two-week OIT stints on Aug. 7, assigned to Garcia. The two emerged from B squad line-up around 3:30 p.m. They headed to a cruiser to begin patrolling the Hill when a call came over the radio: Someone was reporting a theft at 35 Park St.

After seven years patrolling the Hill, Garcia knew the address well: Yale New Haven’s Smilow Cancer Hospital.

As they got into the cruiser to head over there, they received an update: The theft involved a gun.

This would be a good chance to show Wright ​“the steps” of investigating a call like this, Garcia thought on the way over.

They arrived at the scene of the complaint, Smilow’s valet parking lot. The lot’s manager greeted them, asked if he could speak to them privately first. He wasn’t the complainant who called in the theft.

Lesson one: Officers should speak to the complainant first. Which is what they did.

The complainant was a man in his 40s. He told the officers he had brought his mother to Smilow for an appointment and left his Dodge Ram with the valet service. He had left a handgun — with a silver top, black body, in a brown leather holster — inside the car’s console. He’d closed the console. When he returned later, the gun was no longer there. So he told the valet manager and he called the cops.

Next Officers Garcia and Wright spoke with the manager, who brought them inside to view a surveillance video. The video showed one of the valet service employees acting ​“suspiciously” after the report of the stolen gun. It showed him sneaking to a different car, a blue Mercedes, opening the driver side door, crouching down. It showed him closing the door, having a conversation with a colleague. Then he ran across the lot, toward Sylvan Avenue. He took off his work shirt, then took off running again.

After watching the video, the officers located a witness. Garcia interviewed him, with Wright observing.

Wright noticed that when the witness offered an answer, Garcia would repeat it. Garcia does that to ensure that he gets the information right — and that the witness has a straight story. (“I’m always looking for the hole,” he said.)

In this case, he waited until the end to repeat the question about the make-up of the gun. The witness offered the exact explanation — one that matched the owner’s description of the gun. The witness’s other details matched what the officers saw on the video.

Garcia felt he had enough evidence to warrant an arrest. But he needed to check that with his immediate supervisor on the shift, Sgt. Chris Cameron. The normal practice is for patrol officers to hand over their work from calls like these to detectives, who proceed to investigate. But if the patrol officers act fast, they sometimes compile enough for the cops to proceed with the arrest. Cameron agreed this was one of those cases.

The manager gave the officers the suspect’s name and address, which was the suspect’s mother’s house. Garcia found more information in the NHPD database, because the suspect had previously been arrested on misdemeanor charges. He had at one point given the police his father’s address as well.

So Garcia, Wright and Cameron went to the mother’s house across town on Valley Street, while other officers went to see the father.

Wright watched Garcia and Cameron speak politely and sympathetically to the mother, who was obviously upset. The mother tried reaching her son who eventually called back — and denied having a gun. The father called to say he too had made contact with his son, whom he brought to 1 Union Ave. headquarters.

In the lobby, Garcia separated father and son. He asked Wright to get the father’s basic contact info. Garcia brought the suspect past the security door and asked him about the gun. He told the suspect he had seen video and amassed evidence; the suspect continued to deny having stolen the gun.

Hours later, as Garcia and Wright were writing their reports, they learned that the suspect ended up confessing to detectives; he said he had the gun for his protection because a friend had been shot. He told them where he had hidden the gun, under a stairwell on Vernon Street. Officers went to the scene and found it there. It was loaded.

“What Do You Want To Do?”

Madelena Ofiara chose to call Garcia ​“Garcia” rather than ​“OG” during her OIT stint with him.

Like Jake Wright, Ofiara, who is 28, had long wanted to be a cop. She was 9 when her family moved from the Polish town of Rzeszów to the Connecticut city of New Britain. She grew up there. Her mom urged her to be a certified nurse’s assistant instead of a cop. Ofiara did work as a CNA to put herself through college. But she longed for the challenge of police work. She decided to apply to New Haven rather than a smaller community like her hometown, she said, because of the greater opportunities in a bigger department. And with so many veterans leaving the New Haven force, those opportunities are coming sooner: It can take eight years to become a detective in New Britain, she figured; in New Haven, that can happen after three or four.

Garcia served as Ofiara’s FTO during the third of her four two-week stints (which she has now completed). By that point, OITs are expected to do an estimated 75 percent of the tasks on a call.

She was behind the wheel as they patrolled the Hill on the late afternoon of July 14. In training, she had learned to notice details about passing cars as she drives — if lights or license plates are missing, for instance. As they cruised Greenwich Avenue, she noticed a front plate missing on a green Mazda 6 traveling in the other direction.

Then she noticed the driver’s ​“body language” as he passed. ​“He gave us that look,” she recalled — a look Garcia described more as ​“oh sh — ” than ​“oh no.”

“What do you want to do?” Ofiara asked Garcia.

“What do you want to do?” Garcia responded.

She wanted to follow the driver. Garcia gave the OK.

They radioed in that they were following the car. The officers put on their lights and the siren to pull the driver over based on the missing plate. They could see two people in the front of the Mazda.

Instead of stopping, the driver hit the gas. Ofiara followed.

The Mazda driver kept driving, at 25 miles per hour, as he pulled onto Howard Avenue. Then onto Second Street. Then back onto Greenwich Avenue. Onto Third Street.

They were going in circles.

The officers radioed in that they were calling off the pursuit. But then they noticed a back door of the Mazda open. There was a backseat passenger. He put his foot out. Was he planning to run? Or drop something?

The door stayed open as the car kept moving.

The officers radioed in that they were continuing to follow the car. Sgt. Cameron and other officers responded to the scene. The Mazda driver narrowly missed T‑boning them at one point as he continued circling the neighborhood streets. The driver pulled onto a sidewalk, then back on the street. He squeezed his car between two other cars at a stop sign.

Then the rear passenger dropped an object on the ground.

“He dropped a gun!” Ofiara exclaimed. Garcia called in the information.

Ofiara and Garcia stopped their car to retrieve the weapon. It was a silver .380 handgun (pictured). Ofiara’s heart was racing; ​“it was my first gun [to take] off the street.” It had five bullets inside. There was no record of it being registered.

The other officers had their sirens on for what would now become a felony stop. The officers followed the Mazda onto an I‑95 entrance ramp — where the Mazda died. Pursuit over. The three men cooperated with the officers, who arrested them on gun and motor vehicle charges including criminal possession of a weapon.

Later Ofiara reflected on what could have gone wrong: ​“He could have been shooting at us.”

And Garcia noted what went right: Each of the five bullets was ​“one less bullet being shot” at someone in New Haven.

Ofiara and Wright both spoke about stories they’d heard about infamous FTOs past, who made a point of coming down hard on their OITs. One such FTO was known for screaming and throwing maps at OITs who didn’t know the locations of certain streets. Since they both grew up elsewhere, Ofiara and Wright were worried that could happen to them.

Indeed, they found themselves forgetting the location of a street at times while riding with Garcia. He was always ​“patient” with them, they said. ​“He doesn’t yell at you. He doesn’t put you down,” Ofiara said.

“I have three kids. That’s why I’m so patient,” Garcia quipped in response.

As the three of them discussed the recent gun recoveries in a joint interview, it was clear how comfortable Garcia made the other officers — and how much they felt they learned from him.

“I look at them as one of us. They’re still in training, but they’re in uniform. They’re wearing what I wear. I want them to get that comfort level,” Garcia said.

And, he noted, he’ll inevitably find himself on the streets with them again.

“If I don’t teach them the correct way, they’re not going to help me when I need their help.”

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

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