Hamden PD
Daniel Garrett at the scene.
Bass, Gurwitt Photos
Chief Cappiello: Video’s proof. Garrett: Cops smeared family for mayor.
Newly released body camera footage, a 911 recording, and police reports have heightened a debate over a controversial stolen-car incident involving a Hamden mayoral candidate.The debate: Did her family recklessly endanger people’s lives by taking police matters into their own hands? Or are the police mischaracterizing what happened to smear a political opponent?
The candidate, Lauren Garrett, accused three-term Mayor Curt Leng of “undermining democracy,” “victim-shaming,” “dragging my family into a political campaign,” and “using the police department” to misrepresent the incident. Garrett is challenging Leng in a Sept. 10 Democratic primary.
Leng, for his part, called Garrett’s accusation “absurd” and “lies,” and her family’s actions “startling”: “There is a tape. There is video.” He accused her of endangering children’s lives.
The dispute centers on an incident that unfolded around 9 p.m. this past Saturday. Garrett had driven her Tesla to Sushi Palace restaurant on Dixwell Avenue to meet her family for dinner after a day of campaigning. Her husband Daniel Garrett drove the couple’s other Tesla to the restaurant with their children to meet her. When they came outside after dinner, they discovered one of the Teslas, a 2019 grey sedan, missing. Through a phone app, they tracked it. They went driving in their other Tesla, a white SUV, on Dixwell Avenue. They came upon the stolen Tesla at a red light. Garrett’s husband “yelled” at the thief, who pulled away after crashing (or tapping) the Garretts’ vehicle. (Click here for an earlier story on the incident.)
“We’re Wasting Time Here”
Daniel Garrett called the police while driving on Dixwell Avenue and monitoring the thief’s trajectory. Click on the above audio file below to hear the conversation, with the dispatcher:
“We’re tracking” the stolen Tesla Model 3, Daniel Garrett is heard telling the dispatcher when he called it in.
Lauren Garrett is heard informing her husband that the car is “over there … up the road … turning left.”
“Oh God! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Garrett is heard exclaiming.
“The car just hit us. Damaged both cars,” he then informs the dispatcher.
“I need to send an officer to you. Where am I sending the officer over?” the dispatcher asks. “Where are you?”
“We’re at the McDonald’s on Dixwell.”
“I don’t mean to sound rude. But we’re obviously wasting time here. I need to know where you are and where the vehicle is pinging so I can send officers … You’re not talking to me.”
Garrett informs the dispatcher he’s back on Dixwell, heading to a gas station on Woodin Street. He also reports that the stolen vehicle appears to be at Fourth and Warren streets.
“Do not move. I will have officers check Fourth and Warren,” the dispatcher responds.
“OK,” Dan Garrett states, as the conversation ends.
According to a newly released police incident report by Officer Christina Giori, she arrived at Fourth and Warren to find the the grey Tesla, which the thief had abandoned — and to find the Garretts driving up in the white Tesla SUV.
“I instructed Daniel not to enter the Tesla sedan yet,” Giori writes. “[A]t the same time Daniel began to enter the sedan by opening the driver’s side door.” He informed her that his wallet was inside. He reported $3 in spare change missing.
Body Cam Footage & “Blocking”
The officers on the scene, Giori and William Pesanelli, had their body cameras activated. On Wednesday the police released the body camera footage to the media, after redacting images of the children. (You can watch one of the videos above.)
Pesanelli’s video shows Daniel Garrett describing the collision. “I gave him too much room to get out,” he tells an officer. Later in the video, at the 3:26 mark, on a cell phone conversation with someone else, Garrett states, “I saw him on Dixwell. I tracked it with the phone. … This kid could have done 150 miles per hour down Dixwell. … So I blocked him in. … I blocked the kid in. … He banged through the line of cars. … He smashed Lauren’s car.”
In a written report, a supervisor, Lt. Timothy Wydra, concludes that based on those accounts, “Dan Garrett attempted to block the stolen Tesla’s movement with the Tesla.”
In an interview Wednesday, Lauren Garrett accused the police of exaggerating the incident by claiming the couple chased or followed the thief rather than calling police promptly and letting them do the job; and by exaggerating the collision of the two cars and the damage caused. Garrett insisted the couple never tried to follow or confront the thief; that her husband had merely said “Hey,” at the thief, but didn’t yell; and that the two cars merely “tapped” each other.
The police issued a release earlier this week that warned the public not to follow car thieves, especially with children in tow.
Garrett noted that on the 911 tape, the couple is reporting the incident. So, she said, it was “misleading” for the police to report that the incident hadn’t been reported.
“I was right in the car — That is not how it looked. The way that that visual was, the stolen car was in the left southbound lane. We were in the left northbound lane. He pulled away when the traffic moved. It wasn’t a box in. It was a flow. He was alongside the car, like I said all along, and stopped, not parked, and looked over, and he sped up. It happened incredibly quickly.”
Garrett insisted that her husband wasn’t trying to confront the thief and that her husband never tried to box him in when they encountered him on Dixwell Avenue.
“I listened to the dispatch tape. You can tell that it happened very quickly. You can hear a faint, ‘Hey,’ and both of us say, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ because he had bumped into our car. The ‘whoa’ was because he bumped into our car,” Garrett said.
Asked about her husband’s remarks in the video, she replied that she “hadn’t heard that conversation before.” She said she was inside the car while her husband was speaking on the cell phone, out of her earshot.
“The way that I described the incident and the way Dan described the incident is similar. They don’t contradict each other. Dan’s is just infused with testosterone and bravado,” Garrett said.
Hamden PD
Garrett noted that she has publicly criticized police.
“I think it’s very political,” Garrett said of both the mayor’s remarks and the police reports. “I have been advocating for a reorganization of the police department to implement effective community policing while reducing excessive overtime. The unusual press release had misinformation and thinly veiled innuendo as did the incident report.”
“We’re not going after her. What we related in the release is supported in the video and their phone conversations,” Cappiello responded in an interview Wednesday. “She says they weren’t endangering the children. You’re going after a stolen car with your kids in the car.”
Garrett accused the mayor of “using the police department as a political tool, and that undermines trust and our democracy.”
“He’s engaging in victim-blaming and victim-shaming. He used the word ‘chase.’ There was never a chase. The police did not describe the incident as a chase. We never described the incident as a chase. Why would he choose that word? He’s making it up,” she said.
“Shame on him,” Garrett said of Leng. “He was not there. He did not witness the incident at all. There was never a high-speed anything. We were in a car in the area of Dixwell and Circular Avenue. Most of the time was spent sitting at a stop light. When we were driving, it was in traffic, 30 miles an hour at the most.
Allan Appel Photo
Mayor Curt Leng: “Lack of judgment.”
“He’s dragging my family into a political campaign. He’s desperately trying to distract voters from his failed administration.”
In response, Leng argued that the episode “occurred because of choices the Garretts made, pitting their family and the public in danger. They pursued a stolen car for 5 – 10 minutes before even calling the police, confronted a car thief and physically attempted to block the criminal with their car. To lie to the public again is a slap in the face to our police department and to our residents.”
“No one should ever consider pursuing a stolen vehicle, especially not with their children in the back seat. The police should have been called and allowed to do their job,” Leng argued. “The Garretts’ actions and repeated lies regarding their actions demonstrates a real lack of reasonable judgment, responsibility and honesty.”
One Mystery Solved
Paul Bass Photo
Officer’s Giori’s report also addresses one mystery raised by Independent readers, namely how the thief was able to steal the Tesla: “Lauren stated normally there is a passcode for the Tesla sedan which needs to be entered in order for the vehicle to start, but for some reason Daniel had removed it.”
Also, the report explains why the car would normally have had video footage of the thief, but wouldn’t this time. The report quotes Daniel Garrett stating that the sedan “normally has a ‘sentry mode’ which the vehicle is place in once locked and armed. Daniel stated because his vehicle was unlocked at the the time it was entered and stolen, this feature never activated.”