Ex-Outreach Worker Arrested Again, Speaks Out

A recently fired city street outreach worker turned himself in for arrest Tuesday afternoon for allegedly calling for killing cops — but first offered a tale of what he called unfair treatment by authorities.

Hamden police had obtained a warrant for the street outreach worker, Henry Trent Butler (pictured), for allegedly suggesting ​“kill[ing] white cops,” an allegation Butler denied.

Rather than turn himself in to them, whom he accused of beating him in a separate recent arrest, Butler arranged to have a New Haven cop he trusts, Lt. Holly Wasilewski, bring him to the Hamden department.

Butler also turned to Wasilewski last week when police had an all-points bulletin out for him for allegedly making threats that caused Albertus Magnus College to go on lockdown.

Before meeting Wasilewski Tuesday, Butler stopped by the Independent to tell his side of the stories. He said he fears the Hamden police because of how they handled him in a prior arrest.

“They’re killing me, man,” he said. ​“I got to go to New Haven police to escort me” there.

Butler, who’s 44, traced his recent troubles to his September termination by the New Haven Family Alliance, which operates the street outreach worker program to deal with young people most at risk of committing or being victimized by street violence. Butler lost his job there in September after getting arrested for punching out the window of a door to his ex-girlfriend’s home during an argument. He has since filed a complaint with the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities (CHRO) claiming that he was fired in retaliation for blowing the whistle on ​“a gross waste of funds” at the agency.

Butler was the second of two street outreach workers to lose their jobs in recent months. Another worker, who had received a second chance after a domestic violence arrest, was fired after refusing to cooperate with police in a murder investigation.

The cases reflect a challenge faced by an effort like the Street Outreach Program: In order to reach the toughest young people, it hires people who themselves have had troubles with the law in the past, who have lived the life and therefore have street credibility. Butler, for instance, served 14 years in prison for being an accomplice to a 1994 New Haven murder.

Family Alliance Executive Director Barbara Tinney Tuesday afternoon categorically denied Butler’s CHRO allegations. She also said Butler was fired for a ​“pattern of misbehavior” stretching back years.

“One of the allegations that he could not deny was that he put his hand through this woman’s window. He went to the hospital. That is not tolerable. He had used up all of the opportunities he had here to conduct himself in the way that reflected the values of this organization,” Tinney said. ​“He’s been spiraling out of control. I feel badly for him. He needs to get some help before he puts himself in a position where he just can’t extricate himself from. I have some standards here for the conduct of my employees.”

Tinney noted that she hires people with ​“troublesome backgrounds.”

“It’s easy to be a support for young folk … when they’re doing the right thing.These are folks who have pretty serious backgrounds,” she said. ​“I’ll go the extra mile for someone who is trying to to redirect their lives and makes mistakes.

“The real challenge becomes how do you support people through the difficult, when they hit those difficult parts of their lives? If I do anything, maybe I err on the side of leniency. As long as they’ve demonstrated the capacity to be contributing members of our city.”

Picking Up The Pieces

For much of his eight years at the street outreach program, Butler fit the profile of the the ex-offender straightening out his life. he helped mediate a gang truce in West River. (Read about that here.) He helped organize a basketball league for at-risk young people on the east side of town. He served as the program’s lead outreach worker, the person other outreach workers checked in with at tense moments — like the Friday night, Aug. 1 double-shooting at Chapel and Kensington streets. One person died in that shooting.

Butler and other outreach workers were on the scene. Later that night, after he left, Butler received a call from a supervisor who informed him that police needed to speak with a fellow outreach worker nicknamed ​“Tweet.” Tweet had witnessed the murder.

Butler refused to bring her to the police station. He said he feared for his life if he did.

“I’m not getting involved in that,” he said. ​“It ain’t a good look for me for the streets to say, ​‘Trent took [Tweet] to the police department.’ The dudes come in there masked up. … I don’t know who these perpetrators are. They not gonna blow my head off.”

Following that incident, Butler’s relationship with his supervisor was tense. Tinney decided to move Butler to a position — street outreach worker, but no longer the lead worker — that didn’t require him to report to the supervisor. She kept his salary the same. She said that in 2009 he had been suspended for another problem and had had continuing workplace problems; Butler denied having had problems beyond that 2009 suspension, which stemmed form a dispute with another supervisor.

The demotion stung Butler. He reported to Tinney that the supervisor had a second job outside the program. Tinney said that that was OK; that other employees, including Butler, were authorized to work second jobs. Butler claimed the second job overlapped with hours that the supervisor was supposed to dedicate to the outreach program; Tinney disagreed.

Then came the incident with Butler’s ex-girlfriend Sept. 11. It occurred at her home in Hamden. Hamden police said Butler broke a window to a front door to get inside, then grabbed the ex-girlfriend’s cell phone; she fled and called police from a neighbor’s phone.

Butler acknowledged that he broke the glass — and injured his hand in the process. ​“I was wrong. I was out of pocket,” he said. ​“I never touched her,” he added.

Police later came to Butler’s home in North Haven to arrest him. They said that because of the seriousness of the charges they forced entry. They also said Butler threatened and fought them, so they had to use force to subdue him. They charged him with second-degree burglary (a felony), interfering with an emergency call, third-degree criminal mischief, interfering with a police officer and disorderly conduct.

Butler claimed that the police roughed him up for no good reason. He got a black eye, bloodied legs. He defecated in his pants during the scuffle. He carries photos of his injuries on his cell phone.

“Look at that shit,” he said, scrolling through them. ​“They fucked me up. They did me filthy. Look at that knee. …

”… Look at that shin. This was nothing but Hamden police were out to dog me.”

By the next day he was out of jail on $100,000 bond. In court he agreed to attend a family violence program. He called the weekly Wednesday classes ​“beautiful.”

Not so beautiful, he said, was Tinney’s decision to fire him two days later.

He subsequently filed the CHRO complaint. Besides arguing that the termination resulted from his earlier complaint about his supervisor, the affidavit charges that the agency allowed others who had been arrested to keep their jobs.

In an interview Butler identified one of those employees as Tweet; she kept her job after a domestic violence arrest. She only lost her job after this August’s murder incident. Butler also noted that one of the teens in the program was allowed to continue working a $100-a-week job manning the office’s phones part-time after getting arrested for gun possession.

Tinney responded that she considers the latter person a client, and she wants to go the extra mile to help people in trouble: ​“I will work with these young people as long as I can. If our expectation is that they’re going to change their lives and not have pitfalls and make errors in judgment, then I think we’re being unrealistic. I will continue to work with this young man. I was stipending him. That was part of our work with him. These kids are living in abject poverty. He made some bad decisions.”

As for Tweet, Tinney said she was willing to give her another chance after the earlier arrest. But not after the August incident, which sparked tensions with police investigating the case.

“She just wasn’t forthcoming,” Tinney said.” I can’t have street outreach workers who are not prepared to conduct themselves the way that we would want the general public to when it comes to a murder or a non fatal shooting.

“It wasn’t just about her — it was about the involvement of her daughter’s father [in the incident]. She was less than straightforward.”

Spiraling

Butler’s troubles, meanwhile, mounted.

He ended up in a dispute with the financial aid office at Albertus Magnus, where he’s pursuing a master’s degree in law. Two Fridays ago, he said, he called about picking up a financial aid check he said had come due. He was told it would be ready the following week, he said.

When he called back on the following Tuesday morning, Nov. 25, he said, a woman answering the phone told him there was no check ready for him.

By his own account, he got ​“loud” and ​“angry.” He told the woman he would be coming to the office. ​“When I come over there, I don’t want to hear shit. I want my money,” he quoted himself as saying.

A supervisor got on the phone to tell him to ​“relax,” that the money would be there, he said.

That same morning Butler received a voice-mail message from Hamden Mayor Scott Jackson. He had asked to meet with Jackson to discuss his complaint about getting roughed up by Hamden police on Sept. 11. The department had opened an internal investigation. Butler had asked to view video footage of the arrest so he could file a suit. He said Jackson had promised him he could come view the video, but was now reneging.

So he went to Jackson’s office. Jackson agreed to see him.

According to Butler, Jackson had earlier said the whole arrest had been video-recorded and now changed his story, to say only the footage was of him in a jail cell.

Several cops, including an assistant chief, came in the room as, by both Butler’s and Jackson’s accounts, Butler raised his voice. The discussion grew heated. At one point, according to Butler, an officer put his hand on Butler’s shoulder and asked him to ​“chill out.” Butler said he told the cop, ​“Don’t touch me. Don’t put your hand on me again.”

Mayor Jackson Tuesday offered a different account.

Originally, Jackson said, he told Butler, ​“Trent, so you know, some portion of what happened … is on videotape. You probably want to think about what your behavior looks like.” He said that the police did not wear body cameras for that arrest, so the only existing footage is from the cell.

In the Hamden mayor’s office that Tuesday, Butler ​“was loud. He was boisterous. He was very emotional. And he said the sorts of things you ought not to say in public,” Jackson said. At one point, Jackson said, Butler declared: ​“We should go back to the [Black] Panther days and kill all these white cops.”

Butler said that Jackson misquoted him: ​“Nah, I never said nothing like that, man. I said, ​‘In the Panther days, they wouldn’t tolerate none of this shit like you’re doing now. That’s why the government dismantled the Black Panthers, because they wouldn’t stand for none of this abuse.’ I never said nothing about killing nobody.”

Whatever he said, Butler eventually left the office, without being detained.

A Sympathetic Ear

Unbeknownst to him, a police bulletin had gone out for his arrest for allegedly making threats to the staff at Albertus.

At that time, New Haven Lt. Wasilewski (pictured) was at a funeral for a homicide victim. A colleague told her that Butler had gotten into trouble. Wasilewski knows Butler well; they worked closely when he was a street outreach worker.

“He had a lot of street cred with these kids. If I had an issue with someone in the ​‘Ville, he would come talk to them, try to mediate the situation,” Wasilewski said Tuesday. ​“He’s done a lot since he’s been out. He got his associate’s [degree]. He got his bachelor’s. Now he’s working on his master’s. I think he just needs a little direction. Hopefully he can put this arrest behind him. He’s got to address what he has to address.”

At the funeral, Wasilewski started hearing the commotion over the police radio about the search for Butler. The college was on lockdown. Wasilewski called him.

“Just pull over,” she told him. ​“Tell me where you are.”

Butler was on Fountain Street in New Haven’s Westville neighborhood. He parked the car, called his current girlfriend to come get it. Then he waited for Wasilewski, who retrieved him and brought him in for processing on first-degree threatening and second-degree breach of peace charges. He was subsequently released on $100,000 bond; his next scheduled court date on the charge is Dec. 18.

Butler didn’t realize that the Hamden police were also preparing a warrant for his arrest for second-degree breach of peace in relation to the alleged threats made in Mayor Jackson’s office.

The Hamden cops informed Wasilewski Tuesday about the warrant. She contacted Butler and offered to bring him in again. He readily agreed. He said he trusts her and the New Haven police; he said he doesn’t trust the Hamden police, whom he accused of mistreating him and unfairly charging him.

Jackson defended the charge. ​“I had people in my office who felt very threatened,” Jackson said. ​“He can be a very imposing presence. People in my office are nervous. They’re nervous today. This is frankly not heavy-hitting stuff, but for the sake of treating my staff the way they need to be treated, you’ve got to pursue it.”

Early Tuesday evening, Butler reported that the Hamden police treated him civilly when Wasilewski brought him in. They processed the arrest and then released him.

“I’m looking forward to putting my life back together. I have so much to offer my city,” he reported in a text message.

Then he added: ​“I love NHPD.”