Sam Gurwitt Photo
The house where a man pointed a gun at his neighbor, from the side of the truck.
Terrence Lee was standing outside his cousin’s house with a group of friends when a friend asked why there was a green beam of light on his shirt.
Lee looked down, and, sure enough, there was a green dot from a laser on his shirt. He watched it as it flitted from his shirt to that worn by his cousin, Lucresha Cole.
Marion Samuel, Jr. was standing next to Lee. The two had been riding their motorcycles nearby, and had stopped for a moment to chat with Cole soon before 8 p.m. Thursday.
“I looked across the street and I was like, ‘Oh shit, he’s pointing a gun,’” Samuel recalled during a Friday afternoon interview with the Independent.
They were standing right in front of Cole’s house at the corner of Mott and Warner Streets, a neighborhood that consists primarily of modest single-family homes in the southern part of Hamden.
Cole, Lee, Samuel, and another friend, all of whom are Black, were just standing outside of Cole’s house chatting.
In the driveway of the house on the other side of Mott, leaning against the side of his white pickup truck, was Cole’s neighbor, a white man in his 40s, holding what looked like an assault rifle and training it on the small group of friends.
“It doesn’t have to go down like this, fellows,” Lee recalled the neighbor saying. “It ain’t going down like this.”
“He Was Ready To Kill”
Cole said she knows the neighbor. She brought a Christmas gift by for him this year, just “to be neighborly.”
She said she had never had a problem with him before, though she said he did once pull a gun on his Hispanic neighbors, and had once greeted her son at the door with a gun when her son was dropping something off for him.
She called across the street to the neighbor, saying it was just her and her cousin chatting, asking him why he was pointing a gun at them.
The neighbor did not answer. Instead, he kept saying, “It doesn’t have to go down like this,” Lee said.
Cole called for her son, who knows the neighbor better, and asked him to go talk the neighbor down. The son walked across the street toward his neighbor to talk to him and try to find out what was going on.
“It’s me,” Samuel recalled the son saying to the neighbor.
But the neighbor just kept his rifle pointed at Cole’s son.
“Lift your shirt up, lift your shirt up,” Lee and Samuel recalled him saying to the young man. Lee said the neighbor addressed Cole’s son by name, and continued to order him to lift his shirt.
At that point, Lee, Samuel, and Cole told the young man to come back to the house. Samuel called the police. According to the call log on his phone, he placed the call at 8:00 p.m. Police records say the department received the call at 8:02.
“It’s kind of weird because why would you feel the need to pull a gun on men who were just minding their own business?” said Cole. “Would you have done that if it was three white men?”
Samuel said it felt like the kind of situation you see on the news, and he said it definitely felt like it was motivated by racism. “To have it actually happen to me now. I mean, like, wow. It’s just insane,” he said. “He was ready to kill. That’s all I can say.”
At the time, police were already responding to a shooting at the other end of Warner Street that had happened just a few minutes before. Hamden police spokesperson Capt. Ronald Smith said that shooting was an unrelated incident.
When officers didn’t show up immediately, Samuel called 911 again at 8:08 p.m., his phone log shows.
“This guy had time to shoot, take off, leave, everything,” Samuel said. “Thank God he didn’t,” he said, or there could have been five people laying in the street, shot.
Meanwhile, the neighbor called Cole’s son back over to him. He told the young man that he would put his gun down. He then walked behind the house and put his gun down.
Samuel’s phone log shows that the Hamden Police Department called back at 8:14 p.m. to ask if an officer had arrived. Samuel said one hadn’t come yet.
Then, a few minutes later, a cop who was not in uniform drove up. The officer told the group to walk away from the neighbor’s house.
Samuel said they started down the street and then saw a group of other officers coming towards them. Samuel said the officers pointed their guns at them and told them to stop, presumably suspecting that they had been involved in the nearby shooting.
Samuel said they explained that they had been told to walk away, and the officers let down their guns and let them by.
Officers then arrested the neighbor who had pointed the gun.
Samuel and Lee said officers told them that they smelled alcohol on his breath. The neighbor’s wife was there too, they said, and also had a gun. Officers said she, too, had alcohol on her breath.
Though he may have been intoxicated, Samuel said about the neigbor, he did not appear visibly drunk.
Lee and Samuel said they watched as officers found and confiscated an arsenal of weapons from the house.
Lee said he saw them bring out five assault rifles, bags of pistols, and 500 cases of ammunition.
“Get The Fuck Outta Here”
Police arrested the man Thursday evening and charged him with two counts of reckless endangerment in the first degree, two counts of threatening in the second degree, and two counts of breach of peace in the second degree.
He was then released on a $50,000 bond, according to a press release, and is scheduled to appear in Meriden Superior Court on Oct. 1.
When the Independent visited his house Friday afternoon, he was standing in his driveway talking on the phone. The truck he had stood next to when he aimed his gun the night before was parked in the driveway.
When he got off the phone, he came over to speak with this reporter.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he said. “I’ll call the cops for harassment.”
His wife was there too. Both then walked back behind the house.
Lee agreed with Samuel that it undoubtedly felt like the incident was motivated by racism.
“Of course. Of course. Of course it was,” he said. “There was nobody out there. You don’t just pull a gun.”
Cole said she is glad the police confiscated her neighbor’s weapons.
“I can’t have my family afraid to come to my house because of my crazy neighbor who thinks he’s in a movie,” she said.
Shooting Down The Street
Thursday was a busy night for police on Warner Street.
At 7:57 p.m., police received a call about a shooting near 22 Warner St. on the other end of the road from where the threatening incident happened.
Smith said that when officers arrived, there was a party with over 100 people nearby, and some people from the party were helping to load the shooting victim into a vehicle.
Smith said it is not clear whether the shooting had anything to do with the party, or whether it was just a coincidence that the party was happening when someone was shot nearby.
Police have not yet identified a suspect in the shooting. Smith said they are also looking into whether the gathering violated the state’s social distancing mandate.