“Big Eddie” Trimble convinced his son to help cops catch a Crip. Now that an alleged Crip has killed his son, he regrets it.
And he believes the man who killed his son got away with an earlier shooting.
Police, meanwhile, say that Eddie Trimble’s actions — and his son’s cooperation with an investigation — had nothing to do with his son getting killed.
Eddie Trimble was conspicuously absent last week when police invited family members to headquarters for a press conference announcing the arrest of a 17-year-old man accused of shooting 20-year-old Tyrell Trimble to death outside the Stop & Shop Plaza just before 1 p.m. on May 15.
In an interview at his home in the Hill Sunday, Eddie Trimble praised the team of cops, led by Detective David Zaweski, who swiftly made an arrest in the murder of his son.
But he seethed with anger over what he called a failure of the police to protect Tyrell after Tyrell identified a suspect in a shooting that took place two months before the murder, in the driveway of the Trimble home. The home is across the street from the graveyard where Tyrell is now buried — beside a pine tree Eddie Trimble sees every time he comes out his front door. He blames himself for his son’s death because he urged his son to cooperate with police.
“I was done wrong,” he said.
Police can’t say a lot about Trimble’s allegations because his son’s murder and the earlier shooting remain under investigation. But they don’t corroborate some key parts of his story.
“We have high confidence in the fact that we do not believe that [Tyrell] Trimble was killed as a result of ID’ing that individual,” Assistant Police Chief Archie Generoso said.
He said he wanted to stress that fact so people don’t get the idea that it’s unsafe to give information to the police. Police have battled for years to overcome the “no snitching” code.
Generoso said police were well aware of a broader conflict has taken place for years between the two gangs, a conflict that Eddie Trimble blamed for Tyrell’s death.
“Bloods and Crips traditionally do not get along,” Generoso said. “They feud.”
Shooting Number One
Paul Bass Photo
Sunday was the second time Trimble spoke at length with the Independent about his son’s murder.
In the first interview, he described his efforts to be a good father to his children after leaving jail for dealing cocaine and leaving the drug-dealing life. In that interview he also described a March 25 shooting that took place in his driveway.
He spoke of how the shooting grew out of a dispute that had run on for years between his son, who hung out with the Bloods on Kensington Street, and members of the Grape Street Crips. On March 25, Tyrell was in the driveway installing speakers in a car with his friend Eric Evans, a veteran of the violent street life and suspected Blood member, who was living with the Trimbles. A suspected Crip put a gun to Tyrell’s head and pulled the trigger; the gun didn’t fire. A gunman also fired at Evans and hit him four times. (He didn’t die.)
Click on the play arrow at the top of the story to watch Trimble walk through the paces of that shooting at the spot where it occurred.
Eddie Trimble Sunday said his son’s murder stemmed from that March 25 shooting. His son made an identification of a 17-year-old who went to jail for the shooting. The jailed man subsequently put out a “kite” — a message, with a shoot-to-kill order — of revenge, Eddie claimed.
A person familiar with the investigation said Monday that at this point police have not concluded that the alleged murderer was acting to avenge the witness ID.
After his son’s murder, Eddie Trimble said, he learned from the street and from the cops that his son had ID’d the wrong shooter. And he said he learned that the man who allegedly shot Tyrell to death was the same person who in fact shot Evans in their driveway in March.
Assistant Police Chief Archie Generoso said Monday that detectives are indeed looking into whether Evans’ shooter ended up getting arrested or not.
“There were always two people involved. We’re investigating the fact of whether or not the guy was arrested for the shooting actually did the shooting,” Generoso said. “The guy who was arrested for the shooting was there. We’re just doing our investigating.” He can’t discuss the investigation further until its completion, he said.
A “Downtown” Heart-To-Heart”
Since Tyrell’s murder, police have made a point of complimenting Eddie Trimble for “cooperating” with them as he tried to keep his son out of trouble.
Eddie said he helped the police out after Evans got shot on March 25.
Detectives intercepted Eddie, Tyrell, and Eddie Jr. as they went to visit Evans in the hospital. They asked them to come to police headquarters for an interview.
“They picked us up at the hospital in a detective car with suits on,” Eddie recalled. “The streets is watching.”
Eddie sat outside the interview room as detectives spoke with his sons. Then a detective emerged to ask him to join them, Eddie said. We need your help, the detective said.
Tyrell wasn’t talking. Eddie told him to talk, he recalled.
“I’ve been in the game 50 years,” Eddie, who went to jail in the 1990s for dealing crack, remembered saying. “You’re not no horrible a person. We’re not violent people.
“Look at me, Tyrell. If you don’t do the right thing today [by cooperating with the cops], I can’t protect you. I work at night. The police can’t protect you.”
He said Tyrell “broke down in tears.”
The detectives asked Eddie to review a photo board of suspects, Eddie said. He said he hadn’t seen any faces of shooters when he rushed to the window after hearing the shots in his driveway that day. But he knew of a Crip kid up the street who was involved in the ongoing feud with Tyrell. Eddie pointed out the kid’s picture. Tyrell was in the room at the time, Eddie claimed.
Then the detectives asked Eddie to leave the room. They subsequently asked Tyrell to identify the shooter. He did. Eddie said he believes he ID’d the same kid.
“They never supposed to let us in the room at the same time to ID the same person,” Eddie said.
“I wasn’t there. I don’t know,” Assistant Chief Generoso said Monday when asked about the ID process. “I’ve never heard that allegation made by that before.” “That’s not our procedure,” he said. He confirmed that Eddie Trimble cooperated with the police in the March 25 shooting investigation.
The Trimbles left. At no point, according to Eddie, did the police offer witness protection to him or Tyrell. They should have, Eddie argued. “Am I bulletproof? I walk to work every day. What makes you think they can’t get me when I walk down Winthrop Avenue? I didn’t have to do what I did.”
The police subsequently arrested the kid. (Evans never cooperated, according to Eddie.)
Eddie didn’t attend the arrestee’s arraignment. He had “someone” there watching it for him. That person saw the arrestee’s defense attorney show the arrestee a document with the information about his arrest, including the name of the eyewitness, Eddie claimed. (Defendants do have the right to know the evidence against them, including the names of eyewitnesses. Generoso noted that the police department does not release that information.)
Word was out. Tyrell grew scared and started carrying a gun around, Eddie said.
That didn’t save Tyrell. On May 15, outside Stop & Shop Plaza, by the Elm Street-Kensington Street Bloods corner where Tyrell hung out, a masked man approached him and shot him.
That night, at the same corner, by the pop-up makeshift memorial to his son, Eddie learned about how the wrong guy allegedly went to jail for shooting Evans, he said. And a police detective subsequently confirmed that information, he said. At the memorial, Eddie said, he also learned that 17-year-old “Oley” — the phonetic spelling for the Hamden man later arrested for allegedly killing Tyrell — was allegedly the same Crip who actually fired on Evans in the driveway two months earlier.
Eddie was livid. He returned “downtown” to 1 Union Ave. to meet with detectives and their supervisors. He said they told him he and Tyrell needed to ask for witness protection if they had wanted it.
“I shouldn’t have to ask them [for witness protection],” Eddie said Sunday. “It was a gang, it wasn’t just one kid on the block. They knew that.”
Assistant Chief Generoso said his understanding from his detectives is that they did offer Tyrell witness protection and he turned it down. They did not offer it to Eddie.
“The father’s issue was, ‘[Tyrell’s]‘s a kid. I wasn’t told.’ But he was an adult. He was 19 years old,” Generoso said. “We always take steps to make the witnesses aware of the fact that there are steps to protect themselves.”
The state’s attorney’s office handles requests for witness protection. Cops forward the requests to them.
“A person has to want to be in in it. They can’t be forced,” New Haven State’s Attorney Michael Dearington said Monday. “People can guide them at that.”
Without specifically discussing the Trimble case, Dearington said his office tends to be “pretty liberal and generous in processing” witness-protection complaints. “Typically we will acquiesce if there is any merit to it.”
At this point, Eddie plans to continue going to work each night and spending his days trying to keep his other sons out of trouble. They’ve been in a lot of it; Eddie said he’s trying to step in their lives in a way too few urban fathers do and his father never did.
“I should never have gone down there” and convinced Tyrell to identify the March 25 shooter, Eddie said. “I should have minded my own business.”