A morning run by 75 recruits turns into horror: ‘It looked like an airplane wreck’
At a time when one of the nation’s top police agencies is on pace to lose more than 100 officers this year, officers from the New Haven chapter of The Fraternal Order of Police were dispatched to check in on an incident that would ultimately prove fatal for one of their own.
It started innocently enough, with an off-duty officer and his wife doing morning duty together at a local hotel.
But things quickly became tense between them, according to local reports, and then bizarrely escalate into a terrifying nightmare for the off-duty officer.
Local reports describe what happened next:
The off-duty officer arrived in the lobby with a date, as he is known to do, and they sat down in the front section of the hotel.
Then a man dressed in a suit with a briefcase appeared, looking somewhat agitated. He then asked if he could join them and was seated by them.
It seemed like he wanted to know more about the person sitting with him.
This is when things went from uncomfortable to bizarre, as the off-duty officer and the man sitting beside him began to argue about the use of profanity, with the off-duty officer telling the man that he’d use profanity, too.
At some point, the man rose from his seat, walked out of the lobby and walked the streets.
The off-duty officer is named in a local report as being in his early 30s and was a father of four, but police officials couldn’t provide the off-duty officer’s age or the age of any of his children, according to the report.
The off-duty officer and his date left the hotel, but the man in the suit was still sitting in the lobby when they left. He didn’t leave through the front door though, but rather, through an emergency exit.
At some point, he walked outside,