09-13-2010, 09:10 PM
today at trial, from NY TIMES:
NEW HAVEN — The morning she would die, Jennifer Hawke-Petit was calm as she stood at the teller’s window at a bank in Cheshire, Conn. She said that she needed to withdraw $15,000 because men were holding her family hostage at their home and that no one should call the police.
More than three years after that morning, as the Cheshire triple-murder trial opened here on Monday, the bank manager, Mary Lyons, told jurors that she looked in Ms. Hawke-Petit’s eyes. Then she knew, she testified with her voice breaking, that “what she was telling me was the truth and I needed to help her.”
With three packages of $5,000, Ms. Hawke-Petit went home, where she was raped and strangled, and where her daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, were killed, tied to their beds in a house that was set ablaze with gasoline.
The jurors heard the 911 call from Ms. Lyons, the bank manager. Ms. Hawke-Petit had told her, she said on the tape, that “if the police are called they will kill the children and her husband.”
A neighbor, David L. Simcik, took the witness stand and described walking his dog and picking up the newspaper at the end of his driveway, as he would on any morning. Then a while later, his wife told him she heard someone calling “Dave, Dave.”
There was a man lying in the driveway, so beaten and bloody that Mr. Simcik did not recognize him. Only when the man spoke did Mr. Simcik realize it was his neighbor of 18 years, Dr. Petit.
Dr. Petit said Mr. Simcik should call for help.
The morning began to accelerate, as the jurors heard it described. After the call from the bank, officers started converging about 9:30 a.m., running through the woods, wriggling into heavy armored vests. By then there was a police officer, Thomas R. Wright, with a SWAT team rifle in Mr. Simcik’s driveway.
The jurors heard Mr. Simcik’s call to a 911 operator. He seemed breathless. He said who he was. Officer Wright took the phone. He sounded near panic. He shouted at Mr. Simcik to get in the house and he barked out a call for an ambulance. The line went dead.
As he rushed into the safety of his house, Mr. Simcik, a retired teacher, testified, he heard Officer Wright ask a question of Dr. Petit.
“Is there anybody in the house?”
“The girls.”
By then, flames were shooting out of the Petits’ house, Mr. Simcik told the jurors.
Officer Wright, with a crew cut and a military demeanor, was the last witness of the first day. He delivered an account of those next minutes in the flat language of the police, which seemed to be coming from a different man entirely from the frazzled officer on the 911 tape.
The jurors were motionless.
Officer Wright described coming upon Dr. Petit in Mr. Simcik’s driveway: “I saw an individual who had a large injury to his head, bleeding profusely.”
He described hearing shouted commands from the Petits’ house as other officers saw that Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky were in the Petits’ tan Chrysler rushing down the street, the only path to escape.
On foot, he could not hope to keep up. And there were other officers in pursuit. So he and another officer went toward the burning house, Officer Wright testified.
They pushed in one way, he said, and could not make it past the heat and the smoke. They tried again and failed. They searched for a ladder. There were no firefighters yet. They listened.
“We did not hear anything from inside the house,” Officer Wright testified.
A prosecutor led the officer through an account of going through the house after the fire was out.
“There was a body,” Officer Wright said.
There was another body, the officer continued.
“The body,” he said, “appeared to be tied to the bed.”
The vehicle used by the suspects sits crashed at the side of the road shortly after the triple homicide on Sorghum Mill Drive in Cheshire on July 23, 2007. After the suspects fled the Petits' home in the family's Chrysler Pacifica SUV, they rammed a police cruiser that tried to cut them off in front of the house and slammed into two more cruisers in the center of a roadblock a block away. The police cars spun apart from each other on impact. The Pacifica, front end damaged and airbags deployed, rolled 30 feet before stopping against a neighbor's manicured lawn. Officers, guns drawn, swarmed the vehicle and pulled out the suspects, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of Cheshire; and Steven Hayes, 44, of Winsted.
NEW HAVEN — The morning she would die, Jennifer Hawke-Petit was calm as she stood at the teller’s window at a bank in Cheshire, Conn. She said that she needed to withdraw $15,000 because men were holding her family hostage at their home and that no one should call the police.
More than three years after that morning, as the Cheshire triple-murder trial opened here on Monday, the bank manager, Mary Lyons, told jurors that she looked in Ms. Hawke-Petit’s eyes. Then she knew, she testified with her voice breaking, that “what she was telling me was the truth and I needed to help her.”
With three packages of $5,000, Ms. Hawke-Petit went home, where she was raped and strangled, and where her daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, were killed, tied to their beds in a house that was set ablaze with gasoline.
The jurors heard the 911 call from Ms. Lyons, the bank manager. Ms. Hawke-Petit had told her, she said on the tape, that “if the police are called they will kill the children and her husband.”
A neighbor, David L. Simcik, took the witness stand and described walking his dog and picking up the newspaper at the end of his driveway, as he would on any morning. Then a while later, his wife told him she heard someone calling “Dave, Dave.”
There was a man lying in the driveway, so beaten and bloody that Mr. Simcik did not recognize him. Only when the man spoke did Mr. Simcik realize it was his neighbor of 18 years, Dr. Petit.
Dr. Petit said Mr. Simcik should call for help.
The morning began to accelerate, as the jurors heard it described. After the call from the bank, officers started converging about 9:30 a.m., running through the woods, wriggling into heavy armored vests. By then there was a police officer, Thomas R. Wright, with a SWAT team rifle in Mr. Simcik’s driveway.
The jurors heard Mr. Simcik’s call to a 911 operator. He seemed breathless. He said who he was. Officer Wright took the phone. He sounded near panic. He shouted at Mr. Simcik to get in the house and he barked out a call for an ambulance. The line went dead.
As he rushed into the safety of his house, Mr. Simcik, a retired teacher, testified, he heard Officer Wright ask a question of Dr. Petit.
“Is there anybody in the house?”
“The girls.”
By then, flames were shooting out of the Petits’ house, Mr. Simcik told the jurors.
Officer Wright, with a crew cut and a military demeanor, was the last witness of the first day. He delivered an account of those next minutes in the flat language of the police, which seemed to be coming from a different man entirely from the frazzled officer on the 911 tape.
The jurors were motionless.
Officer Wright described coming upon Dr. Petit in Mr. Simcik’s driveway: “I saw an individual who had a large injury to his head, bleeding profusely.”
He described hearing shouted commands from the Petits’ house as other officers saw that Mr. Hayes and Mr. Komisarjevsky were in the Petits’ tan Chrysler rushing down the street, the only path to escape.
On foot, he could not hope to keep up. And there were other officers in pursuit. So he and another officer went toward the burning house, Officer Wright testified.
They pushed in one way, he said, and could not make it past the heat and the smoke. They tried again and failed. They searched for a ladder. There were no firefighters yet. They listened.
“We did not hear anything from inside the house,” Officer Wright testified.
A prosecutor led the officer through an account of going through the house after the fire was out.
“There was a body,” Officer Wright said.
There was another body, the officer continued.
“The body,” he said, “appeared to be tied to the bed.”
The vehicle used by the suspects sits crashed at the side of the road shortly after the triple homicide on Sorghum Mill Drive in Cheshire on July 23, 2007. After the suspects fled the Petits' home in the family's Chrysler Pacifica SUV, they rammed a police cruiser that tried to cut them off in front of the house and slammed into two more cruisers in the center of a roadblock a block away. The police cars spun apart from each other on impact. The Pacifica, front end damaged and airbags deployed, rolled 30 feet before stopping against a neighbor's manicured lawn. Officers, guns drawn, swarmed the vehicle and pulled out the suspects, Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of Cheshire; and Steven Hayes, 44, of Winsted.