Category: Connecticut

Tommy Stuart (left); Hal Yocher (right).

In the pre-dawn hours of a Wednesday morning, 39-year-old James Thomas “Tommy” Stuart III was hanging out with a friend named Renee in his third-floor apartment in Waterbury, Connecticut. They had a few drinks and were talking when suddenly an armed man kicked in the apartment door. Brandishing a pistol, the gunman shouted at Renee: “Leave now!” She ran for her life and scrambled down the stairway.

Before she reached the ground floor, Renee heard multiple gunshots from the apartment. Tommy Stuart was shot in the abdomen and then in the face, killed instantly. The gunman then went down to the yard behind the apartment on Marion Avenue and shot himself in the head.

He was an off-duty Waterbury policeman.

Officer Hallock “Hal” Yocher, 37, was an Iraq war veteran who had been on the Waterbury police force for 10 years. He had been diagnosed with cancer in 2013 and, according to a source familiar with the July 2016 murder-suicide case, Yocher had threatened suicide just weeks earlier.

More importantly, however, Yocher had a history of domestic violence. He lived in Naugatuck, the town next to Waterbury, and his neighbors there had reportedly called police about disturbances at the home where Yocher lived with his wife and children. Yet it appears that Yocher’s status as a policeman protected him from being arrested. And under a Connecticut law, passed just two months before the murder of Tommy Stuart, police were required to seize any firearms in the possession of a domestic abuse suspect. Yocher still had his guns, however, including the semiautomatic pistol he used to kill Tommy Stuart before killing himself.

The motive for Yocher’s crime? Jealousy.

Before their 2006 marriage, Yocher’s wife had once dated Stuart, according to a source familiar with the case. Three months before the murder-suicide, Kathleen “Katie” Yocher had reached out to Stuart for advice and sympathy in dealing with her troubled husband. The cause of Yocher’s murderous rage in the early morning of July 20, 2016, was his discovery of communications with Stuart on his wife’s cell phone.

More than a year after Stuart and Yocher’s deaths — which police at the time called “an isolated incident” — Stuart’s family has been unable to obtain police reports about his death. The Connecticut State Police are in charge of the investigation, which for unknown reasons is still uncompleted, and local news organizations have failed to report on the circumstances that led to the deaths of Stuart and Yocher.

What is most startling about this story is the seeming indifference by the Hartford Courant, a newspaper that has twice won Pulitzer Prizes. Here is a tragedy involving two issues — domestic violence and firearms laws — that should be of interest to the Courant’s readership. The mysterious delays in the State Police investigation, and the possibility that police in Naugatuck and Waterbury shielded Yocher from the consequences of his alleged domestic violence, has the distinct aroma of a cover-up.

Two men are dead because Hal Yocher still had his guns that morning in July 2016, and much of the same information that I have shared here has also been sent to the Hartford Courant and other news organizations in Connecticut, as well as to various officials, including U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who for 20 years was the state’s Attorney General.

So why is this story being reported on my blog, and not by the journalists at the Pulitzer-winning Courant? It beats me. Maybe readers could contact Andrew Julien ([email protected]) editor-in-chief of the Courant or the newspaper’s investigative editor John Ferraro ([email protected]) and ask them why they haven’t followed up on this story. You might think that the murder of a civilian by an off-duty cop, under circumstances that could give rise to accusations of obstruction of justice, would be considered newsworthy. Certainly, the family of the murdered man would be willing to talk to reporters in Connecticut who were trying to find out why the State Police haven’t finished their investigation of this case.

Tommy Stuart left behind two young children, a son and a daughter. They might become plaintiffs in a wrongful death lawsuit against Waterbury officials, but the failure of State Police to complete their investigation, and the refusal of Waterbury police to release their records related to the case, make it difficult for Tommy’s children to seek justice.

This could be a big story, and it astonishes me that local reporters in Connecticut aren’t pursuing it. One of my sources in Waterbury said: “Everybody knew Tommy. Everybody loved Tommy. He was just one of those wild guys with a heart of gold.” If readers will share this on Facebook and Twitter, maybe we can get some justice for him.

Two 18-year-olds in Torrington, Conn., are charged with sexually assault. The case involves a 13-year-old, and it has caused some ugly reaction:

[O]n social media in recent weeks, dozens of athletes and Torrington High School students, male and female, have taunted the 13-year-old victim, calling her a “whore,” criticizing her for “snitching” and “ruining the lives” of the 18-year-old football players, and bullying students who defend her.
“Even if it was all his fault, what was a 13 year old girl doing hanging around 18 year old guys..” said a Twitter user with the handle, “@LoryyRamirez.” That was reposted 11 times and received six favorites.

Balancing the rights of victims and the rights of the accused can be difficult in such cases, and when rape accusations become national headlines, commentary is often wildly irresponsible. Lee Stranahan covered the ways in which reaction to the Steubenville case led to false accusations of a “cover-up” that impugned the entire community. Dana Pico at First Street Journal reminds us of another media-created travesty:

Many of our friends on the left immediately jumped on the guilty, guilty, guilty! bandwagon in the infamous Duke lacrosse team not-rape case, including our old friend Amanda Marcotte, who was extremely reluctant to believe that Crystal Gail Mangum might actually have lied when she made the accusations, stating that the charges were dropped against the three accused lacrosse players because the “prosecution in the Duke case fumbled the ball.” ….One of Miss Marcotte’s commenters even held that:

Rape is a crime unlike others. In any rape case, but especially in a rape case where a black woman accuses a white man, the rapist should be considered guilty until he proves his innocence. And he must prove his innocence not beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond any possible doubt. The Durham rapists have not done so, by any means.

The rush to judgment, the irresponsible haste to comment on what happened before we actually know what happened, causes all kinds of unecessary problems in situations like these. Trying criminal cases in the media is always a bad idea, and using blog comments as a way to vent personal or political sentiments about a rape case can easily turn into a digital lynch mob mentality.

The Washington Post notices that most folks in Newtown, Connecticut, don’t see the murderer’s mother as a victim worth mourning:

Police said that before he attacked the schoolhouse, [the creepy little weirdo] pumped four bullets into his mother’s head as she lay in bed. . . .
“I am feeling that there is more anger toward the mother than there is toward the son,” said Lisa Sheridan, a Newtown parent.
“Why would a woman who had a son like this, who clearly had serious issues, keep assault rifles in the house and teach him how to shoot them?” she said. “To deal with that, there’s a feeling here that we’re just going to focus on the 26 innocent people who died at the school.” . . .
Nancy Lanza apparently broke no laws and suffered a violent, tragic death. People who knew her . . . see her as a victim like any of the others.
But for some, how to refer to her — and what to think of her — is a subject of much conversation. While some call her the first victim, many think she bears at least some of the blame.
“Maybe somewhere there is a deep thought that the shooter’s mother could be responsible for leaving the guns available,” said Himansu Patel, the Newtown Convenience and Deli owner, who decided to leave Nancy Lanza out of his memorial to the victims. . . .
Much remains unknown about [the creepy little weirdo] and his mother. But everyone here knows that Nancy, 52, was the legally registered owner of the powerful .223-caliber, military-style Bushmaster rifle that was used in the nation’s second-deadliest mass shooting. And they have heard that federal investigators have determined that mother and son visited numerous shooting ranges together.
It is also known that [the creepy little weirdo] had psychological or emotional problems that made the most basic elements of daily life — such as school and social settings — challenging for him. The state medical examiner said he had been advised that [the creepy little weirdo] had Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder that is not associated with violence.
Those facts have left questions hanging over Newtown. Did Nancy Lanza do enough to try to keep her guns out of her son’s hands? Should she have helped a young man with psychological problems learn how to shoot?

Notice, by the way, the Post isn’t calling the Bushmaster an “assault weapon” (because it’s not), but instead — in keeping with the media’s misguided “exotic weapons” narrative — is calling it “the powerful .223-caliber, military-style Bushmaster rifle .”

Focusing on the weapons as the demonized villain of the tale, rather that looking at the complex human factors involved in this horrible atrocity, is much easier and, in terms of Democrat Party politics, certainly convenient. But the politics of convenience seldom solves problems.