Meriden and Waterbury police are partnering with the FBI on a joint task force to combat gang violence that investigators believe is behind recent increases in shootings in both cities.
Meriden Chief Roberto Rosado and Waterbury Chief Fernando Spagnolo announced the task force Wednesday afternoon and indicated the violence appears to be connected to a small number of individuals affiliated with specific groups based on the suspects they have identified so far.
The FBI already has helped the cities with those investigations, but the new task force will help bring more specialized federal agents and technology to bear on the increase in gun violence, officials said.
“When we combine FBI resources, technology, specialized personnel along with dedicated police officers and detectives who have local knowledge and understand the intelligence and who these actors in our communities that are committing these crimes, we build a collaborative effort that has been proven time and time again to reduce such violence,” said David Sundberg, the special agent in charge of the FBI office in Connecticut.
“Most of the violence is conducted by a very small portion of our communities and our towns and cities deserve a peaceful way of life,” he continued. “We’ll do everything we can alongside the police departments to make sure that happens.”
Meriden and Waterbury are among a number of Connecticut cities that have experienced a sharp rise in shots fired incidents and shootings with injuries this year, especially over the past two months, officials have said. The upward trend in gun violence is mirrored in municipalities across the country that have seen increases in gun violence and homicides in 2020 after years at virtually record lows.
Shootings with injuries already are at a six-year high in Hartford with 2 1/2 months left in the year, for example, and the pace has increased since the beginning of September with almost triple the number of such incidents over the past seven weeks than in any of the previous three years. Last week officials announced 15 state police personnel have been dispatched to the capital to help crack down on illegal gun carrying and stolen vehicles that facilitate shootings.
Meriden has seen a particularly sharp rise in shooting incidents this year after a rash of gun violence since late August, including several gun homicides and even more shots fired incidents that damaged property but missed any human victims. Earlier Wednesday, authorities in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Marshals arrested 32-year-old Davis Omar Roman Villanueva, who is suspected of fatally shooting 34-year-old Casey Eric Schoonover earlier this month.
Investigators have recorded 85 confirmed incidents of shots fired so far in 2020 — already a 10-year high in gunfire in the city through just Oct. 14, according to police data. The city reported 55 confirmed shots fired incidents in 2019 and 2012, the next highest annual numbers, and has averaged about 43 such incidents per year over the past decade.
The department tapped into FBI assistance as that spike began and it was federal intelligence that tipped the department off to the home on Round Hill Road last month where a joint operation with New Haven police ended in the arrest of three people and seizure of two rifles, a sawed-off shotgun and tactical body armor. At least one of those men arrested is believed to be connected to at least one of the city’s recent shootings, Rosado said.
“We’ve been working together for some time now behind the scenes,” he said. “We’ve made a lot of significant progress already. I know here in Meriden, we’ve seized about 17 firearms and made about 20 arrests in the last three months.”
Investigators in Waterbury have been reviewing their own set of recent shootings and collaborated with Meriden police when they discovered connections between the incidents in the two towns, officials said.
“We did develop information and were able to correlate a nexus between a lot of this violence occurring between Meriden and Waterbury,” Spagnolo said. “With the assistance of the FBI … we were able to create a task force and participate in several investigations.”
Sundberg emphasized the task force will be focused specifically on a small group of suspects that investigators believe are responsible for most of the violence and will not include any kind of widespread public surveillance.
“There are times like this when the violence takes a sharp spike and increases [during] which we need to have a more public effort and show the population that we are all collaborative, we are all working together to reduce that violence,” he said. “That is when you publicly see the FBI, but we don’t have people in uniform, we don’t work out of patrol cars. We’re not normally in that view, but we are always here looking out for people’s safety.”
Zach Murdock can be reached at zmurdock@courant.com.
