Post by WaTcHeR on Jul 12, 2006 14:27:48 GMT -5
Officer Robert Lawlor
07.12.2006 - His eyes welling with tears and his head hung low, Hartford police Officer Robert Lawlor sat in his lawyer's office on a sunny afternoon in May and spoke about the despair that has gripped him since he shot and killed a teenager in a dark parking lot in the city's North End last year.
The fatal shooting of 18-year-old Jashon Bryant, he said, has shaken him so badly that he still replays the incident in his head every day, and needs to take medication to keep his nerves in check.
Two days later, Lawlor showed up at a ceremony to celebrate the promotion of several Hartford police supervisors, attended by Mayor Eddie A. Perez. Just a week earlier, the mayor had said Lawlor should be arrested as soon as possible after a prosecutor released a grand jury report concluding that Bryant's shooting had not been justified.
Lawlor brashly walked up to Perez, interrupting an interview with a reporter, reached out to shake hands with the mayor and thanked him for his "support."
The two episodes, so contradictory, raise a question others have asked about the 18-year veteran:
Who exactly is the real Bob Lawlor?
To some he's a hard-charging cop who relentlessly pursues the bad guys on the street, even at the expense of his own personal life. To others, he's a renegade, unwilling to play by the rules that don't suit him and all too ready to defy those above him.
His arrest on charges of first-degree manslaughter and first-degree assault made Lawlor the second police officer in Connecticut to be charged in connection with an on-duty fatal shooting. Lawlor has said he believes Bryant was armed.
Like other moments in Lawlor's career, the shooting can be seen in starkly different ways. The night Bryant died, was Lawlor - as many supporters claim - a hard-working officer trying his best to get guns off the street looking out for himself and his partner?
Or was he - as the young man's family believes - acting too quickly, without thinking?
`Robocop'
A look at Lawlor's personnel records, as well as interviews with several officers who have worked with him, paints a picture of an officer so motivated and passionate for police work that he was known as "Robocop." Since joining the force in 1987, Lawlor has received 20 written commendations, many from other law enforcement agencies he has assisted.
In January 2004 he received a commendation from Kevin O'Connor, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, after Lawlor helped the FBI crack down on a drug operation in the North End that had contributed to a murder near a school.
The crackdown led to the conviction of two men responsible for shooting and killing a man in broad daylight on Farmington Avenue in 2001, O'Connor said in his letter. In particular, O'Connor said, Lawlor played a key role in helping investigators find a vantage point from which they could watch the drug operation without being noticed.
To do that, Lawlor said, he hung out in an abandoned house on Edgewood Street, where he and other detectives spent 39 straight days watching the local drug trade from a perch on the third floor.
"Those guys were always looking to the left and the right whenever they were looking out for us, but they never looked up," he said. "We were so close we could see the lines on their hands when they sold their crack."
Lawlor made a name for himself during the 1990s, when the city was gripped by violent turf wars between street gangs such as Los Solidos, 20 Love and the Latin Kings.
"He was just highly aggressive and highly motivated," said Stan Wasilewski, a retired cop who worked with Lawlor on the gang task force. "He was one of those guys who would climb a tree if he thought it was the best way to put someone under surveillance."
Wasilewski said Lawlor also was admired for his ability to get people on the street to talk to him. He was able to infiltrate the hierarchy of the gangs, developing intelligence that helped police head off clashes and confrontations.
"He just had a way of talking to people, getting them comfortable," he said. "If some guy was kind of quiet or not telling us anything, Bob would offer the guy a soda or a cigarette, just sit there until the guy opened up."
www.courant.com/news/local/hc-lawlor0708.artjul08,0,5013032.story?coll=hc-headlines-home