Cops should have cut fatal Mashpee chase
‘The risk clearly outweighed the need to pursue the suspect’
The Mashpee police officer should have broken off the car chase that ended in three people dead, including a Marine who had just left his wife and newborn daughter at the hospital, police Chief Scott W. Carline said yesterday.
“The risk clearly outweighed the need to pursue the suspect,” the department’s investigators wrote in a report about the July 28 crash on Route 28 in Barnstable’s Cotuit area.
The 36-page release from Mashpee police includes the full transcript of the internal investigators’ interviews with the officers involved, the police report and a statement from police.
“I do not feel the community expects us to be perfect, but I do feel it expects us to be honest,” Carline wrote.
It does not include any information about whether officer Matthew Cascio, who investigators deemed to have broken department policy, would face any discipline. The chief wrote that the department “would take corrective measures to make sure this type of policy violation does not happen in the future,” but didn’t elaborate on what that might mean.
No one from the department who could speak about the report could be reached for comment yesterday. Police repeatedly refused to answer questions in the days after the crash, acknowledging only several days later that an internal investigation was underway.
Marine combat veteran Kevin Quinn, 32, of Mashpee, who had just left his wife and newborn daughter at the hospital, was killed when his SUV was struck head-on by a 2000 Toyota sedan driven by Mickey Rivera, 22, of Fall River, who also died in the 12:15 a.m. crash. Jocelyn Goyette, 24, of New Bedford, who was a passenger in the sedan, died two days later from her injuries.
Quinn’s best friend, Rob Dinan, who has been acting as a spokesman for the family, said he and the family are aware of the department’s finding but don’t want to talk publicly about it.
“The community has really come together to support the family, and it just restores my faith in humanity,” Dinan told the Herald yesterday.
The report by Capt. Thomas Rose and Lt. Oliver Naas found Cascio violated department policy by continuing the chase, which reached speeds of about 100 mph in areas that had speed limits of at most half of that. The sergeant who was serving as patrol supervisor at the time did not break policy, the report concluded.
Cascio attempted to pull Rivera over after he saw him driving too quickly and then roll through a stop sign, though investigators deemed that Cascio’s characterization of Rivera’s speed was right around the speed limit. Rivera sped away, and Cascio followed him, lights flashing, until the crash, investigators found.
Rivera had just been released without bail after a drunken-driving arrest in Hyannis in June, despite being freed on bail on armed robbery charges related to a 2015 slaying, which Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe acknowledged was a mistake.