GUNS TELL STORIES
Reading them can be key to cracking a case
Violent crime and gun violence don’t respect borders. This is in part because guns — which tell stories to those who know how to get at them — don’t stand still when in the hands of hardened criminals, authorities say.
In today’s world, Connecticut, Maine, Georgia, Florida — are all increasingly connected in the movement of guns, according to authorities. And the ability of law enforcement to match shell casings to the guns they came from and connect one crime to another often is the key to cracking
what might otherwise be a cold case.
In Connecticut in 2019, for example, law enforcement recovered and traced 1,423 firearms, including 899 pistols, 197 revolvers, 170 rifles, 102 shotguns, 21 machine guns, 12 unknown types of firearms and 22 listed as “other,” according to ATF statistics.
The number of these guns traced to other states were: Georgia, 55; Florida, 51; South Carolina, 45; Texas, 34; North Carolina, 32; Virginia, 27; Maine, 23; Ohio, 20; Vermont, 20; Rhode Island, 18; Pennsylvania 17, Alabama, 15; New Hampshire, 13; Massachusetts, 11; and New York, 11, according to the ATF.
Of those 1,423 recovered and traced firearms, 327 turned up in Bridgeport, 270 were recovered in Hartford, 108 each were recovered by police in New Haven and Waterbury, 50 were recovered in Vernon, 45 were in Meriden, 42 turned up in Groton, 41 were in New Milford, 23 were in Clinton and 23 were in Milford, with 81 additional municipalities accounting for 385 additional traces.
Tracing pathways
Chances are good that the gun used to kill the person you read about on the streets of Bridgeport, New Haven, Hartford, Stamford, Danbury, Norwalk or Waterbury came from another state, often, but not always, down south where the laws are less stringent, authorities say.
And if a gun is in the hands of a criminal, it may well be used in multiple shootings and other crimes, authorities say.
“I’ve seen (evidence) of a gun being used in 10-15 different crimes” in Connecticut metropolitan areas, said Scott Riordan, resident agent in charge of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Connecticut Office in New Haven. “That’s how a lot of our gang cases are worked.”
“The whole idea of tracing is trying to see if there are patterns of people diverting guns from lawful commerce” to illegal activity, Riordan said. “The end goal is, each gun tells a story — and you’re trying to get to that story ... and see where it leads.”
Getting to that story means comparing striations on shell casings found at crime scenes, as well as the mark made on the bottom of the casing by a gun’s firing pin.
Images of the shell casings are scanned into ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network database -- NIBIN -- to see if they match casings already in the database.
In some cases, shell casings can tell stories about gang warfare — investigators have been able to look “at gangs shooting at each other in one case” and then, via analysis of shell casings found at crime scenes, see others shooting back, a few days later, Riordan said.
About half of the “crime guns” used in Connecticut come from states other than Connecticut, he said.
For example, a decade or so ago, when the Grape Street Crips and the Red Side Guerilla Brims were wreaking havoc all over New Haven, police and other law enforcement found that RSGB members were shooting people on the streets of New Haven with guns they bought or traded drugs for in Bangor, Maine, according to authorities. That’s one place where gun laws were more lax, said Riordan and other law enforcement officers.
Within a fairly narrow period of time, 10 to 20 of those firearms were used in five homicides and armed robberies, Riordan said.
Meanwhile, members of RSGB, a New Haven-based sect of the Bloods gang, were selling and trading heroin and crack cocaine that they brought from Connecticut to connections in Maine, where illegal drugs were less plentiful and fetched a higher price, according to Riordan and New Haven Police Department Assistant Chief Karl Jacobson.
This is known because when New Haven police working with the ATF and a federal Grand Jury began charging RSGB members in 2015 following a nearly twoyear investigation, ballistics tests from a string of homicides in New Haven, many of which took place in 2011, matched up to guns that originated in Maine, officials said.
Growing numbers
Both the technology for that kind of forensic matching and the amount of federal support have leaped forward in recent years, and the Connecticut State Police Forensic Science Laboratory in Meriden, which does the bulk of that work, now uses 3D technology available only since 2013, officials said.
It’s also seeing its caseload explode.
The lab currently averages about 260 cases for analysis per month — it initiated 283 cases in October. Last year, it averaged about 140 to 150 cases per month.
In October, it was able to enter into NIBIN 240 of the 283 cases, leaving a backlog of 43 cases, said Lucinda Lopes-Phelan, the lab’s deputy director of identification.
“We’re addressing the backlog,” state lab Director Guy Vallaro said in a recent video call. “Until recently, there was no backlog.”
The lab has had some recent turnover and is looking to replace the lost employees, he said.
The average turnaround for state lab ballistics analysis is about one month, he said. Two months or more is considered a backlog.
The lab currently has four full-time examiners and one parttime examiner, said Lopes-Phelan.
It may be surprising to some that guns used for crimes, at least in New Haven, don’t generally come from New York.
“You don’t see a lot of guns stolen from New York,” said Assistant Chief Jacobson, who formerly commanded the NHPD’s Intel Center, where much of the department’s ballistics detective work takes place and equipment to monitor New Haven’s federally-funded ShotSpotter gunfire tracking system is located.
“That’s because there’s not a lot of guns in New York,” which has stringent gun laws, Jacobson said. “It’s illegal.”
But “definitely, there’s a flow of guns from down south to here,” Jacobson said. He estimated that one-third to one-half of the guns seized in New Haven are from the
South, with “maybe one third stolen from the area or down south.”
In recent years, “We have definitely seen an uptick in guns coming from Southern states — Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama — where state laws are less strict, if there are state laws at all,” said the ATF’s Riordan, who works closely with local law enforcement across Connecticut.
In a 2017 case, the New London Police Department recovered two firearms used in crimes that turned out to have been purchased just two weeks earlier by the Massachusetts girlfriend of a New London man. The girlfriend was stationed at an Army base at Fort Stewart in Georgia and later allegedly admitted to having “straw purchased” seven guns for her boyfriend, who was a New London drug dealer, Riordan said.
Mike Sorrentino, an ATF agent who works out of the agency’s New Haven office, said the guns were recovered by New London police in August 2017, just two weeks after being purchased.
The woman allegedly “first made up a story that they had been stolen,” but police later were able to arrest her boyfriend, who was a felon, on a federal gun charge, Sorrentino said.
Then in February 2019, New London police recovered another one of the guns and traced it back to the woman, Sorrentino said. Her boyfriend ultimately was convicted on federal gun charges after he pleaded guilty to possessing the two that were recovered, Sorrentino said.
The girlfriend was discharged from the military but not charged in the case, he said.
But Riordan said the increase in caseload at the state forensics lab isn’t just an indicator of increased activity.
“I think, one, the ATF is really pushing the NIBIN system,” as well as providing greater funding to the state lab, he said.
In the future, Riordan said it’s likely that a great share of the actual analysis will be done by the ATF’s National Correlation Center in Hunstville, Ala., which will free up the examiners at the state lab to do more of the initial correlation, entering data images into the eTrace system, which is housed at ATF’s National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va.
“ATF is pushing 100 percent compliance” to enter all shell casings collected at crime scenes into NIBIN, Riordan said.
That way, if, for example, people in Woodbridge hear shots fired and “two weeks later, there’s a shooting in New Haven,” they might more easily find that “the shell casings match,” he said.
Additional changes are coming within the next few weeks and months.
Federal grant money is going to enable the state forensics lab to install an additional NIBIN shell casing image acquisition case in a kiosk in the lab’s lobby. There, police from Connecticut departments will be taught to enter the images themselves, speeding up the analysis time and reducing the load on state examiners, said Riordan, Vallaro and Lopes-Phelan.
“Last I heard it was 45 days away,” said Riordan.
Another acquisition case will be installed in a van to be used as a mobile unit that can be sent to crime scenes to enter information on-site, said Lopes-Phelan.
The cost of the mobile unit is $205,000. The cost of the kiosk is $135,000, she said.
Local matters
But not every police department in Connecticut needs to use the state lab.
The Bridgeport Police Department has its own ballistics examiner, a retired state trooper who has done the job in Bridgeport for 20 years now, working two days a week, said Capt. Brian Fitzgerald, who oversees investigations for the department.
“I think we’re the only police department in the state that has our own in-house ballistics examiner,” Fitzgerald said. “If we get a link to a gun that we think was used in a crime on a Friday,” the department could have a match early the next week, he said.
That compares to a likely turnaround of a month or more through the state lab.
“It’s very useful for us. In a lot of cases it” can put the department over top in its investigation and enable it to issue a warrant, Fitzgerald said.
“So we essentially have a duplicate of NIBIN in-house that’s Bridgeport-centric,” he said.
That said, “We duplicate, so we test everything in-house but we also submit a sample to the state lab,” Fitzgerald said.
According to Fitzgerald, “There’s certain guns I can think of that have been used in 10, 15, 20 incidents over time.”
In Bridgeport, as in many cities, “Our gangs are generally based in neighborhoods,” he said. When they procure guns, “we have a lot coming up from the South, especially from Georgia. A lot are stolen. We have some where we run the history and we have no history on them at all.”
Overall gun activity “ebbs and flows but I would say that in 2020 we’ve seen a sharp increase in the guns used in crimes, both shots fired and victims hit by gunfire,” said Fitzgerald, who has been a police officer for 24 years.
“Last year had 124 (shootings) and this year it’s 139, our homicides are up, our homicides involving gang members are up,” he said.
Improving technology hasn’t just changed ballistics work. It also has greatly improved the ability to pinpoint where shootings are happening, he said.
Bridgeport is one of three police departments in the state — along with New Haven and Hartford — that has ShotSpotter technology to detect gunfire in certain city neighborhoods and show police on a map where the shooting occurred. There’s even an app on officers’ cellphones.
NHPD’s Jacobson said ShopSpotter is accurate to about 80 feet and is sensitive to “hear” gunshots but not sensitive enough to hear conversations.
“Shotspotter has allowed us to draw a map where shell casings are found,” said Fitzgerald. “It used to be, if someone called in a shooting, the cop would drive through and if they didn’t see anything” that was the end of it.
Now, “Every cop in Bridgeport
has a Shotspotter app on their phone,” he said. “We had a homicide (at the) end of last year, gang related. They did a shooting in a housing project, didn’t hit anybody there, then drove over to another part of the city” and “shot somebody there.”
“Because of the app we were able to track the shell casings ... and make an arrest in that case,” Fitzgerald said. “Shotspotter puts cops on the scene more accurately and within minutes.”
In many cases, “We’re able to get there while the bad guy’s still on the scene,” he said.
Depends on the gun
A growing issue cited by both Fitzgerald and Danbury police Lt. Mark Williams is “ghost guns” — essentially unfinished “kits” that don’t have serial numbers and are virtually untraceable.
“They’re not exactly prolific, but we’ve seen a few dozen of them in Bridgeport,” Fitzgerald said.
The way ghost guns work is that “on any gun, the lower receiver is the part that’s coveted ... the part with the serial number ... If you have that part, you can manufacture the rest in your basement.”
Because components that people can buy on the internet aren’t finished guns, they need not be registered — and the individual part, some of which people can manufacture themselves on 3D printers using code they can get on the Internet, don’t have serial numbers, he said.
In some cases, individuals can buy components for firearms such as an M4 carbine or an AR-15 — both assault rifles — that “you can’t even buy” in Connecticut, “and put it together yourself,” Fitzgerald said.
Williams, detective lieutenant in charge of the Danbury Police Department’s special investigations division, said that while violent crime is lower in Danbury, which has 85,000 residents, than in the state’s larger cities, his department stumbles across “the so-called ‘ghost guns’” on occasion.
“I’ve seen so-called assault weapons without serial numbers,” he said.
While “it’s illegal to sell them, it is not illegal to possess them,” Williams said. “You’re supposed to register them.”
Ghost guns can be handguns or long guns, he said. “Basically you’re just buying the mechanisms and putting them together yourself,” using some plastic polymer components you can print yourself.
For Lt. Paul Cicero, who commands the Hartford Police Department’s Major Crimes Division, “Tracing guns is complex and it’s also very simple at the same time,” he said. “As far as tracking the behavior of a gun and where it’s been, we do that through NIBIN correlation. We submit casings to the lab” for analysis.
“We get them back relatively quickly, a few weeks,” he said.
How much history can be unearthed “depends on the gun,” Cicero said. “Some guns can have 10, 12, 15 investigations tied to one gun.”
In recent months, state police