Cops in chase warned before
3 Creek officers in deadly crash disciplined in a pursuit last year
Three officers involved in a car chase that left an 18-year-old woman dead this month were disciplined last year for ignoring orders to end another dangerous chase, according to records released Wednesday.
Coconut Creek Officers Rocco Favata, David Morales and Chris Lewis were reprimanded and suspended for two days in a chase that topped 100 mph after an attempted traffic stop, their personnel records show. Lewis had tried to pull over the driver for an expired tag.
Now those officers are among four under investigation for chasing a driver Dec. 2 after discovering two people in a parked car that smelled of alcohol and marijuana.
After a chase that spanned 2 to 3 miles, the driver managed to lose the cops, but he crashed moments later, killing his passenger,
according to police and dashboard-camera records.
Police are investigating whether the officers did anything wrong.
In the earlier case, the driver took off when Lewis tried to stop him Oct. 21, 2016, records show. The driver sped off at 57 mph down Banks Road, which has a speed limit of 30 mph.
When a lieutenant asked Lewis the reason for the chase, Lewis told him it was for a traffic violation and fleeing.
The lieutenant demanded that the pursuit be called off — twice — and Lewis responded, “I’m no longer in pursuit.”
But Lewis continued the chase anyway, records show. His in-car system recorded speeds at 95 mph.
Favata joined the chase at “excessive speeds” and without his lights and siren, a violation of policy, according to records.
The pursuit ended at Northwest 31st Street in Margate, where the car “jumped the median … spinning out and crashing.”
Favata was going more than 100 mph on Banks Road and more than 90 mph on State Road 7, records state. His bosses wrote in his report that he “blatantly disregarded a lieutenant’s direct orders.”
Records show Morales, too, joined in, traveling up to 95 mph without lights or sirens. The driver they were chasing, Stephen James Gentile, then 44, of Tamarac, was arrested by Margate police because the car came to a final stop there, police said.
Gentile, who was unhurt, was jailed on charges that included fleeing police and driving the wrong way in traffic. The case is pending in court.
Coconut Creek Police Detective Rod Skirvin, vice president of the Police Benevolent Association, which is representing the officers, said the October 2016 case and the one this month are not comparable.
“There are a completely different set of circumstances and facts, and it has nothing to do with it,” he said.
Morales also was suspended for a day over an incident in March this year, when he reached speeds of 115 mph on Sample Road and approached a driver at gunpoint, records show. He gave chase even though he “never took the time to notify dispatch or surrounding units of your direction of travel, intentions or even whether any crime had occurred,” according to records.
Officer Cristian Salas, the fourth officer in the Dec. 2 chase, had no reprimands for prior police chases, according to records released Wednesday.
The police department’s pursuit policy generally limits officers to chasing people suspected of major felonies, such as murders, carjackings and kidnappings. But there are exceptions — for example, if officers decide a crime suspect poses a threat to the public.
In the most recent case, Officer Favata had been called to an apartment complex after someone reported loud noises coming from one of the apartments. As he investigated, he saw a car backed into a parking space. He wrote that “the driver looked up at me and appeared extremely spacey. His eyes were glassy and bloodshot.”
Instead of turning off his car, the driver — Fabreece Ductan, 19, of Margate — fled, “almost sideswiping the parked car next to him. … This behavior gave me grave concern that the driver posed an imminent threat of physical harm to the public,” Favata wrote in a report. The chase began moments later.
According to police records and the officers’ dashboard camera recordings:
Morales, who was at Sample Road and Northwest 54th Avenue, east of State Road 7, spotted a silver four-door Buick that matched the description Favata had given of the car that sped off.
Morales told other officers where he was as he began heading west on Sample to catch up and get behind the Buick.
About two miles west of where Morales first saw the Buick, police readied to pull the car over on West Sample Road.
Police turned on their lights to pull the driver over on West Sample Road, as they drove past Rock Island Road. The westbound pursuit carried on for nearly a mile on Sample. But as police readied to close in on him, the driver made an abrupt U-turn and headed back east on Sample for nearly another mile.
The driver turned south onto Rock Island Road and drove south for about a mile before crashing into another car. In the final stretch of the chase, the driver had managed to get out of officers’ sight, police said.
A Margate officer moments later reported the car had crashed in the 2400 block of Rock Island.
After the crash, Ductan’s passenger, Abigail Espinoza, also of Margate, was taken to the hospital, where she died, police said.
Police’s in-car camera system, which logs speeds and GPS location, recorded the officers hitting speeds of above 70 mph on roads, where the speed limits ranged from 40 mph to 45 mph.
Before the chase began, one officer had sped up to 91 mph on Sample Road to reach the suspect’s car. The posted limit on Sample is 45 mph.