State’s attorney plans to complete fatal police shooting cases soon

Hartford State’s Attorney Gail P. Hardy said Friday that she plans to close out “within the coming month” four open deadly police shooting investigations after records revealed she left the cases unresolved for years, including two for more than a decade.

“Honestly, they are all in some state of completion and I estimate within the coming month … the chief state’s attorney or the acting [chief state’s attorney] should have all of them,” Hardy said during an interview Friday when asked about her timeline to complete the required reports.

Records reviewed by the Courant show Hardy, the top prosecutor in Hartford, has a total of five open use-of-force investigations involving the fatal shootings of five men by police from 2008 until April of this year.

Those records show that state’s attorneys have been responsible for 66 deadly useof-force investigations since 2001, and Hardy was the only chief prosecutor with unresolved cases older than 2019.

Her most recent case focuses on the killing of 18-yearold Anthony Vega Cruz by Wethersfield police Officer Layau Eulizier on April 20. Chief State’s Attorney Kevin T. Kane assigned Hardy the investigation. State police records show that detectives submitted their findings to Hardy on July 31.

Hardy said Friday that state police did not submit a completed report on the Cruz case until Aug. 20. State police officials said Friday they started submitting material on July 31 but that all of their findings were submitted by Aug. 20.

The four other probes from March 2008 to July 2012 occurred before a 2015 law that required the chief state’s attorney to assign deadly police use-of-force cases to state’s attorneys from outside the district where the incident took place.

In addition to Hardy’s five open cases, Middlesex State’s Attorney Michael Gailor is currently investigating a police shooting that killed a man in Windham on Feb. 20, 2019, and Tolland State’s Attorney Matthew Gedansky is probing the fatal shooting by police of a man in Hartford on July 26.

State police do an initial investigation into deadly police shootings before turning over their findings to a state’s attorney who decides if the officers’ actions were justified or if they should be charged criminally. Records show it sometimes takes months for state police to complete their part of the investigation.