The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
The lives of Darien’s Scott Hapgood and Caribbean island worker Kenny Mitchel collided last year. It ended with Mitchel dead and Hapgood facing a manslaughter charge.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on Darien resident Scott Hapgood’s deadly encounter with hotel worker Kenny Mitchel while on vacation with his family last April in Anguilla.
DARIEN — The man stands in the park, reenacting a scene from his own life. He is in the park with his family, and they are pretending to be themselves, doing things they normally do: playing games, walking on the grass. But they are not themselves. And this is not normal. But his lawyer said it was a good idea, so here they are.
In the middle of a sea of green athletic fields, dense woods, playgrounds, tennis courts, and a pond, he stands in the shade of a gazebo behind a field where his children compete in sports—a field where, as a boy, he himself competed, a field he knows better than his own back yard. His two daughters fling a lacrosse ball back and forth, back and forth.
“Lacrosse is like a religion around here,” the man says. All three of his kids play in lacrosse leagues after school.
There’s a photographer taking pictures of them, and the family has an easy rapport as they stand before the camera. “Should we smile?” asks Kallie, the man’s wife—a good question, all things considered. The photographer is taking their picture because of what happened when they were on vacation in the Caribbean and the man, Gavin Scott Hapgood, was accused of causing another man to die. Now they want people to see that despite that awful nightmare they are a good family. This photo shoot is one small part of what they see as their fight for survival.
The man, who goes by Scott, met Kallie freshman year at Dartmouth. They have been married for 17 years. Scott, who just turned 45, has worked in the same industry, finance, for the same company, UBS, for more than two decades. Kallie, 44, is head of investor relations at the private equity firm Gridiron Capital. They chose this town, Darien, the ninthwealthiest town in the United States — the town where Scott grew up — to raise their three kids in, two girls, ages 13 and 11, and a boy, 9.
You can plan all you want. Scott’s life has moved along tracks grooved deep over decades: from the suburbs to the Ivys and back to the suburbs, a family and a job and a big house. But there are so many humans running around the planet, and sometimes two of them collide unexpectedly, at just the wrong angle in the wrong millisecond, and it causes an explosion. That’s what happened on vacation in Anguilla: Scott ended up in a hotel room 1,800 miles from the town where he grew up, and in that room was a stranger, a younger man named Kenny Mitchel, and pretty soon the other man was dead.
Scott Hapgood’s rectilinear face rests on a tree-trunk physique maintained by the doubles paddle tennis league he and Kallie compete in (and dominate). He was a first team All Ivy defensive end and a second team All Ivy lacrosse player. Today he’s a tanned, six-foot-three avatar of suburban masculinity, with a Mt. Rushmore brow, thin lips, and cropped sandy hair, in button-ups and khakis and breathable mesh loafers. His handshake is firm, even though the pinkie of his right hand juts out at a strange angle, the result of an old sports injury. Nothing else is out of place. In photos Scott appears every inch the Ivy League alpha male that his résumé suggests.
In person the stereotype falls away. Dark circles have appeared under his eyes. He speaks in clipped sentences, with visible tightness at the corners of his mouth. A week before the shoot, at a grim press conference, he called his life a “living nightmare.” Only around his family does the pre-Anguilla Scott emerge. As he stands within the force field of their affection, his warm smile melts away the tension curdling behind his jaw.
It’s been hard for the kids to process what they witnessed—to be witnesses, in fact, giving statements to the police in what would become the investigation of their father. They have been in therapy. Scott and Kallie have been open about what happened, and what’s happening now. “The kids are holding up pretty darn well, but there’s little things you notice,” Kallie says. At the moment, here in the park, they seem to be in a good mood.
“I promised them ice cream afterward,” says Scott, smiling.
Scott and Kallie Hapgood met during their freshman year at Dartmouth, and they have been married for 17 years. A college athlete, Scott has worked in finance at UBS for two decades. The Hapgoods have two daughters, ages 13 and 11, and a son, age 9.
Scott Hapgood, a U.S. financial adviser charged with killing hotel worker Kenny Mitchel, at right, while on vacation in Anguilla, during a news conference in New York on Aug. 20. condition of anonymity to protect his job. “He was very much loved by his family.”
After his father moved to Anguilla to pursue business as a contractor, Kenny often traveled back and forth between the two islands. In 2015 he moved to Anguilla for good, to follow in his father’s footsteps.
He made friends almost immediately. He loved cooking, eating, dancing, and making music. Kenny could throw a barbecue with no warning, and fill up a yard with people at the drop of a hat, the friend says. “He would say, ‘I’m going to grill up some chicken, invite everybody to come. He loved to see people having a good time.’”
A year after he moved to Anguilla, Kenny met a woman named Emily Garlick at a food festival where she was working. He loved food, and Emily caught his eye; he hung around her booth all day, smiling at her. She flirted, told him to go away, thinking he was “too small, too little.” But her friend put Emily’s number in Kenny’s phone, “and that was it.”
Kenny was wiry, with dark skin and a gentle, handsome face. Garlick—white, British, red-haired, blue-eyed, her face an ocean of freckles—fell hard. “He was caring. He was passionate—about everything: his music, his food, me, his family, how he looked,” she says. “He loved to look sharp, funny, goofy. He loved to dance. He was a bit silly. A good one.”
She recalls one of their early dates, when they spent a weekend together on the beach, and he wrote her a song on the spot. She remembers it perfectly:
After two dates they were a couple. “Four months later,” she says, “we were pregnant.” They moved in together. Mylie—a combination of “Emily” and Kenny’s nickname, Mylez—was born in February 2017.
Kenny was obsessed with his newborn daughter, Garlick says. “He was great—he knew his responsibilities and he did them. I’ve got videos of him playing with her all the time… He did feed [her] through the night. He changed nappies.”
Supporting his family was important to Kenny, but it wasn’t always easy. His father made good money as a contractor, and Kenny had followed him into that line of work, taking on odd building jobs. Then, in September 2017, Hurricane Irma wiped out homes and caused millions of dollars in damage on Anguilla. Malliouhana, one of Anguilla’s preeminent luxury hotels, was hit badly. Kenny got a job there as a maintenance worker, repairing broken railings, repainting walls, and doing electrical work. He was earning around $2,000 a month and he loved the work, according to those who knew him, and he began to allow himself to dream of bigger things: college abroad, his own landscaping business.
Still, his relationship with Garlick was often tumultuous. They argued, broke up, and made up. Love for Mylie held them together, until it didn’t.
On March 25, 2019, less than three weeks before he died, Kenny was arrested and charged with raping Garlick.
At the time of his death he was out on bail, with a protective order keeping him from seeing Garlick or his daughter. Garlick now flatly denies that he raped her, and the facts of that incident remain murky. “He never laid a hand on me,” she told adding that Kenny was never once violent with her. “He didn’t know how to be violent,” she said. Still, she later confirmed that she had been the one who called the police that day, leading to his arrest. After several requests, she declined to elaborate further.
Whatever had happened, she said, was between her and Kenny. Plus, “It didn’t define him. He didn’t deserve to die.”
Family vacation
On the night of April 12, 2019, Kenny went out with his close friend, who recalls his being in good spirits, talking about the future. He mentioned that he had just gotten paid, and paid his bills, earlier that day.
“You said to me when you left my car the night before your passing ‘Aye frère, I love you, eh,’” the friend wrote online shortly after Kenny died (the two often spoke Dominican Creole with each other). “At least you passed knowing that I loved you and appreciated you the same.”
Anguilla has dozens of beaches, but Meads Bay Beach, a cartoonishly perfect milelong strip of pale sand on the western tip of the island, is where most visitors stay. They book rooms in one of its upscale hotels, the easternmost of which is Malliouhana, a cluster of bone-white buildings perched on a rocky bluff. It opened in 1985, and its spa and world class French-Caribbean restaurant helped spur an explosion in luxury tourism to the island. After closing in 2011 for a multimillion-dollar renovation, it was reopened four years ago by Auberge Resorts, an international hospitality management company that operates 19 properties on three continents. In high season a single room at Malliouhana can cost $1,000 a night; a suite runs upward of $1,800.
Scott and Kallie knew none of this when they booked their seven-night stay. Amid the constant logistical tangle of school, sports, and work, the Hapgoods had little time to debate vacation destinations. They went to a travel agent and picked Malliouhana at random from a menu of options, as if “throwing a dart at a dartboard,” Scott would say later.
In addition to nice hotels and pristine beaches, Anguilla, population 15,000, is known for its friendly locals. The crime rate is low compared with other Caribbean islands. People leave their homes unlocked. Tourism is the economy, and guests are greeted with smiles. Many are American, and, as is the case at most Caribbean resorts, nearly all are white.
The first thing that happens when you set foot in Malliouhana is someone hands you a rum punch. Breezes blow fragrant air through the open lobby, past seagreen columns, between potted palms, over mirrored floor tiles, past framed tropical scenes by the Haitian painter Jasmin Joseph. A smiling attendant leads you onto the veranda, where sunburned pink flesh sinks into pristine white couches. Beneath you the ocean stretches for miles.
“The kids are holding up pretty darn well, but there’s little things you notice,” Kallie says. At the moment, here in the park, they seem to be in a good mood.
“I promised them ice cream afterward,” Scott says.