COPS’ TRAGIC BOTCH IN ’07 SLAY HORROR
Shocking 911 tapes emerged yesterday that suggest cops responding to the horrific 2007 Connecticut homeinvasion murder case made a series of glaring mistakes that may have cost the victims their lives.
The tapes — revealed on the sixth anniversary of the heinous “In Cold Blood” like murders of a doctor’s wife and their two young daughters — show how Cheshire cops were clearly skeptical of nurse Jennifer HawkePetit when she walked into a bank and told the teller she was being robbed.
The tragic mom, 48, said her captor was waiting outside while his partner had her two young daughters tied up at home.
“Apparently, she came into the bank, she tried to get some money out,’’ police Lt. James Fasano can be heard telling dispatcher Donald Miller after HawkePetit and kidnapper Steven Hayes drove off.
“One of the accounts was in her husband’s name, and then she says, ‘Well, my kids are at home tied up.’ So we don’t know if they really are or if she was just trying to get money out at this point,’’ Fasano said on the call. “She was calm. She didn’t appear upset,’’ he said.
The tapes — obtained by the Hartford Courant — indicate that the clueless cops were even still holding on to the twisted notion that HawkePetit might have been complicit in the bank scheme after they arrived at the family’s home.
“Three suspects. One is a female supposedly in the upstairs bedroom possibly [dead], with the other two,’’ said Cheshire Sgt. Robert Vignola over the radio.
That was about 50 minutes after the initial 911 call.
One cop, in the neighborhood when the initial 911 call came in at 9:21 a.m. on July 23, 2007, got to the house before Hayes arrived from the bank with HawkePetit.
But the cop was ordered not to approach anyone as he watched the SUV pull into the garage.
“What I want to do is set up a perimeter, a better perimeter, as soon as everyone is geared up, and then what we are going to wind up doing is . . . we’re going to have to make contact,’’ Sgt. Vignola instead told Lt. Joseph Mazzini.
Inside, Hayes, 44, and partner Joshua Komisarjevsky, 27, were brutally beating and tying up HawkePetit’s husband, endocrinologist Dr. William Petit, in the basement.
Hayes then raped and strangled HawkePetit, and Komisarjevsky sexually assaulted the couple’s youngest daughter Michaela, 11.
Both Michaela and sister Hayley, 17, were still tied to their beds and alive when the fiends set the house on fire. William Petit escaped and was the sole survivor.
The killers were caught as they tried to flee.
HawkePetit’s sister, Cindy Renn, said she believes that the police “from Day 1 didn’t do what they should have done.”
“And they’ve never admitted it,’’ Renn told The Post. “It’s a huge coverup, and I don’t know why. Why can’t you just say, ‘We really messed this up, and we’re wrong, and we’re sorry’?’’
Additional reporting by Laurel Babcock in Cheshire, Conn.