Market robberies case goes to trial Faith Davison, noted Mohegan archivist, dies at 78

Jury selection is underway in Stop & Shop case

Jury selection began Monday in New London Superior Court in the case of a man charged with carrying out two separate robberies inside the Stop & Shop on Route 12 in Groton.

John Henri Lamotte, 53, of Bradford, R.I., has pleaded not guilty to two counts of first-degree robbery and one count each of third-degree larceny and fourth-degree larceny. He has opted for a trial by a jury of six people.

Lamotte has been held in lieu of $200,000 bond since Groton Town Police arrested him in February 2018 and charged him with robberies that occurred in 2016 and 2017.

The town police allege that on Dec. 6, 2016, Lamotte passed a note to an employee at the Stop & Shop courtesy desk that demanded money and implied he had a weapon. He allegedly fled on foot with $2,468.

The other robbery occurred Sept. 18, 2017, at the People’s United Bank branch inside the same Stop & Shop. The state alleges that Lamotte implied he had a weapon, demanded money and fled with $1,840.

According to public records, Lamotte had previously been convicted in U.S. District Court in Louisville, Ky., of robbing a bank in Bowling Green in 2005. He was sentenced in 2006 to serve 100 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.

On Monday, he wore civilian clothing and sat with attorneys M. Fred DeCaprio and Dawn Bradinini from the public defender’s office as jury selection got under way in the courtroom of Judge Barbara Bailey Jongbloed.

The trial is scheduled to begin Thursday and last for several days.

Mohegan — Faith Davison, a retired archivist and researcher who helped preserve the Mohegan Tribe’s cultural history, died Friday. She was 78.

Davison, a Mohegan tribal member, was honored in 2013 with a prestigious Guardian of Culture and Lifeways Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums.

“Ms. Davison played a major role in the creation and development of the Mohegan Tribal Archives,” read the citation that accompanied the award. “Using her talents for research and her knowledge of history, both tribal and colonial, Ms. Davison was instrumental in the acquisition and repatriation of Mohegan cultural properties.”

Following her retirement in 2010, she continued to write, lecture, research and consult. She wrote the forward to a history of Connecticut tribes and was a founding member of the Board of Advisers of the Yale Indian Papers Project. In an online post Sunday, the Yale project’s blog described Davison as “a font of knowledge about Native history and presence in Southern New England.”

In a 2013 interview with The Day, Davison said she started taking classes at what was then Mohegan Community College when she was in her 30s. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Connecticut College and a master’s in library sciences at the University of Rhode Island.

She worked at Mystic Seaport Museum, where she catalogued the Rosenfeld Collection of maritime photographs, and at the Mystic & Noank Library.

The Mohegan Tribe’s library had 47 volumes when it hired Davison in 1997. When she retired 13 years later, the Mohegan Library and Archives held some 7,000 volumes, including works by Native American authors, both fiction and nonfiction, and books about Native American tribes and the history of the region.

In 2011, the Mohegan Council of Elders named Davison a “nonner,” a status conferred on female tribal members who have established a record of outstanding service to the tribe.

Davison raised three sons. Other information, including funeral arrangements, was unavailable.