The expected law enforcement professionals responded to
Angela Fratollini’s 911 call—not all at once, but in prompt succession. Two patrol units showed
up, followed
shortly by
an ambulance with two paramedics who approached the prone body and attempted to find a pulse before
looking at
each other and shaking
their heads. Not long after, Bruntfield Homicide Detectives Cavaluzzi and Ryan arrived, already aware of the identity of the deceased as one of the officers involved in
the Felson beating, and immediately examined the car and the
dead body slumped in its trunk before calling in the crime scene forensics squad. Having done that, they entered the
house to interview
Mrs. Fratollini. They had hardly exchanged
introductions when someone from the Medical Examiner’s Office had
turned up, interrupting the questioning. Following him was the Crime Scene Investigation
Unit from the New Jersey State
Police, who had accepted
the request for help from Len Peterson, acting chief of police for Bruntfield Township. A photographer, a fingerprint specialist, and
a crime
scene mapper from the same unit joined their Bruntfield
counterparts.
It was only then that Cavaluzzi and Ryan were able to sit
down and have a chat with Mrs. Fratollini.
She had heard him pull up, she told them, heard him get out and open the trunk of the car. Then she thought she heard her
husband say something, to which she replied, “What?”
but got no response. As she was in the middle of a TV show, she sat
down again on the couch. After fifteen minutes, when Mr. Fratollini had still not entered the house, she went outside to see what he was up to, and
that’s when she
discovered her husband flopped inside the trunk, “and all that blood!”
At that
point, Mrs. Fratollini lost her
control and wept.
While trying to calm her down, Cavaluzzi got a call on his mobile. The story
he got over the phone was that an evening paperboy
had seen a body on the ground in a pool of blood, and had raced home
to promptly tell his mother, who in turn had promptly
called the police. And would you believe it? What seemed to be yet another chillingly similar shooting had taken place just a few miles from this one!
And so they all exited the scene in the order they had come, proceeding to 74 Elmore Lane. Cavaluzzi, in the unmarked car that
Ryan was driving, had the instinct to call the Motor Vehicle Department to get an ID that matched that address: John Fox. He went into emergency mode and grabbed for his cell phone.
“Hello, Chief Peterson, have all
units proceed to the house of Rafael Puente…look up his address…and all the other officers involved in the Felson incident…send all available units to those residences!”
But by the time two of the available units got to where
Puente lived, he and his dog had been dead for at least an hour. Orders had by then already been given to cover the homes of the
remaining three officers involved in Jay Felson’s death, who were so far spared a similar fate. A dragnet
that encircled all six sites was implemented by both the Bruntfield police and the
New Jersey State Troopers, with barricades set up on all the exit roads out of town. Everyone was stopped,
told to get out, and interrogated. Bruntfield units patrolling the side streets
hauled in any suspicious
person they saw, but all of them were eventually
released after irrefutably ruling them out
as
suspects.
It seemed that the perpetrator had already fled, staying one step
ahead of his pursuers.
Murders are the stuff of local news. Nobody could have been more
exuberant about
such events than the press
and TV people who regularly
make a living from the dark side of human behavior. They swarmed over the story like ants on a ham sandwich dropped in the woods. As expected, it was received as a gem of a headline, not only by the Bruntfield
Daily, but also by
regional papers such as the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. And this time,
because of the extraordinary act of pulling off three similar murders within a few hours—the victims, cops, no less—the story even made it to the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington
Post.
Tessa sat and stared at the newspaper in front of her, silent
tears streaming down her cheeks. Ten minutes perhaps, she sat
there quietly anguished
before she dumped her face onto the
newspaper and began to sob. Her worst fears had materialized. She lifted her face up a few inches,
opened the paper, and wrapped it around her head insulating
herself like an ostrich submerging
its head in the sand, bawling away. She felt someone touching her hands and looked up with black newsprint smudged all over her face to see Ed, Penny, and Casey standing
before her with
equally mournful faces.
Meanwhile, a hundred miles to the
west, at the same time that Tessa was crying into her newspaper, Bruntfield was
practically on lockdown. A shelter-in-place order was in effect, meaning in
simple terms, stay where you are and don’t leave until further notice.
Checkpoints prevented people from entering or leaving the areas of the crime
scenes, as well as the neighborhoods of the three other ex-officers, even
though those men were apparently being protectively sequestered by the
authorities in undisclosed locations. Schools were closed, not only in
Bruntfield, but in the nearby townships as well. People locked their doors and
windows and slept with the lights on. The police, through the news anchors of
local television, advised everyone to keep all garage doors and sheds closed
and secured. Gun owners had their weapons locked and loaded. Law enforcement
officers were everywhere to be seen.
