While questions surround a minor car accident Hartford’s police chief had in his city-owned SUV, including discrepancies in the sequence of events, city officials are standing behind him.
Mayor Luke Bronin and Thea Montanez, the city’s chief operating officer and Police Chief Jason Thody’s direct supervisor, have defended the police chief’s handling of the May incident at the town line of Chester and Haddam, which remains under investigation by state police and the city’s auditors. Bronin and Montanez say they are comfortable with several differences the Hartford Courant noted between the investigative report Hartford police released Friday and their own conversations with Thody.
Namely, the report does not describe the events in chronological order and fails to mention that Thody stopped at his second home in Haddam after the accident, something he told Montanez later that day.
“The investigators included the facts that they deemed relevant in the way they deem appropriate,” Bronin said. “This was not an incident that, based on the information anybody had or that I had, requires more than basic fact finding and reporting of the damage, the minor damage, to a city vehicle.”
Bronin said he’s requested to listen to the 911 call from an alleged witness of the May 31 incident on Route 154 in Middlesex County, which Thody has stated was caused by distracted driving. Bronin said he and Montanez plan to decide whether a reprimand is warranted after state police and the city’s Internal Audit Department release their findings on the matter.
“Based on the facts that I have and what I know at this point, I believe this to be a very minor incident that does not give me significant concern,” Bronin said.
Thody has not responded to requests for comment.
Grazed a guardrail
In the Hartford police report, Thody states that he was traveling north shortly after leaving a marina in Chester when his phone fell from his console onto the passenger seat. When he reached for it, he struck a guardrail with the passenger side of his take-home vehicle, a 2019 Chevrolet Tahoe.
Thody did not stop, according to his statement in Deputy Police Chief Rafael Medina III’s report on the incident. He said he continued driving until it was safe to assess the damage to his car, which the city was invoiced for Tuesday for about $3,300.
Then, he continued driving to Hartford, where there was a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest that Thody was monitoring remotely, as protests on police accountability and racial justice were escalating in other areas of the state.
What Medina’s report does not mention is that — as Thody told Montanez — he’d been on his way to his second home in Haddam when he struck the guardrail, not driving directly to Hartford. The chief’s rental in Hartford is his primary address, Montanez says, though property records in Haddam list his mailing address as that Plains Road home.
Montanez said Thody stated he got ready at his house after spending part of the day at a marina.
From his Haddam home, Thody drove to Hartford and then turned back around because the protest had ended, according to Montanez.
He then drove to the scene of the incident, took photos of the guardrail that show paint transfer from his SUV, and then returned to his property in Haddam, Montanez said.
Thody’s statement in Medina’s report lists the facts in a different order, and does not include the stop at his Haddam property.
He wrote, “I proceeded until it was safe to stop and check the vehicle for damage. The vehicle sustained minor, cosmetic damage to the passenger side and remained fully operational. The guardrail had paint transfer but was not damaged. I was not injured and was the only one in the vehicle at the time. Given that there was no damage to the guardrail, and minor damage to the vehicle (I assessed was under $1,000.00), I prioritized my response back to Hartford for the protests over waiting a State Police response.”
In the following lines, he states that he notified Montanez, took photographs of the damage, and notified his chief of staff, Brian Bowsza, to prepare the paperwork to document and repair the damage.
Montanez said she doesn’t see a discrepancy there.
“The way that report is written, I don’t read it as it was written in sequential order,” she said Tuesday. “I read it as it was a recap of what had happened.”
According to her, Thody also said he was less than two miles from his house, so he drove straight there to assess the damage.
“He figured since he was in such close proximity to his destination that he would wait til he got there,” Montanez said, adding that traffic and the lack of a breakdown lane were also factors.
However, in Medina’s police report, Thody states the accident was just north of a road called Island View Terrace, which is located near the Haddam-Chester town line. The street is 5 miles from his Plains Road house.
Thody also states in the report that a lack of damage to the guardrail was one of his deciding factors in driving to Hartford rather than reporting the incident to state police.
However, he told Montanez he did not inspect the guardrail for more than an hour after the accident, until after he had returned from Hartford.
Montanez defended this too, saying the chief made a reasonable conclusion that was later backed up by photos.
“He could tell as he was driving the vehicle that it was a scratch, it was insignificant,” Montanez said Thody told her. “Had it been anything more than that, he felt he would have felt the impact of something more significant.”
$3,324 in damage
There were also initial questions about the level of damage to the SUV and how much it would cost to fix, as the city hadn’t received a bill as of Friday, when Deputy Chief Rafael Medina III submitted his report on the incident to Montanez and news of the scrape-up was broken by a Hartford blogger.
Montanez says she’s learned it isn’t unusual for invoices to take several weeks from the shop, Friendly Auto Body & Repair, which Hartford police uses because it also has a state contract. However, she told city council members Tuesday that the invoice for $3,324 “seems high”.
Montanez is now reviewing the city’s use of that auto shop.
“That seems high based on the limited amount of damage, and so as part of my review of auto repair expenses, we will be using the photos from this case to get other assessments of repair costs,” she said.
The final bill for the damage was three times more than Thody estimated In the Hartford police report on the incident. The chief reportedly assessed the damage at less than $1,000 and stated that amount placed it under a state threshold for reporting traffic accidents to law enforcement.
Now that they have received a bill for more than $1,000, the city will also determine if it needs to file paperwork with the state, Bronin said.
Asked Tuesday whether Bronin would have called state police in the same situation, he said he believes he would have done the same thing as Thody and notified only the city.
“I wish that he would not have been driving while distracted but I have to confess I have been guilty of distracted driving as have most people I know in 2020.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated how Thea Montanez described a Hartford police report. Montanez said, “I don’t read it as it was written in sequential order.”
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.
