School Cop Murdered

[TheeBadOne]

The call for help came from a Newark police officer moments before his death. Now CBS 2 has the exclusive police radio transmission from Monday’s fatal shooting.

“I wanna get some units? I got a large fight,” said Newark special police Officer Dwayne Reeves.

It was Monday afternoon, just minutes after summer school dismissed at Weequahic High School and Newark Special Police Officer Dwyane Reeves knew he needed backup.

“I’m on my way headed over there,” said Reeves.

Reeves, as heard on this radio transmission obtained by CBS 2, did request and receive additional police support, but called off the request once he had the two girls under control.

“You can, slow’ em down. I got two. Only two. I got my partner here now,” says Reeves.

Minutes later, Reeves and Special Officer Ahkia Scott, both cops hired by the school district hurried off again by themselves to break up another fight between students, down the block from the school.

A temporary memorial now marks that location where investigators say 26-year-old Omar Tindell shot and killed Reeves and shot Scott in the hand.

Tindell and alleged accomplice, 32-year-old Hassan Reeds, who plead not guilty during his court arraignment this morning, have both been charged with murder and unlawful weapons possession.

The radio transmission underscores just how unpredictable this kind of work can be. And Officer Reeves’ colleagues say it was not unusual for him and others to respond to an incident without backup.

However, Newark Police Director Anthony Ambrose who addressed a group of junior police cadets today says the department can’t let what happened to Officer Reeves discourage kids from aspiring to join law enforcement.

“You talk about an individual that shot Officer Reeves officer, the lifestyle he chose and they have to take an alternate route,” says Ambrose.

“He wouldn’t want us to give up. He would want us to fight more for him and what he stood for,” says Ambrose.

Officer Reeves funeral is scheduled for Tuesday.

web page with LINK to Officers last radio transmission
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Name game: officer slaying highlights hard job of ID'ing suspects


NEWARK, N.J. -- According to authorities, Omar Tindell was in Newark's South Ward last Monday afternoon, where he fatally shot one police officer and wounded another in a confrontation outside a high school.

Or, he was several miles away in Irvington, under home confinement after serving a prison term for vehicular homicide.

Or, the assailant was actually Deshawn Tutt, who used the name Omar Tindell among several other aliases.

The slaying of Officer Dwayne Reeves highlighted the challenges faced by police and prosecutors when they arrest suspects who routinely give false names, birth dates and other personal information. A computer database that employs numerous identifiers has made it easier to track suspects' histories, but authorities say the system is not foolproof.

"We in law enforcement are running up against it all the time, and it makes it a lot more difficult," said Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow. "We'll have the same defendant indicted in different cases under different names. They often do this in order to avoid law enforcement being able to pile up the charges and recognize the linkage."

The case of Tindell/Tutt offers a glimpse into the tangled web created by the multiple identities.

Essex County authorities announced the arrest of Omar Tindell on Monday, soon after the shootings of Reeves and partner Akia Scott in front of Weequahic High School. As more details emerged, there was confusion over whether it was actually Tindell who did the shooting, or whether it was Tutt using Tindell's name.

In the state Department of Corrections' online database, the suspect's picture appears along with an incarceration history that reveals that he spent from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2003 in prison for selling drugs near a school and for violating parole.

According to the database, he was sentenced in those crimes as Deshawn Tutt, with Omar Tindell listed as an alias along with Deshawn Mott, Deshon Tutt, Khalil Tutt and Sharod Tutt. Tindell/Tutt's age was given as 26 by authorities, but the DOC web site listed him as 24.

Further complicating matters, a second Omar Tindell had been sentenced, also in Essex County, to 51 months in prison in 2001 for vehicular homicide and was released earlier this year. It is unclear whether he and Tindell/Tutt knew each other.

In New Jersey, all suspects are fingerprinted upon arrest, and that information plus their name, date of birth and other identifying characteristics is entered into the nationwide National Crime Information Center computer system, said New Jersey State Police Lt. William Place, head of the unit that provides state law enforcement with access to the national and state databases.

If a suspect has a record here or elsewhere, the computer will provide an electronic rap sheet along with up to 99 aliases used by the suspect.

In addition, a 2003 New Jersey law requires anyone convicted of a felony _ from murder to assault _ to provide a DNA sample. Last year a Superior Court judge ruled criminals who complete their sentences can request that their DNA samples be destroyed.

Yet the process can be compromised if a suspect gives a false name and date of birth upon a first arrest. That name then becomes a permanent part of the record, along with an identification number assigned by the state Department of Corrections.

"I won't say that sometimes it's not a problem," said Place. "If someone's grabbed and uses your name and date of birth, that could be a problem for you. But police officers in 2005 are pretty savvy to pack these records with a lot of information."

Dow acknowledged that occasionally suspects using different identities have confused authorities, particularly in cases where defendants were arrested while on bail for separate crimes and gave different names. But she added that better intelligence-sharing and a more extensive computer database have limited those instances.

"Can people slip through the cracks? A little bit, but I think it's getting easier for us to detect these problems," she said.

Meanwhile, the mystery of the true identity of Tindell/Tutt took another turn this week when published reports pegged his actual name as Khalil Tutt.

"Sometimes we just don't know" a suspect's real name, said DOC spokeswoman Deirdre Fedkenheuer. But, she said, that may not necessarily be a hindrance to law enforcement.

"The name of the person really isn't that important," she said. "You want to assign a name to everybody, but you want to assign something that's not going to change. Your fingerprints are not going to change, and your DNA is not going to change."




web page

[BILLY D.]

JUST A TRITE QUESTION. WERE THOSE OFFICERS ARMED? OR IS THIS ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE LIBERAL DEALS WHERE WE MUST CIVILIZE SOCIETY THEREFORE WE DON'T NEED ARMED GUARDS AT OUR SCHOOLS.

CRIMINALS CAN HAVE GUNS BUT GOOD PEOPLE CAN'T.

[TheeBadOne]

They were armed