Boy had Surrendered. Police Caught Lying about Death
A state trooper came to his door, accompanied by some West Haven police. They told him his teenaged son had been hit by a car on I-95 and killed. "What happened?" Tyson asked. "We don't know what happened, sir," Tyson recalls the state trooper responding. "We're investigating. From what we know so far, we think he was with a group of kids who got in a fight with another group of kids. Your son tried to run across the highway and got hit." Tyson also recalls one of the West Haven officers speaking up: "That's right, sir. We don't know what happened. We're investigating." Tyson had to go to the hospital to identify the body of his teenage son, Gary Christopher Tyson. "And I made him a promise that night: 'I'm not going to stop until I find out what happened to you. We're going to find out the truth." The search continued the next morning, when Charles Tyson went to the West Haven police station. He says a lieutenant told him that Chris got in a fight with another kid and ran across the highway. The lieutenant also told him the department's dog handler was there. The dog handler? "They said, 'Yeah, but we didn't use the dog,'" says Tyson. In fact--we now know--the dog repeatedly bit Chris Tyson before he bolted into rush-hour traffic. Those first conversations, Charles Tyson says, set a tone for his interactions with West Haven police. "I always felt that the police was lying," he says bluntly. "Their story didn't make sense to us. We needed answers, and we weren't getting any." The police deny any responsibility for Chris Tyson's death. Now the family's search for the truth has led to federal court, where Charles Tyson is suing West Haven and three individual cops. New information emerging from the lawsuit shines a spotlight on the department's use of deadly force--and its use and abuse of the truth. Why did West Haven police call out a dog to track down an 18-year-old kid running away from a fistfight? Why did they unleash the dog--which constitutes deadly force under the law, just like firing a gun--once they had surrounded his hiding place? Why did this young man's life end so tragically? [more]