The 26-year-old accused of slaying Providence police Detective James L. Allen is ordered held without bail.

09:09 AM EDT on Tuesday, April 19, 2005

BY MARK ARSENAULT, AMANDA MILKOVITS and GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writers

PROVIDENCE -- The first glimpse of shooting suspect Esteban Carpio brought gasps.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Esteban Carpio, his upper face battered and his lower face shielded by a plastic mask that Corrections Department spokesman said he was wearing to preclude him from spitting, appears yesterday in District Court, Providence.

The 26-year-old, who stands accused of slaying Providence police Detective James L. Allen on Sunday, made his first court appearance yesterday with a plastic mask fastened over his nose and mouth. Above the mask, his eyes were swollen to slits and his stitched cuts appeared to ooze.

"Look what they did to him! Look what they did to him!" one woman screamed, leaping from her seat and flailing her arms.

Rows of Providence police officers, who filled the back of the courtroom, stood silent.

Carpio's mother, Yvonne, cried and shouted when sheriffs led Carpio, handcuffed and shackled, into District Court for arraignment.

"Stevie, tell them not guilty!" she cried out, using the English name for Esteban. Sheriffs hurried over and pulled her from her seat. "Steven, tell them police brutality!"

Sheriffs took Yvonne Carpio and other shouting relatives from the courtroom in the J. Joseph Garrahy Judicial Complex downtown.

The police say Carpio attacked Allen during questioning at police headquarters, stole Allen's pistol, shot him point-blank, then shot out a third-floor window, jumped 30 feet to the ground and fled into downtown, where he fought violently when officers grabbed him on Washington Street a short distance from the police station.

Carpio watched the scene in court through blackened eyes. His face bled under the top edge of the mask.

He nodded as Chief Judge Albert E. DeRobbio questioned him about his address and age. Carpio is facing a murder charge; no plea was entered.

DeRobbio ordered Carpio held without bail. As sheriffs led Carpio from the room, his girlfriend, Samein Phin, shouted out, "I love you, baby!"

"I love you too," Carpio called back, his voice muffled behind the mask and breaking with emotion.

It was the only thing he said in court.

JAMES ALLEN, 50, a 27-year veteran of the force and one of Providence's longest-serving officers, died early Sunday morning after being shot twice. He leaves a wife, Marguerite, and two teenage daughters. He was the son of retired Providence police Capt. Lloyd Allen.

His wake will be tomorrow at Nardolillo Funeral Home, in Cranston. Police Chief Dean M. Esserman yesterday invited the public "to grieve with us" at Allen's funeral, Thursday at his home parish, St. Thomas Church, in Providence.

"Please remember this man," Esserman said at a news conference. "We will."

The mood was subdued at police headquarters yesterday, as officers and civilian employees exchanged sad smiles and hugs, while citizens came and went from the building, getting copies of police reports and doing routine business.

Esserman canceled or curtailed some department activities for the week, such as firearms qualification tests and supervisor training for new sergeants.

Black bunting was draped on the station yesterday, and will remain up for one week. Officers wore black bands on their badges.

Flags flew at half-staff at the Public Safety Complex and at City Hall.

Detectives continued to work from the detective bureau, although they are avoiding the conference room where the killing occurred.

Allen had been investigating a stabbing last Saturday afternoon, in the North End of the city. An 84-year-old woman, Madeline Gatta, had been knifed in the back. A witness told the police that the man who stabbed her fled in a red van. The police traced the plate to a van rented by Carpio and his girlfriend.

Esserman was troubled by the viciousness of the stabbing and told the detectives to "pull out all the stops in this case," he said.

Allen's shift ended at 4 p.m., but he called Detective Lt. Hugh Clements, his boss, and asked for permission to return to duty.

Because of the chief's order to focus on the case, "I have to live with the fact that Detective Allen came back," Esserman said. "Went home, left, had dinner and . . . came back to work."

Detectives went to see Carpio and Phin, his 22-year-old girlfriend, who has said Carpio had been suffering from mental problems.

"I told them he hasn't slept in three or four days. I said he's not normal," Phin said yesterday in an interview.

She talked with investigators outside and then coaxed Carpio out of the house for them. "I said come out of the house. These are detectives and they want to talk to you about something that happened," she said. "I said just relax baby, just relax. I'll be by your side."

Carpio was calm when the police handcuffed him and took him to the station, Phin said.

Phin arrived at the station later. Detective Allen introduced himself to her, and Phin said she sat at a detective's desk while investigators questioned Carpio.

She heard the gunshots.

In court yesterday, Anthony Capraro, chief of the trial division of the state Public Defenders Office, stood with Carpio as Assistant Attorney General Paul Daly described the allegations against Carpio.

Allen was interviewing him in a conference room when Carpio suddenly attacked the detective, Daly said.

After shooting him twice and escaping through the window, Carpio was on the run for 45 minutes, he said. The police caught him by the downtown campus of Roger Williams University.

"The defendant then violently resisted arrest," Daly said.

Outside the courthouse, some of the family members strode away from the media. Others raged against the police, accusing them of brutality.

Capraro declined to comment on the case in detail. "This is an emotional case," he said. "Let the court system work."

Asked yesterday about Carpio's physical condition, Esserman reiterated the events of Sunday morning: "He jumped out of a third-story window and he struggled, in a tough struggle, to be apprehended on the ground. . . . The only information I have is that it was a tough fight. It was not easy . . . to actually get the handcuffs on this fellow."

Detective Maj. Stephen Campbell said yesterday that officers may have believed that Carpio was still armed when they captured him. The gun, Allen's police weapon, was found on the ground below the window from which Carpio was alleged to have jumped.

Four officers -- a Providence patrolman, an FBI agent and two state troopers -- were the first to apprehend Carpio.

Phin put her hands to her face in horror when she saw her boyfriend walk through the door with a mask and swollen eyes. She doesn't believe his jump from the police station window caused his facial injuries, she said.

"If he had fallen on his face, he would have laid right there," she said.

Neither Rhode Island Hospital nor the Department of Corrections would comment yesterday in detail about Carpio's medical condition, citing privacy laws.

Esserman said he was surprised that Carpio was in court in a mask.

Joy Fox, a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections, said the mask was a "spit shield," to prevent Carpio from spitting at officers and sheriffs as he was transported to court.

Fox said the mask is an infrequently used security measure, to prevent officers from coming in contact with a suspect's blood. Fox said rarely are inmates still bleeding when they are transported to court.

RANKING department officers declined to provide any more detail about the shooting, how Carpio and Allen had interacted, whether Carpio's questioning had been taped, or if Carpio had been advised of his rights.

The funeral should come first, Esserman said. "I'm not going to comment on that now," he said. "There is a time and a place . . . the time and place is after Detective Allen is buried."

However, Esserman and Major Campbell confirmed that Carpio is the suspect in the Gatta stabbing. He said Gatta was released from the hospital yesterday.

As to whether Carpio should have been handcuffed throughout his questioning, the chief said, "People come into this building and are brought into this building all the time and are interviewed without handcuffs. I'm not going to rush to judgment, and I would ask that you don't either."

Campbell said Allen was "a friendly, gentle and thoughtful person. . . . He had a wonderful personality. He was not intimidating to suspects or to people that came in." He let people perceive that their case was most important.

Campbell declined comment on whether Allen's affability might have made him seem vulnerable. But he did say, "Jimmy had 27 years of experience. He was a sharp detective who dealt with some of the most violent people in the state of Rhode Island. And he put them in prison for a long time. So Jimmy wasn't taken advantage of very easily. . . . He recognized the danger of the job."

ALLEN IS the third Providence police officer killed on the job since 1994. He is the second officer this year in the United States to be killed with his own service weapon, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, an Internet site that tallies the deaths each year of law enforcement officers who die in the line of duty or in job-related incidents.

The other shooting was in North Carolina, on Jan. 18, where an officer who made a traffic stop allegedly was overpowered by the driver and shot three times.

In another, well-publicized case, a suspect awaiting an appearance at Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta on March 11 allegedly attacked the lone deputy guarding him, and stole her service gun. He then shot and killed the judge scheduled to preside over his case, and killed a sheriff's deputy and later a federal immigration agent, during his flight.

Of 154 deaths listed on the site from last year, 7 involved officers taken down with their own weapons, including one overcome by a suspect within his own station.

According to published reports in Chicago newspapers, Detective William Rolniak Jr., a 14-year veteran of the Riverdale, Ill., Police Department, was escorting a suspect in an attempted murder to a holding cell on Feb. 4, 2004, when the unhandcuffed man grabbed the detective's gun from his holster, took him hostage, led him out of the station, and killed him a block away.

The suspect, whom the police said had been calm and cooperative prior to the incident, was later shot to death by the police after he aimed the gun at three officers trying to arrest him.

With reports from staff writers Liz Anderson and Cathleen F. Crowley.

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