"I heard a noise in the conference room that sounded like a fight going on," Providence Detective Timothy McGann testifies at a hearing during which a judge denies bail for Esteban Carpio.

01:29 AM EDT on Friday, September 16, 2005

BY GREGORY SMITH
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE -- "Help, Timmy. Help. He's gonna kill me!"

As police Detective Timothy McGann remembered it in Superior Court yesterday, Detective James L. Allen screamed those words just before Esteban Carpio shot him to death at police headquarters on April 17.

"Detective Allen is screaming for help" from behind a locked door in a conference room in the third-floor detectives bureau, McGann related on the witness stand. "Help, Timmy. Help. He's gonna kill me.

"I slammed my shoulder into the door and the door wouldn't move."

McGann made a couple of running starts from across the hallway and unsuccessfully tried to batter the door in, both with his shoulder and by kicking it.

McGann said he heard a gunshot and drew his own pistol.

"Jimmy, Jimmy," he said he called out. "There was silence."

Spectators sat rapt as the crewcut and pokerfaced McGann recalled in vivid detail the events of the overnight hours of April 16-17, when Carpio was brought to headquarters for questioning in a stabbing, and allegedly wrested away Allen's gun and killed him with it.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl

Esteban Carpio accused of killing Providence Detective Sgt. James L. Allen in April, appears at his bail hearing in Superior Court, Providence, yesterday.

The occasion was a 2-hour, 45-minute bail hearing for Carpio on four charges, including murder. At the conclusion, Judge William A. Dimitri pronounced Carpio a flight risk and refused him bail.

Also testifying was correctional officer Michael Palumbo, who said he overheard Carpio telling another inmate at the Adult Correctional Institutions on Aug. 2 that he shot Allen and stabbed Madeline Gatta, 83.

McGann, a 12-year member of the police force, described how Carpio was brought into headquarters for an interview regarding the stabbing and wounding of Gatta.

Although Carpio was not under arrest, he was handcuffed as "a precaution," because his girlfriend, Samein Phin, told the police that "he acts a little weird sometimes," McGann testified. Carpio's friends and family have said that he is mentally ill, hears voices and acts paranoid.

The suspect's handcuffs were removed, McGann said, and he was placed in a chair at the head of the table in the conference room. After a while the two detectives assigned to the stabbing investigation came in and sat down, flanking Carpio. They were Allen, 50, an affable veteran detective renowned for his memory, and Detective Emilio Matos Jr.

While waiting for them, McGann offered, and Carpio accepted, a couple of cups of water.

Matos soon left the room to do paperwork that Allen said was necessary for the investigation, and, although his shift was over, McGann decided to sit in and help with what seemed to be an important case.

He said that while chatting with Carpio earlier, the suspect lied to him twice, telling the detective that his name was Barcelino Carr and that he had never been arrested.

During a brief lull in the interview, which occurred at about midnight, Carpio turned to McGann and asked for a third cup of water. Allen put down his pen and leaned back in his chair. Taking that as agreement, McGann said he got up and went to the kitchen in the hall to fetch the water.

As he returned to the room with the cup, he said, "I heard a noise in the conference room that sounded like a fight going on." "I heard loud bangings . . . furniture being knocked over," the sound of bodies hitting the wall. The noise went on for 10 to 20 seconds.

McGann tried to open the door and rush in, but was caught off-guard when the door did not open. He bumped into it hard.

He could hear Allen's fearful voice but could not get through the door, which had been locked from the inside. He heard a throaty sound that seemed to come from Allen: "Aaaaah," a gunshot, and then, he recalled, "the struggle ceases."

McGann said he backtracked into the kitchen and took cover for a brief time.

"My first thought was he [Carpio] was coming out of the room [with a gun]. Because there was nowhere else for him to go," he said.

More shots were heard, about 30 to 45 seconds after the initial shot, he said.

"Everyone was yelling for Jimmy but there was no answer," he remembered.

When officers finally broke into the room with a battering ram, they found Allen lying on his back, partially covered with posters pulled from the walls. His overturned coffee cup and notepad were on the table.

"He was gray," McGann said. "I'm not a medical expert, but he didn't look good."

Carpio had shot out a window in an adjoining office and escaped. After a period of confusion, the police caught him downtown.

According to Palumbo, the correctional officer, Carpio gave his version of some of what happened that night as he talked through his cell door with another inmate two cells away.

Carpio asked his listener: Do you know who I am? Have you seen the news? "I'm the guy who killed the cop."

During an uninterrupted narrative that echoed in the prison corridor, Palumbo said, Carpio told the inmate that he did not know why he did it, but that he "stabbed the old lady." "He said he couldn't go through with it. . . . he jetted" home, had something to eat and fell asleep.

When he awoke he saw the police outside. He figured that someone must have seen the van he was driving and they tracked him down.

The correctional officer's account then jumped to the sequence of events in the conference room. He quoted Carpio as saying that he got up to throw away his water cup and Allen told him not to move.

"He [Allen] bugged out" about his getting up, Carpio related. "I grabbed his gun and I blazed him." When he saw that he had shot Allen in the head, he said he panicked.

Carpio then said that "he blew out the window with a burner [gun]." He dropped 30 feet to the ground from the office window, according to the police. Carpio told his fellow inmate, according to Palumbo, that he broke both ankles and nearly broke his back in making the drop.

Carpio, wearing a baggy orange jump suit over a white T-shirt, shuffled into the courtroom yesterday in white-soled tennis shoes, manacled hand and foot. It was his first actual visit to court for his own case in 4 1/2 months.

For security reasons, and because his health declined when he virtually stopped eating, he had participated in previous court sessions by videoconference from the ACI.

Unlike his first two times in court, he did not wear a perforated white spit shield that attracted national news coverage. He had been forced to wear the shield, according to the authorities, because he allegedly had spit at correctional officers and claimed that he had a communicable disease.

Carpio, 27, of 79 Nashua St., Providence, was a virtual bystander yesterday, sitting quietly between his two lawyers, Robert Sheketoff and Kirsten M. Wenge. Other than giving his name and date of birth to a court clerk in a soft voice, he was not called on to speak.

Returning to court after lunch, however, Carpio softly called to his mother, Yvonne Carpio, who was sitting in the spectator gallery. "I love you, Mom."

Carpio's mother sat with Carpio's girlfriend, Phin, Carpio's aunt, and two men, one of whom was Carpio's uncle.

Other observers in the audience of about 40 included Allen's widow Marguerite; his father Lloyd, a retired Providence police captain; and about 10 police officers.

Carpio asked for bail on two charges related to Allen's death and two charges related to Gatta's stabbing. He also is charged with assaulting three correctional officers at the ACI, in a case that is being handled separately.

Sheketoff asked Dimitri to use his discretion and grant bail because Carpio has "no real criminal record to speak of," strong support from his girlfriend, who is the mother of their son, and his family, and has deep roots in Boston. The judge could set bail conditions, he said, such as a requirement that Carpio wear an electronic monitoring bracelet.

Assistant Attorney General Paul F. Daly cited a list of countervailing factors and declared, "If an armed police officer inside a police station filled with other armed officers is not safe" from Carpio, then the community cannot be safe.

Dimitri recapped the evidence at length and then said, "The proof of guilt is evident and the presumption great. . . . Bail is denied."