The Rising

by Ryan D'Agostino

  THE COURT: Let me just ask you this. Based on what you know now, I need to know your answer. Knowing what your responsibilities are going to be, that you have to base your decision—because of your oath, you have to base your decision on all the evidence, and you have to follow the instructions of the court, can you assure us that you will be faithful to your oath? Or can you not so assure us? You tell me.

  THE JUROR: I could be faithful to my oath.

  THE COURT: All right.

  Blue thinks he has him.

  THE JUROR: Yes, I can do that.

  THE COURT: And you could assure us?

  THE JUROR: To the best of my ability.

  Blue does a double-take.

  THE COURT: You say “to the best of your ability”?

  THE JUROR: That’s what I’m doubtful about.

  THE COURT: You are doubtful about your ability?

  THE JUROR: Yes, to focus on the right things in this trial.

  Blue hears this, looks up at the lawyers, and snaps out one last question:

  THE COURT: Are there any follow-up questions?

  You can hear it in his voice: We’re done here.

  Mr. Lively is gone.

  Blue arguably had no choice but to dismiss the juror from his service, but the fact is, there is now one less juror available in the case of State of Connecticut v. Hayes. Every case starts with twelve jurors and four alternates. There are now only three alternates, and it’s only lunchtime on the second day. If Bill Petit is worried about this, or frustrated by this Mr. Lively for interrupting the delicate procession of a case that Bill would like to see resolved swiftly and without undue drama, he doesn’t show it. As is his custom, Bill does not show anything at all.

  —

  Each morning, whoever is going to court that day meets at the house on Red Stone Hill, and whoever’s going to court usually means the whole crew. Bill, of course. Dick and Marybelle Hawke. Cindy. Barbara and Bill Sr. Glenn. Hanna and usually Dennis, when he can get off work. Aunt Bev and Uncle Larry. They pile into a couple of cars and drive the forty minutes south to New Haven. No one says much on the ride. Bill’s stomach turns the whole way, every day. He wants none of this. But he goes for the girls. There is guilt in why he goes. He goes because he believes his presence will help bring the killers to justice, and that is the one, last thing he can do for his girls, the girls he could not save. He knows it’s irrational to think that way, but that’s the way he thinks.

  The state allows the family to park in a special lot directly across Church Street from the courthouse. When they arrive, Bill gets out of the comfort of the car and steps into the bracing downtown air, like walking out of the bathroom after a shower, the warm cloud of humidity dissipating around you. The reporters are always huddled out in front of the courthouse, and they click on their recorders and take the caps off their pens. The cameramen heave cameras onto their shoulders. Bill and his family wade through, saying little more than Good morning.

  Andrew Chapman comes along once in a while, if he doesn’t have school. His sister Abby, though, does not. She is just starting her sophomore year at the University of Vermont, on the cold shore of Lake Champlain, far away from Plainville, far away from Cheshire, from the Petit Family Foundation and its road races and golf tournaments, far from Uncle Billy’s sad room upstairs in her grandparents’ house, from this suffocating courtroom. At school she has met nice kids from all over the country. She is joining a sorority, making good friends. But she doesn’t tell anybody. Doesn’t tell a single person of the horrors that have befallen her family. This makes her feel like a fraud, because there’s this huge thing that nobody knows about her, but that’s the point: She doesn’t want anybody to know. She rarely goes home to Plainville on school breaks. With her new friends, she goes anywhere but home. If she doesn’t acknowledge the past, Abby tells herself, it won’t seem real. So she makes a new life, or imagines one.

  One day, Abby is sitting in the student center with some friends. There’s a television on, tuned to one of the news channels, and she looks up and sees her Uncle Billy’s face. He’s walking out of the courthouse, her grandparents and her mom by his side. Abby looks away, pretends not to notice.

  —

  Bill arrives one morning wearing his dress-up version of golf clothes, or his golf-club version of dress clothes: tan slacks, gray blazer, black mock turtleneck with a tiny white Nike swoosh on the collar—a pro-shop shirt. Outside in the hall, in the line of people waiting to get in, he spots two of Jen’s old friends from Cheshire. They are both named Deb, and Bill stops to hug them both at once.

  “D squared,” he says quietly, with a weak smile.

  Inside, he takes his seat on the harsh wooden bench, shifting every few minutes because these things kill your back. His stare is blank, his unlined face frozen.

  Captain Robert Vignola, a twenty-three-year veteran of the Cheshire Police Department with a bullet head and metal shavings for eyes, sits in the chair on the witness stand. He fires a glare at Steven Hayes that could knock down a brick wall.

  Nicholson, the prosecutor, has a mustache and broad shoulders and looks like a detective from the Chicago PD, and together he and Vignola are a couple of bulls charging through what exactly happened on Sorghum Mill Drive on the morning of July 23, 2007. Nicholson projects an aerial photo of the Petits’ old neighborhood.

  Bill’s leg is bouncing fast.

  Vignola tells the court that he was at his desk at Cheshire police headquarters when he got a call from dispatch at 9:27 reporting a possible hostage situation at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive. Mary Lyons, at the bank, had looked out her office window and had seen the car as it pulled away, and she relayed the plate number to the 911 operator. Vignola ran the plates on the car, the Chrysler Pacifica. The car was in Jennifer’s name, matched to the address. He and another detective jumped into an unmarked car and sped to the neighborhood, with another two-man unit following behind them. He radioed a fifth officer, who was off-duty working a second job, doing construction. That officer ran to his car, left the construction site, and sped toward Sorghum Mill. He was on pace to get there first, and he radioed Vignola and requested permission to do a drive-by of the house for a visual, which Vignola granted. Vignola also ordered marked cruisers to close Sorghum Mill Drive to traffic at either end.

  About ten minutes after receiving the initial call, Vignola himself arrived and did a drive-by of the house. He saw the Pacifica already back in the driveway, along with Hayley’s old Mercedes. He drove slowly, saw no lights or activity in the windows. He circled the block and parked so that he had a line of sight to the house.

  Over the radio, a police dispatcher told him they had located the home phone number for the house, plus cell-phone numbers, but Vignola ordered that no one call the house just yet. He knew that in the 911 call, the bank manager had made it clear that according to the wife, the intruders said they would kill the hostages if the police showed up. You don’t risk that, not yet. Right now, what he needed to do was establish a perimeter around the house. He had no idea how many intruders were inside—the wife had said two, but that wasn’t certain enough to act on. He was ordering men to the woods behind the house, and there were now two vehicles within sight of the house, and backup on the way.

  Protocol.

  On the aerial photograph projected in the courtroom, Vignola uses a laser pointer to show the jury where he was positioning his men. For each new post, Nicholson adds a small red arrow. Bill follows this closely, looking up at the screen each time Vignola points to a new location, as if hearing it for the first time.

  Next, Nicholson asks for state’s exhibit 15a, and a marshal dims the lights. Bill shifts in his seat as he looks at a picture of his former house. It’s a beautiful house, just as he remembers it: the cream-colored clapboard, hunter-green shutters, the lush lawn he labored over, orange flowers by the road, tall trees all around. The American dream, pretty much. But if you look closely at this particular photograph, you can see black smud
ges above the front door and the upstairs windows, from the smoke.

  Sitting in his unmarked car, Vignola did not take his eyes off the house. Suddenly he heard on the radio that there was a man in a neighbor’s driveway saying, “Dave, Dave, Dave.” Vignola stiffened, asked for more information, but before it came, he saw a suspect running from the Petits’ house.

  “Tell us what you saw, Captain,” Nicholson says.

  “Mr. Komisarjevsky”—Vignola later learned that this was Joshua Komisarjevsky, the younger of the two intruders—“ran to the car with a bag in his hand, placed the bag in the car, quickly reversed, very, very quickly—that’s when another officer [who had a view of the back door] stated that there was movement from the suspects. Moments later, Mr. Komisarjevsky was in front, Mr. Hayes was behind him running to the vehicle. Mr. Komisarjevsky came around, went into the driver’s side, Mr. Hayes went into the passenger’s side.”

  Vignola flipped the sirens on, yanked his car into gear, and flew up to the mouth of Bill’s driveway. Jennifer’s Pacifica, now driven by Komisarjevsky, screamed down the driveway about a million miles an hour. “Hang on,” Vignola told his partner. The Pacifica slammed into Vignola’s car. He jumped out and pointed his 40mm semiautomatic pistol at the Pacifica, shouting, “Police!” Another detective closed in, pointing a tactical rifle at the vehicle, and a third approached the passenger side, shouting orders. But the Pacifica peeled around in a 180—almost hitting the officer with the rifle—ran over a stone wall and a swath of Michaela’s four-o’clocks at the bottom of the driveway, and started speeding down Sorghum Mill Drive. It disappeared around a corner and there was a loud crash.

  Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes had driven head-on into the two parked police cruisers that had set up a roadblock, then rolled to a stop.

  Bill’s eyes are closed, and he rubs the spot on his forehead where the Louisville Slugger first met with his skull about seven hours before the crash Captain Vignola has just described.

  With the suspects out of view, Vignola says he turned his attention now to clearing the house. Nicholson asks, “Did something catch your attention concerning the Petit residence?”

  Bill opens his eyes.

  “We saw a large plume of smoke coming from the back side of the residence.”

  —

  The first thing Ullmann, the public defender, said in his opening statement on the first day of the trial was that his client did it all. Pretty much everything the state says he did, he did. Broke in. Watched his friend beat Dr. Petit with a bat. Tied up the girls. Bought gasoline. Drove Mrs. Petit to the bank. Brought her back and raped her. Strangled her. Ran from a burning house in which he knew at least two living people were restrained, unable to escape.

  His plan, he told the jury, was to ask them to consider the troubled life his client lived before that night, and to spare his life.

  Now, two days later, Ullmann stands up to cross-examine Captain Vignola. The jurors fix their eyes on the lawyer. Each juror has been given a W.B. Mason spiral pad to take notes in, and a few open their notebooks to a fresh page, their pens ready. A middle-aged woman in the second row of the jury box slides her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  “Good morning, Captain Vignola.”

  “Good morning,” Vignola says to Ullmann. Clipped, official.

  Ullmann asks Vignola when, exactly, on the morning of July 23, 2007, he knew various bits of information: the license-plate number of Jennifer Petit’s Chrysler Pacifica, the telephone number to the Petit residence, the family’s cell-phone numbers. He is smooth, Ullmann—a veteran. The tilt of his voice is almost conversational, his pitch low and casual. Vignola says he found out all of this as he and the other officers set up a perimeter around the house.

  “No one made an attempt to call?” Ullmann asks. A tad sharper now. Challenging.

  “No, they asked me if I wanted to make that call [to the Petit house], and I advised them that I was going to wait a couple of minutes for a better inner perimeter, more people, for the safety rescue,” Vignola says.

  Bill’s eyes bounce back and forth between the lawyer and the witness with each question.

  Ullmann raises his eyebrows. “Almost twenty minutes altogether where no phone call was ever made…from any police officer into the home?”

  Now Vignola narrows his eyes at Ullmann, a look of either confusion about what the lawyer is implying or anger because he knows precisely what this lawyer is implying.

  In the press section of the public seating, a seasoned on-air reporter for one of the New Haven stations whispers to herself, “They’re putting the cops on trial.”

  “That is correct,” Vignola hisses to Ullmann.

  Ullmann plows ahead, asking Vignola why no one approached the residence. He projects onto the overhead screen his own aerial photograph of the neighborhood. He asks Vignola where every officer was, and with each answer, Ullmann marks an X on the map. Not only does each car get an X, but each officer in each car—he is trying to crowd the map with as many X’s as he can, to show the jury just how many Cheshire police officers were set up around 300 Sorghum Mill Drive in the thirty-some minutes between the 911 call and the time the suspects fled.

  Next he projects a log of the radio calls made between Vignola, headquarters, and the various officers who were on the scene—the time, in hours, minutes, and seconds, that each call came in, along with a summary of the call. Ullmann cranes his neck up at the screen, peering at it through his glasses, referring to a hard copy in his hands.

  The lawyer’s implication is clear to everyone in the room, not least to Captain Vignola: that if his team had stormed the house, they could have stopped Ullmann’s client, Steven Hayes, from raping Jennifer Hawke-Petit and could have stopped the men from burning Hayley and Michaela Petit alive, but instead they just set up their perimeter, allowing all of that to happen. What this has to do with his defense of Hayes is unclear.

  When Judge Blue asks the state whether it wants to follow up after Ullmann’s cross-examination, Nicholson jumps up and asks Vignola to once again explain that everything he did was protocol, by the book.

  “And did you, sir, have any idea what Joshua Komisarjevsky or Steven Hayes were doing in that house?”

  “I had absolutely no idea that there was any act of violence,” Vignola says. “If we had any information whatsoever that there was violence, I would have been the first one through the door.”

  The volley goes back to Ullmann, who stands up to re-cross-examine Vignola. He tries a few paths to try to get Vignola to admit fault. Vignola shuts those down. Then Ullmann asks a question that’s really a statement, the kind of thing lawyers say to get on the record, knowing it will draw an objection: “The fact of the matter is that with all this setting up—and not excusing what happened in any way—it’s too late, correct?”

  Nicholson: “I’m going to object to this.”

  Judge Blue sustains the objection.

  Ullmann is already walking back toward his seat. “I have nothing further.”

  Bill’s head is bowed, his eyes closed.

  —

  They march on, these lawyers, clinically dissecting the night the world ended. Bill clenches his eyes and worries the scar on his forehead, now a faint plum-colored line. “As you were going up the stairway from the first floor, did you have any concerns for your safety, sir?” the prosecutor, Nicholson, asks. Rick Trocchi, a volunteer firefighter who owns pizzerias, is on the stand. Nicholson is asking him about when he first entered the Petit home, minutes after the two perpetrators fled. Bill sits hunched over, his arms hanging like thick anchor line on his lap. He knows what’s coming.

  “The stairs had been burned and they were structurally compromised, we could tell, especially as you went up, indicating that they were losing—they had lost some structural stability,” Trocchi says.

  “All right. And in addition to the stairs being compromised structurally, did you have—was there also some problems with the visibility go
ing up the stairs?”

  “Yeah, there was very little visibility and it was very hot up there as well. We could feel the heat through our gear. Our gear is very, very thick. If you could feel the heat, it’s very hot.”

  “Now, you indicated that you found a person at the top of the stairway leading up to the second floor, is that correct, sir?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nicholson handles a manila folder that he says contains two photographs and asks that the marshal pass them to the judge. Only the judge and jury will see these pictures—they won’t be displayed on the screen. They are photographs of the person Trocchi saw at the top of the stairs. The judge asks Nicholson to establish who it was.

  Nicholson nods. “Let me just ask you, sir,” he says to Trocchi. “At the time, did you know the identity of that person?”

  “No.”

  “Have you subsequently learned who that was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Hayley Petit.”

  “All right.”

  The marshal takes the folder from the judge and hands it to the first juror in the box, who opens it to see a color photograph of a seventeen-year-old girl lying facedown on what looks like the surface of Mars—black and gray soot, craters of burned carpet, ash all around her. Her head had landed just inside the door to the bathroom, across the hall from the only bedroom she ever knew. She wears a T-shirt and sweat shorts. Hayley Petit had escaped. After hours of struggle, she had actually escaped from the rope and nylon restraints around her wrists and ankles. She had fought and fought, covered in the gasoline that Steven Hayes had bought and poured on her, to free herself from captivity in her own room. But the trail of gas led right to her bed, and even all her stamina and all her strength and all her love were no match for a fire so hot that firefighter Trocchi could feel it through his gear a half hour later. She had used up everything.