CHESHIRE - Police have identified two parolees with long criminal histories as the suspects in a horrific home invasion in which a mother and her two daughters died Monday.
Joshua Komisarjevsky, 26, of 840 North Brooksvale Road, Cheshire, and Steven Hayes, 44, of 5-H Horne Ave., Winsted, each face a multitude of charges, including first-degree aggravated sexual assault and first-degree kidnapping. State police said the investigation is continuing and that more charges will be filed.
Both suspects were on parole after serving time in prison for past burglaries. They were arraigned on the new charges Tuesday in Superior Court in Meriden, with bail for each man set at $15 million.
Town police officers who raced to Dr. William A. Petit Jr.'s home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive Monday morning said they saw the two men running from the burning house and attempting to escape in a car owned by the victims. After ramming three police cruisers, the suspects were arrested at gunpoint.
Inside the home, Petit, a prominent doctor and father of two who had been brutally beaten about his head and left tied up in the basement, was able to hop up the cellar stairs as the flames spread. He was the only one to make it out alive.
As he struggled, flames roared around his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, a popular nurse at Cheshire Academy, who was unconscious and possibly already dead on the first floor.
The charred body of his oldest daughter, Hayley, 17, a recent graduate of Miss Porter's School in Farmington, was found at the top of the main stairs.
In a second-floor bedroom down the hall, the youngest in the family, Michaela, 11, was found tied to a bed. Her body was too badly burned to tell how she died.
The office of the chief state medical examiner will perform autopsies on the three victims today.
Police were dispatched to the house about 9:20 a.m. after Jennifer Hawke-Petit was forced by one of the suspects to drive to a local bank branch to get money. Hawke-Petit was able to alert a teller that her family was being held hostage because the suspect who went with her waited outside. At the bank, Hawke-Petit withdrew $15,000 from a bank account. The money was later found in the family vehicle the suspects used to flee.
As police were closing in on the Deaconwood neighborhood of half-million-dollar homes, the two men jumped in the family's Chrysler Pacifica SUV parked in the driveway. The fleeing suspects rammed a police cruiser that tried to cut them off in front of the house and continued west on Sorghum toward a police roadblock about a block away.
Sgt. Chris Cote and Officer Tom Wright, both members of the department's SWAT team, had left their cars at the roadblock and were headed toward the house armed with semiautomatic rifles. Officer Jeff Sutherland was positioned at the roadblock.
Instead of slowing for the roadblock, the fleeing suspects gunned the SUV's engine and raced toward Sutherland. The SUV slammed into two police cruisers in the center of the roadblock. Their front ends mangled, the police cars spun apart from each other on impact. Sutherland escaped injury. The Pacifica, front end damaged and airbags deployed, rolled 30 feet before stopping against a neighbor's manicured lawn.
Officers, guns drawn, swarmed the vehicle and pulled the suspects out.
Komisarjevsky is charged with one count each of first-degree assault, first-degree aggravated sexual assault, first-degree burglary, first-degree arson, conspiracy to commit arson in the first-degree, first-degree robbery and risk of injury to a minor, plus two counts of first-degree larceny and four counts of first-degree kidnapping.
Komisarjevsky in 2002 was sentenced to three years in prison and six years of special parole by a Bristol judge after pleading guilty to 11 counts of second-degree burglary. Authorities involved in the case said he would wear military night vision goggles and break into homes to steal electronic items while his victims slept.
The judge, James Bentivegna, called Komisarjevsky a "cold, calculating predator." The prosecutor in the case, Ronald Dearstyne, said at the time that Komisarjevsky began robbing homes when he was 14 in Cheshire. Dearstyne told the judge that Komisarjevsky would carry a military backpack, equipped with items including a knife, to rip through window screens.
Komisarjevsky had told police he burglarized homes to pay for a drug habit. But the prosecutor and judge said his actions were more calculating than those of a junkie needing cash for a fix. At his sentencing, Komisarjevsky apologized to his victims.
Komisarjevsky's home on North Brooksvale Road is about two miles from the Petit's home. A man at the North Brooksvale address gave the Courant a written statement Tuesday morning but would not answer questions. The statement read: "This is an absolute tragedy. Our deepest sympathy goes out to the Petit family and all those whose lives they touched. We cannot understand what would have made something like this happen. There is nothing else we can say at this time."
Hayes is charged with one count each of first-degree aggravated sexual assault, first-degree burglary, first-degree arson, conspiracy to commit arson in the first-degree, first-degree robbery and risk of injury to a minor, plus two counts of first-degree larceny and four counts of first-degree kidnapping.
He has a long history of burglary and larceny convictions going back 25 years. Hayes accumulated 23 disciplinary actions while in prison dating back to the 1980s, authorities said in court today.
Investigators found a car - believed to belong to one of the suspects - in the Quarry Village subdivision about 1-1/2 miles away from the Petits'.
On Monday, investigators had not determined what brought the men to the Petits' home.
William Petit was listed in serious but stable condition at St. Mary's Hospital in Waterbury Monday night.
Neighbor Kim Ferraiolo said she had just spoken to William Petit about 7:30 p.m. Sunday and nothing seemed amiss. "They were the nicest people, just a great family," said Ferraiolo, who moved next door about three years ago.
Ferraiolo said a neighbor alerted her to the fire Monday morning and she tried to call Petit at work, but was told he never showed. She said Petit likes to tend to his flower beds and "has a great sense of humor."
Ferraiolo, like other stunned neighbors, tried to understand why the Petits' home was picked. "It's just hard to understand how someone could do something like that."
Investigators believe the two men barged into the home sometime after 3 a.m. and held family members hostage for hours, sources close to the case said. Shortly after businesses opened at 9 a.m., one of the men took Jennifer Hawke-Petit to the Bank of America branch office in Maplecroft Plaza several miles away and forced her to withdraw money.
Shortly after they returned to the house - as police were racing to the scene - the suspects set fire to the residence and fled.
State arson investigators were at the badly burned house late Monday searching for possible accelerants. Detectives were expected to enter the house later in the evening.
Cheshire Town Manager Michael Milone praised police and firefighters for risking their lives responding to a dangerous crime scene.
Neighbors said that shortly after the fire was extinguished, a firefighter climbed a ladder to enter a second-floor bedroom window in search of possible victims and then quickly backed out. Police SWAT team members then moved in and secured the home, witnesses said.
Chronology: Home Invasion
Here is the sequence of events, according to sources and police statements.
1. Early morning. Two intruders enter family home at 300 Sorghum Mill Drive, Cheshire.
2 . About 9 a.m. one intruder forces Jennifer Hawke-Petit to drive to the Bank of America on Route 10. She alerts a bank employee that her family is being held hostage. Minutes later, Hawke-Petit and the intruder arrive back at the house.
3. Cheshire police officers arrive and find the home in flames. Fleeing suspects crash the family's vehicle into an officer's cruiser, then into two other Cheshire cruisers, before being taken into custody a block away. At some point, a badly beaten William Petit stumbles from the burning home and makes it to a neighbor's home. Emergency personnel find bodies of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and daughters Hayley and Michaela.
