Record shows chaos of shooting
Transcript released in Providence case

By Jamal E. Watson, Globe Staff, 11/11/2000

PROVIDENCE - As the chaos of the police shooting subsided, several Providence police officers gathered around what they thought was a mortally wounded suspect, who lay face up and bleeding in the parking lot of an all-night diner.

To a few of them, the young man looked somewhat familiar. But it took several minutes to confirm what one officer, to her horror, slowly realized: The suspect was Sergeant Cornel Young Jr., a comrade about to die from friendly fire.

''I started to yell at the firefighters who were now walking up to the body, `It's a cop! It's a cop! Hurry up! It's one of us!''' Sergeant Tabitha Glavin told a grand jury investigating Young's death. ''And then I knelt down and I started yelling at Cornel: `Don't give up, fight!' I kept yelling that.''

Glavin's dramatic account became public yesterday, when a Providence judge released transcripts of testimony from grand jury hearings probing Young's death.

Young, 29, who had three years on the job and was the son of the department's highest-ranking black officer, was killed when two patrolmen mistook him for an armed suspect as he tried to break up a fight. He was off duty at the time.

By shedding light on the proceedings, release of the testimony helped satisfy civil-rights activists who were frustrated by the grand jury's refusal to indict Officers Carlos A. Saraiva and Michael Solitro III. The activists had pressured Attorney General Sheldon Whitehouse to make the proceedings public in order to guarantee a fair and thorough investigation.

Young, the son of Police Major Cornel Young Sr., had stopped by Fidas diner for a late-night snack, then drew his weapon and ran outside when the fight broke out.

He was holding a pistol-wielding suspect, Aldrin Diaz, 33, at gunpoint when Saraiva and Solitro confronted him. The officers, who had been dispatched to the restaurant, apparently opened fire when Young did not heed their demands to drop his gun.

The shooting rocked the city, aggravating deep divisions between the police and the black community. Protests spread across Providence for days, and activists stormed City Hall. The uproar forced the US Department of Justice to investigate whether racial profiling played a role in Young's death.

The special grand jury heard from more than 50 witnesses over a two-month period behind closed doors. Though the panel cleared Solitro and Saraiva of criminal responsibility, several high-profile attorneys representing Leisa Young, the dead officer's mother, have said they will file a $20 million civil lawsuit against the city and the officers.

Whitehouse initially tried to block the attorneys from getting the 1,700-page transcript, maintaining that grand-jury proceedings are secret. Later, when it became clear that Leisa Young's lawyers would get to see them, Whitehouse told a judge that the public should be allowed to read them, too, and posted them on his office's official Web site.

In a statement released yesterday, Whitehouse said he wanted the transcripts opened to keep the lawyers from ''an undignified and perhaps misleading release of selected testimony.''

''I want the public to have the opportunity to view all of the testimony, all at once,'' Whitehouse said in the statement. ''The dignity of those proceedings is preserved this way, and the people of Rhode Island can reach their own conclusions about the thoroughness and fairness of the investigation.''

The eyewitness testimony in the transcript doesn't seem to significantly alter the basic account of what unfolded on a dark West Providence street early Jan. 28.

The night he died, Young was wearing jeans, a sweatshirt, a baseball cap, and a coat. He did not display his badge when he stopped Diaz. Solitro and Saraiva said Young ignored their commands and did not identify himself as a police officer.

But one witness, Stephanie Zoglio - who admitted she had been involved in the parking lot fight - testified that Young burst out of the restaurant shouting: ''Police! Freeze!''

She told the grand jury that she heard Young repeat the words several times before Solitro and Saraiva arrived and chaos erupted. However, when questioned closely, Zoglio testified that she had been drinking and smoking marijuana that night.

Another witness, Christa Calder, testified that she initially thought that Young was fighting in the parking lot. She said that she never heard him say he was a police officer.

''I thought that [Young] was with the girls that had started the fight, because they had yelled to `get their [guns]' and then all of a sudden [he] appeared with the gun,'' Calder testified. ''He was holding the gun kind of funny. It was, like, sideways. I've never seen a cop pull his gun like that.''

It was Calder's .22 caliber pistol that Diaz, her boyfriend, allegedly waved out the window of her Camaro, an act that police say prompted Young to stop him at gunpoint.

After the shooting, Diaz was arrested and charged with felony murder for his role in Young's death. The charge was later dropped, but Diaz was found to have violated his parole and was sent to prison for 20 years.

Dr. Elizabeth Laposata, Rhode Island's chief medical examiner, testified that Young was shot twice, once in the head and once in the chest. Laposata said that toxicology tests showed no trace of drugs or alcohol in Young's body.

Though the shooting will remain classified as an accident, the civil suit by Young's mother will seek to prove that inadequate training and racial profiling led Saraiva and Solitro to fire on their comrade.

''The Providence Police Department has to come to terms with the fact that police officers have to understand the dangers of racial stereotyping,'' said Barry Scheck, who is representing Leisa Young, along with Johnnie Cochran, Peter Neufield, and Providence lawyer Robert Mann. ''The city of Providence has not dealt with this issue at all, and they, like the rest of the country, have to be held accountable.''

But Joseph F. Penza, who represents the officers, said that racial profiling had nothing to do with the shooting. Solitro, who is white, and Saraiva, who has been described as Latino, ''saw a gentleman who was black, but their main focus was on the gun,'' Penza said. ''We will never know why Cornel Young didn't drop the gun, but that is the only reason why they fired shots.''

Several calls to Major Young and Leisa Young were not returned yesterday.

But some in Providence said they hoped the city could move past the tragic incident.

''It's taken a toll on us as a city,'' said Amanda Schmidt, 39. ''This was a horrible accident, but we have to move on. Nothing in the world is going to bring back Cornel Young.''

John Ellement, Francie Latour, and Joanna Weiss of the Globe Staff contributed to this report.

This story ran on page B01 of the Boston Globe on 11/11/2000.