Houle said he was going to remedy the situation.
Then in July, Houle suspended two officers, Captain Walter Warot and Lieutenant Timothy Paul, who was involved in the Mailhot case, on charges of violation of department operational policies and insubordination for their part in an investigation of another officer.
The two officers were investigating Patrolman Steven Fairley, who was the officer who actually found Stacie Goulet’s remains in the landfill, for allegedly tampering with a police department computer to embarrass another officer. Those charges were later dismissed in superior court.
Then, of course, on January 14, 2008, Christine Dumont’s fifty-two-year-old brother hanged himself with his shirt in a jail cell at the Woonsocket police station forty-five minutes after he was arrested and incarcerated for breaking and entering his landlord’s apartment. Robert Dumont lived across the hall from his landlord, who was on vacation at the time. After his arrest police brought Dumont back to the police station and put him in a holding cell.
Dumont’s sister Madeline Desrochers, who has had her problems with the Woonsocket police in the past because of the way they initially handled Christine’s disappearance, said her brother would still be alive if the officers on duty had been doing their jobs and watching him.
Deputy Police Chief Richard Dubois defended his officers, saying they followed departmental procedures regarding prisoners. According to Dubois, police use surveillance cameras to monitor prisoners in holding cells. In addition, he said, an officer is required to check on prisoners every hour.
In this case, at around 10:45 P.M., about forty-five minutes after Dumont was placed in the cell, the dispatcher who was monitoring his cell noticed that he seemed to be pressed up against the bars of the cell door—something that happens regularly, Dubois said, because prisoners grab hold of the bars, then yell or spit.
But several minutes later the dispatcher observed that Dumont’s body was still in the same position, so an officer went to check on him and discovered that he had used his shirt to hang himself. Efforts to revive Dumont failed.
The RISP and the internal affairs department of the WPD are investigating Dumont’s death.
“I just can’t believe this,” Madeline Desrochers told the local paper. “What is going on with this police department? He would still be alive if they were doing their jobs.”
Dumont was the third person to die in the custody of Woonsocket police since 2003.
In 2006, forty-one-year-old Timothy Picard died after a Woonsocket police officer trying to subdue him during a struggle in the booking area shot him twice with a Taser. Police had arrested Picard on domestic assault charges. Emergency personnel took Picard to the Landmark Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
In September 2003, forty-six-year-old Janet Barr, of Woonsocket, choked on a concealed object she tried to swallow while she was being held at the Woonsocket police station on drug charges.
According to the attorney general’s office, she choked while she was involved in a “brief but violent confrontation” with Woonsocket officers. She lapsed into a coma, was taken to Landmark Medical Center and died five days later. After the medical examiner ruled that Barr died of “cardio respiratory collapse due to acute cocaine intoxication,” the attorney general’s office cleared the Woonsocket Police Department of any wrongdoing in her death.
After Robert Dumont’s death in January, things just seemed to get worse for the beleaguered department. Later that month Woonsocket police officer Marsha Bish, the ex-wife of the chief Michael Houle, resigned from the force. She had been under suspension for a number of issues. Bish was one of the officers who received a two-month suspension without pay stemming from the incident involving the prisoner who smuggled the gun into a jail cell.
And the police union alleged that Houle violated departmental procedures by helping Bish get onto the force in 2004. According to news reports at the time, Houle once investigated Bish, then a police dispatcher in Franklin, Massachusetts, for using her position there to have the Woonsocket police serve papers on an exboyfriend. Houle, who was a lieutenant at the time, said the Woonsocket police should not have been involved. Then, in 2004, Houle and Bish were married and she was hired by Woonsocket police.
At the end of December 2007, Local 404 of the police union had given Houle a vote of no confidence. The union president explained that police officers were concerned that Houle was not communicating with his command staff, made rash decisions and showed favoritism to certain officers.
At the beginning of February 2008, approximately twenty-five Woonsocket police officers and the head of their union attended a meeting of the Woonsocket City Council to express their frustration at the way the department was being run and to ask when a review of the department would take place. The union wanted the city to bring in outside experts to review the way the department was being managed.
The union head told council members that after Robert Dumont hanged himself in his jail cell, the chief did not sit down with department heads to talk about what had happened and to review the videotape of the incident.
Susan Menard, the city’s mayor, said union members were airing their complaints because they had not yet been able to reach an agreement on a new contract. She said the union didn’t like the chief because he wouldn’t let them run the department.
At the end of February 2008, the union head notified the mayor that in the summer of 2004, Chief Houle and Deputy Chief Richard Dubois changed test results in order to change the rankings of police recruits. He said the tests were normally sent out to the exam company to be corrected. According to the allegations, the chief and deputy chief helped change test scores so that Marsha Bish, then Houle’s wife, could get hired by the Woonsocket Police Department.
An internal investigation was launched into the allegations of wrongdoing by Houle and Dubois. Then just four days after the allegations were made public, Houle announced his retirement.
In a letter sent to the mayor, he wrote:
My credibility as Chief and attempts to make positive changes in the Police Department continue to be stonewalled and challenged. This is due to misleading and false information being provided to the media and lack of support by various people who have chosen to become involved and interfere in the day to day operations of the Woonsocket Police Department. I can no longer assume the position of Chief of Police without considering the affects [sic] this negative publicity has made on my family.
The mayor had promoted Houle to chief in 2005. Initially Menard said that Deputy Chief Dubois, who still faced the allegations he helped changed the recruits’ test scores, would run the day-to-day operations until further notice.
Although the union head said he felt bad the chief was leaving under a cloud of suspicion, he believed it was the best thing for the department.
“Since he came in, we have had nothing but controversy—the evidence room, the exam scam… . Morale has been down for a while. We look forward to somebody with a fresh new face,” Sergeant John Scully of the Woonsocket police union told the local paper.
But then Dubois also submitted his letter of resignation, writing, [T]he last two years have proven to be one struggle after another. Whether it was dealing with certain members of the City Council trying to have me removed from my position, or the constant interference from union officials in almost everything the Chief and I tried to do, the job I once loved became a constant strain. Dubois added that the job had affected his health.
So in the beginning of March 2008, the mayor handed the reigns of the Woonsocket Police Department to state police lieutenant Eric Croce until the city hired a new chief. After the announcement, rank and file Woonsocket police officers said they were relieved the chief and deputy chief were gone, because their mismanagement had negatively affected the department.
Two days after making that announcement, Mayor Menard said she was retiring from public service, as of June 15, 2008, so she could spend time with her famil
y in Utah. However, she also acknowledged that the turmoil in the city contributed to her decision. She said one of her priorities before she left office would be to hire a new police chief.
Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.
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Notes
1 www.woonsocket.org
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