Michelle Garvey/ Contributed photo


By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo
Investigations Editor
Michelle Garvey of New London disappeared in June 1982, just days before her 15th birthday, and police believe she ran away from home.
A month later, her remains were found in an open field in Houston.
But it would be three decades before police positively matched the body found in Texas to Michelle, whose death was ruled a homicide.
Finding out Michelle’s fate was a collaboration of the Connecticut State Police Missing Persons Unit and authorities in Texas. Detectives with the unit got a DNA sample from Michelle’s family to enter into a national database. Texas officials had exhumed the body to get DNA samples. In January, state police announced a match had been made.
The case is just one of the success stories for the Missing Persons Unit. Two years ago, state police indicated they were revamping the unit to include more investigators, with major crime detectives from multiple districts.

Read more here.

(Photo by Peter Hvizdak — New Haven Register) Linda Piotrowicz of East Hartford stands near Burnside Avenue and Larrabee Street on Jan. 25 by the crosswalk in front of East Hartford Middle School where her life partner, William Laramie, was killed by a drunken driver while he was riding his bike home from work in September 2011.        

By Michelle Tuccitto Sullo
and Charlotte Adinolfi
Most impaired drivers responsible for killing either themselves or others in Connecticut collisions had no prior record for drunken driving in the past decade, which advocates say is simply an indication that the typical violator drives drunk many times before being caught.
In 2010, 119 people died in alcohol-impaired driving fatalities in Connecticut, compared with 94 people in 2011 and 85 people in 2012, for a total of 298 deaths over three years, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The state Department of Transportation provided the New Haven Register with a listing of fatal accidents in which a party under the influence of a substance was a contributing factor for 2010, 2011 and 2012 — about 250 collisions. Some crashes resulted in the deaths of multiple individuals.

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