The Day I Shut Down Cottage Grove Road

A January sunset over Silver Sands State Park. Snowy months are my personal favorites for beach play.

When I think of close-to-home states, like Connecticut and New Jersey, they're so familiar, so colored by my innumerable experiences, it's hard to see them for the destinations they really are. I took this photo back in January at a beach I'd never been to despite having lived within close road-tripping distance for four years.

In hindsight, the mini road trip I took from NY to CT before the pandemic swooped in and changed travel as we knew it, was foreshadowing the foreseeable future of travel. Our current situation lends itself to exploring what’s nearby and discovering places that were either on the back burner or not on your radar at all because Italy and Australia were at the forefront of our collective minds.

Ironically, the new reality of travel inspires what I encourage in the undertones and overtones of nearly everything I write…that there is so much more than you ever expected to see in the places you never thought to look. Whether close to home or further from it, venturing into your own backyard can be as boundless or bounded an experience as you make it.

I think about driving to Iowa constantly. It feels exotic to me. So do places like Bali and the Maldives, but since so many others have gone and reported back, they somehow feel more familiar than foreign. And Iowa – a state where no one I know has ever been, feels even more mystifying. I can hardly wait to experience everything that destination deemed "a fly-over state" has to offer. A state like Iowa is often overlooked by default by the far coasts and perhaps even its neighboring states. Just as I naturally overlook states like New Jersey and Connecticut because I'm so accustomed to them. How easily I forget that they can still surprise me.

When I think of Connecticut as a whole, my views of it are clouded by memories deeply rooted in my college years. And up until now, the stories I've shared have been exclusively those I've experienced on the 13 major road trips I've taken and been taken by (so far) throughout my life. But since I've got close-to-home destinations on my mind, it's sparked some excitement to share an out-of-the-ordinary story from an otherwise ordinary Connecticut day. So here's one of my classics. 

It was the somethingth of October 2011 at the University of Hartford – time to shop for Halloween costumes. My best friend and I piled in my newly leased and totally unreliable Volkswagen Jetta and headed off campus for a pop-up costume store that made its appearance once a year, just like everything else Halloween. What a thrill it was to drive off campus – even for the most mundane of errands. It was a freedom not every student had, which only added to the cool factor we all felt while doing it. If you were headed for the exit, you had places to go, people to see, and there was clearly more to your life than what went on within the confines of campus living. It was fun to venture out for a bit, and it was also a healthy reminder that a whole world existed outside our 40-thousand-dollar-a-year never-never land accommodations.

So my best gal and I headed north for Cottage Grove Road…the main vein between West Hartford and Bloomfield, Connecticut. The road had two lanes running east and two lanes running west with a grassy divider separating both sides, as most big roads have.

We picked out our over-priced, polyester ensembles relatively quickly, and even though this was nearly ten years ago, I can still recall being taken back by how many children were running around the store with parents hoarding heaps of costumes for their kids to try on. Somehow it had escaped my mind that this was a holiday predominantly celebrated by children…just more evidence of how deeply I was sucked into the half-mile land of make-believe that I never wanted to leave.

That place, although infested with new kids, new Halloween costumes, new names on the local dive bars, is one I can go back to, but I can never really return to. Just like lands of make-believe before it, this place and time now exist only in my mind.

It's silly and illogical, but every time I drive back to take a swig of nostalgia, it's almost as though I'm expecting to watch a reel of myself and my friends being how we were…hearing Pete tell a joke that always made me laugh to tears, having Val bring home our precious, dirt-cheap, boxed blush wine, seeing that spiky-haired chick I never really knew rollerblading around the village…almost like a motion picture of my experiences. But it's not like popping in a DVD and getting the same story, same ending every time you play it. This is more like going back to the sand dunes you once left footprints in and expecting to see them just as they were, but they exist only in my memories now. And as cool as the idea of revisiting the experience is, I'm too old for that kind of ruckus now anyway. Those days are best relived in the farthest reaches of my mind.

But getting back to one of those screenplays I love to replay, Manda and I were on our way back to campus, cruising carefree along Cottage Grove Road, passing the Bloom Hill Farm on our right, when suddenly, the chill vibe between us changed drastically. I don't know what exactly made me detect this shift – perhaps a sudden silence between us? But I glanced over at my usually tan friend, and she was as white as a ghost. She looked like she saw a ghost. Her stare was blank but frightened, and she was frozen in my passenger seat. "Manda, are you ok??" I asked with grave concern. She swallowed and paused for a moment as if remembering how to speak or being abruptly yanked back to reality.

"I––I don't even want to say what I think I just saw…" she said without blinking, without even looking at me. Naturally, I exclaimed, "Oh my god, what did you see?! What happened?!" I put my hand on her arm and gave her my full attention as I stopped at the light to bring us back to home base on Bloomfield Road. "Lauren…I just saw––I think I just saw a man with a gun to his head. He was kneeling down in the field in front of two other men dressed in long black trench coats standing side-by-side, and they were––they were holding a gun to his head!" It felt like something detonated in my chest. My eyes bugged out of my head, my mouth flung wide open, "WHAT?! Are you––what?!? Should we––should we pop a u-ey and check??" "Yea, we have to," she said without skipping a beat.

Because of the double lanes heading in both directions on Cottage Grove Road and the multiple lights situated at intersections throughout it, circling the block was relatively easy. So when the light turned green, I made a hard left to wrap back around and catch a glimpse of whatever the heck Grand Theft Auto scenario my friend thought she saw, on the now far left side of the road. I stayed in the left lane, driving somewhat slowly and meticulously checking the road and checking the land on the left, checking the road and checking the land on the left.

It took about 60 seconds––which may as well have been an eternity––for us to get back to the general vicinity of the scene. But suddenly, the barn-like ice cream shop at the top of the farm's hill appeared on the left, and in front of it lay a wide-open, green-grass field of farm lined with traditional white ranch-style fencing. And then, exactly as she'd described it, and straight out of a Boondock Saints execution scene, I saw two men dressed in long, black trenchcoats wearing dark sunglasses and holding at least one long gun, possibly with a silencer on it, to the head of a man kneeling down in the wide-open field, in broad daylight.

"See! See! Holy ****!" All kinds of profanities were exclaimed, all kinds of nausea bubbled up in our cauldron bellies, "What do we? What the ****?!?! No, it can't be…what did we just see???" Without wasting another minute, I called 911 with Bluetooth. I don't recall whether it was something Manda and I agreed to do or not, but I instinctively made another u-turn at the very next light to get a better look passing the scene on the right-hand side. I stayed safely in the left lane as we circled back around again to confirm what we'd just seen. Yup. There was no mistaking it. A man was on his knees in an open field, waiting for his assassins to pull the trigger. To-the-floor trench coats were flapping in the breeze, and a foot-long gun was aimed at the forehead of an innocent or perhaps guilty man. Were his soon-to-be killers vigilante hitmen? Were they unlawful heroes? Or were they cold-blooded criminals out to kill with purpose and conviction? Either way, I had a lump in my throat, or was it perhaps my lunch lumping up in my throat?

"911 what's your emergency?" a female voice asked quickly. I wasn't sure if word vomit or actual vomit was going to fly out of my mouth after seeing what I'd just seen even closer, "Hi…um…hi…ok, we're on Cottage Grove Road passing that big…uh…farm…that big farm…and there's…well, there are these guys holding a gun to another guy's head. He's kneeling down, looks like he's got his hands behind his back and…they've got A GUN TO HIS HEAD!"

The dispatcher asked me a series of very detailed questions: specific descriptions of the men, how far they were from the road, had I heard any gunshots. That question made Manda and I look at each other kind of puzzled. I could tell we were thinking the same thing…why hadn't we heard a gunshot yet? How was that guy still kneeling there? We were on our third lap now, and he was still kneeling there with a gun to his head. Would he be lying flat by our next lap? They must be letting him speak his last words. Maybe they're reminding him of the pain he's caused and why they must execute him. My mind was in full-on movie mode mixed with a very real reality that was so terrifying, it had me sweating bullets, while fighting the urge to purge, while trying to be as articulate as humanly possible over the phone to potentially save a man's life. Ah, and the silencer. We won't hear a shot ring out from all the way over there…not with a silencer like that on the gat.

The dispatcher assured us that the police were on their way and told us to head to a safe location to wait for them to call us back. Suddenly I felt even sicker. Was it the waiting…the anticipation of awful news…this innate fear that somehow we were doing something wrong and going to get in trouble? Why were we the first ones to call this in? Didn't anyone else see what we were seeing? I'm not sure, but the next thing I knew, I was circling just once more to head back to the safe parking lot of the Halloween store. This time, the crime scene was back on our left, across the grassy divider and the other side of the road, but the scene itself had changed drastically since our last lap. As we approached, so did a fleet of cop cars and SWAT trucks, instantly barricading the other side of the road! 

Officers in bulletproof vests armed with massive machine guns burst from the trucks, sprinting single-file along the fence to the farm. At least six men jumped down to lay flat on their bellies, hidden in the tall grasses with guns aimed at the perps through the fence's openings. More and more cars carrying more and more cops were piling up. No sirens, just flashing lights and gleaming badges. State Troopers, Hartford Police, men in helmets armed with gear that said "SWAT" were all over the road and exterior of the farm, rendering the north side of Cottage Grove Road completely impassible. And the criminals still stood holding a gun to a man's head in the open field in broad daylight on a Thursday afternoon in October.

"Holy mother of ****––look at––we did that! And they got here so fast!" My call to the dispatcher lasted less than five minutes, but Hartford PD was locked, loaded, and ready to deploy many, many men at a moment's notice. In retrospect, it makes even more sense after watching the Hartford episode of Gangland, in recent years, and nearly a decade after our time there. I didn't know until watching, that Hartford was actually in the midst of an all-out gang war during our free-for-all time spent frolicking the city's main and less main streets at all hours of the day and night.

But those 20-something cops came because of the call made by two soon-to-be 21-year-olds. And once the scene in my rearview mirror was just a mishmash of flashing lights and civilian cars piling up behind them, we felt even more freaked out. Maybe because we couldn't see what was happening anymore and we now had to wait someplace where we wouldn't have an actual visual, only the horrific manifestations of our imaginations.

I was sure we were bound to barf in the parking lot. We called our then boyfriends to tell them what was going on. I don't think they believed us right away. I think they annoyed us right away, and we regretted calling. Who'll really sympathize and match my level of intensity right now? I needed a level of freakout that matched my own! And who better to call than Mom and Dad for that? But no, they'd probably exceed my level of freakout and really freak out. Better not to call them till we know what's what.

There's no telling how long we sat waiting for the cops to call us back. Was it a few minutes, an hour? Realistically it was probably 20 minutes or so. But I was feeling so sick, I was certain I'd never eat or drink anything ever again. Manda kept telling me she had a bad feeling. I kept telling her I was dying. Our worries and awful hunches ricocheted throughout the car like gruesome farts mixed with bad breath and old chicken.

Finally, my phone rang. I grabbed for it the way a blind bear with no thumbs would try to grab a flipping, flopping fish fresh out of the river. I dropped it, probably cracked it a little. Manda hit the "answer call" button on my stereo. My car has Bluetooth, duh. Our interiors were in turmoil, but Manda kept her external a lot cooler, calmer, and more collected than I did. "Hello, Ms. DeFazio?" "Hi, yes. Hi." "Afternoon, miss. This is Sergeant Macklin of The Connecticut State Police. I'm just calling to let you know that the situation you called in has been de-escalated…it turns out, those men you saw were actually shooting a movie, and there was no cause for concern. They've been reprimanded for not having the permit required to shoot a movie in public…but you girls did the right thing in calling it in because we had no record of anything like that being shot there." Again my jaw dropped. Probably in a semi-smile, semi-are-you-effin-kidding-me face. I felt like a little kid who ran and told the whole neighborhood that Bigfoot was in her backyard, and when everyone was gathered 'round to capture the beast, he turned out to be her dad who hadn't shaved in a while. Womp womp womp.

"Oh…well…oh. Ok, thank you so much for calling and letting us know. We're so sorry to have wasted everyone's time!" "Not at all, girls. Thanks for doing the right thing and calling it in."

We hung up with the Sergeant of the State Police of the State of Connecticut…not the interim assistant manager of the Baskin & Robbins that's closing…the Sergeant of the State Police, who'd likely just called off his best men…the ones they really only bring out for the big stuff, but then again in a city like Hartford, the "big stuff" is probably the usual stuff. 

"I can't believe we…wow." I wish I could remember how long it took for us to laugh about it. I remember not knowing how to feel. But an empty space for feelings was quickly filled with the shame of how we wasted everyone's time and turned our stomachs inside out, and it was all…a hoax? Well, not a hoax, but a fake act with toy guns that looked real as hell from the road. And then shame was quickly replaced by self-defensive outrage, "Well, how stupid are those guys…I mean, come on, how could you not get a permit and think it's ok to shoot a movie where it looks like you're shooting a dude???" "YEA! What the ****!"

And then that overreaction was replaced with, "Manda…we just shut down Cottage Grove Road...like...completely shut it down." The cops were all gone once we passed the spot again. "But where were the cameras?! That's what I want to know! Where were their cameramen? I saw NO ONE, but those three goons!" 

True to form, Manda and I got back to campus and couldn't wait to tell everyone our great big, insane, once-in-a-lifetime, almost-had-to-see-it-to-believe-it adventure. And by dinnertime, true to form, everyone was sick of hearing us tell the story. That's probably when we decided to call our parents and text our friends from back home.

I'd love to hear this story from the side of the men shooting the movie. I'd love to see the movie they were shooting! I wonder if there are any shots that include Cottage Grove Road. If they do, there is a 99.89% chance my gunmetal gray, ever-unreliable Volkswagen Jetta would be captured creeping in slow motion in the background. Maybe it's better left as a mystery. Either way, this one goes down as one of my most epic college stories with a whoopee cushion ending.