Valor Awards
Meritorious Service
Officer Craig Lovett
Officer Sergio Alexandre
Elizabeth Local 4
Nailing a loose screw
An everyday call for a welfare check
turned into anything but when Elizabeth
Officers Craig Lovett and Sergio Alexandre
heard a “blood-curdling” scream com-
ing from the bottom floor of a two-story
apartment building on Jan. 9.
“We approached the door, and kids
behind the door started yelling to shoot
the door,” Alexandre recalled about what
he and his partner of three years encoun-
tered. “I thought, ‘Why should we shoot
the door?’ We thought it was a set-up, you
know an ambush.”
Lovett asked the children to unlock the
door. One of them said they couldn’t open
it. “I asked, ‘Why not?’” recalled Lovett, a
12-year veteran. “One of the children said
the door was screwed shut.”
While trying to figure out how to get the
situation unscrewed, the officers said they
heard something even more blood-cur-
dling. “One of the children screamed,
‘He’s killing my mom.’”
The perpetrator in this incident had
been coming to his former girlfriend’s
apartment since October, showing up
when she wasn’t home. He reportedly
looked at her computer, stalking her Face-
book page. He also admitted to detectives
that he had been going through her gar-
bage.
He had been in the apartment since 8
a.m. on Jan. 9. The 9-1-1 call came from
her sister at 1 p.m. thinking it was strange
that she didn’t show up for work. He had
been beating up one of his girlfriend’s
children, according to Lovett.
“We didn’t wait for approval. We know
what we needed to do and how to do it,”
Alexandre reported. “We are pretty knowl-
edgeable about the law, so we know when
you approach a situation how to get past
the nonsense and help the victims.”
They kicked in the door. The kids di-
rected the officers to the back bedroom,
where they saw the man straddling her
face with his arms around her throat. Her
arms were at her side and she looked to be
unconscious.
Lovett and Alexandre tackled the sus-
pect, put him in custody, passed him off
to backup that had arrived and moved to
helping the woman.
“That’s when we saw a knife sticking
out of her chest,” Lovett recalled. “The
blade of the knife. The handle had broken
off.”
Of all the domestics they handle, this
one surprisingly had a happy ending. The
officers were able to treat the woman un-
til paramedics arrived and took her to the
hospital. She was OK. The man pled out to
a 20-year sentence.
A week later, she brought her kids to
meet with Officers Alexandre and Lovett.
“Her daughter wanted to come and hug
us, but wasn’t sure she should,” Lovett
shared. “We’re like, ‘It’s all right. It’s cool.’
It’s cool to know that everybody is alright.
And the bad guy went to jail.”
It’s amazing to know how happy this
ending truly was and what Alexandre
and Lovett were celebrating at the Valor
Awards with a large contingent from Eliz-
abeth Local 4. An incident that was abso-
lutely crazy had a postscript that was even
more insane.
“Subsequent to all this, he admitted to
detectives that not only was he going to
kill her, he was going to kill her two chil-
dren that were in the house,” Lovett re-
vealed.
The officers credited the children for
acting so quickly, being right on the spot
to direct them to the suspect and to let
them know exactly what was going on.
As they recognized, that’s something you
don’t see every day. d
www.njcopsmagazine.com
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