Retired officer's life ended by fugitive

James Fisher | The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal

WILMINGTON, Del. — Charles Permint Jr. spent decades with the Philadelphia Police Department, working homicide cases and pursuing fugitives. After he died in a car crash Saturday, his widow, Ludmilla Permint, noted a bitter irony: The other vehicle in the fatal crash was being driven by a wanted man whom police were able to capture after the wreck.

"He stopped this one last criminal from doing God knows what," Ludmilla Permint said in an interview Monday. "And he did not suffer."

The crash that killed Charles Permint Jr. happened just before noon Saturday, according to a Delaware State Police account. A 26-year-old Lewes man, Rashai L. Harmon, 26, wanted by police on charges including terroristic threatening, criminal trespass and violation of probation was being pursued by police from Troop 7 in Lewes.

Delaware State Police Sgt. Richard Bratz said police had cut off pursuit before the crash because Harmon was driving "in an extremely reckless manner."

Harmon, driving west on Forest Road south of Harbeson, blew through a stop sign and hit a Kia Soul driven by Ludmilla Permint. Charles Permint Jr. and two other passengers, including their 3-year-old granddaughter, were in the car with her.

Ludmilla Permint said Monday she was bruised and sore from the crash, and their granddaughter had been more seriously hurt. Charles Permint was declared dead at Beebe Medical Center.

She and her husband, she said, had moved to Sussex County from Philadelphia after Charles Permint's retirement from the city's police force in 2001. They had met, she said, in the early 1980s; Charles was sent to investigate a murder that happened across the street from Ludmilla's home and interviewed everyone on the block, including her.

A Philadelphia Police Department spokesman said Permint joined the force in 1966, was promoted to the rank of detective in 1971, and retired in 2001 — a 35-year career on patrol and in detective work. In 1992, Permint and two other detectives used then-novel fingerprint tracing techniques to make a cold-case arrest in a murder from 1976.

"He was a fabulous man," Ludmilla Permint said of him. "Always fair, and always honest. He's the type of man you could trust with your life." Before joining the police, she said, her husband enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and opened a John's Bargainstore in Philadelphia — the first store in that chain owned by a black man, she said.

The couple moved to Delaware in part to be able to enroll their son, also named Charles, in the Sussex Consortium, a public school program for children with autism and disabilities, Ludmilla Permint said. They became active in the Lewes Church of Christ, which is where Charles Permint's funeral service is being planned, she said.

"He loved the Lord. He was faithful," Ludmilla Permint said. "I wish I had told him these things more... My nephews adored him. They always said, 'Uncle Charles, he has it all.'"

Bratz said Harmon tried to run away from the crash site, but quickly was taken into custody by responding troopers. He was charged with second-degree murder, driving under the influence, possession of heroin, marijuana, crack cocaine and powder cocaine with intent to deliver them, vehicular assault, resisting arrest and several other offenses, police said. He was held at Sussex Correctional Institution on $372,213 bail.