by Thomas MacMillan | Sep 25, 2012 5:00 pm

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Posted to: Legal Writes

To crack the case of a fatal collision on Front Street, Officer Rose Dell zeroed in on a teen who she said had a troubling habit—stealing minivans and flinging open the driver’s door into pedestrians as he drove by.

Police recently arrested that teen and charged him with manslaughter in the Jan. 15, 2011 death of 14-year-old Kyshant Moore Jr., who was struck by a car on Front Street while riding his bike.

At a 2 p.m. press conference on the third floor of police headquarters on Union Avenue, Police Chief Dean Esserman praised Dell and her colleagues for their work in solving the case. About 20 members of Kyshant’s family showed up to mark the closing of the case.

After the press conference, Dell (pictured) shared some of the details of how she helped track down the now 17-year-old teen who police say killed Kyshant.

Dell said she caught the teen by focusing on his tell-tale “modus operandi”—his habit of stealing cars and hitting people with his door.

A member of the police accident reconstruction team, Dell took over the case about a year ago. She solved it by comparing the Jan. 15 crime to other similar crimes, Dell said. She found a teen who had been involved in a number of crimes involving similar vehicles and a similar method of opening the driver’s-side door to hit pedestrians.

“It was a criminal escapade,” she said.

Three days after the deadly hit-and-run, police recovered the stolen minivan involved in the crime three blocks away from the crime scene, Dell said. Eight days after the crime, they arrested the teen—not for the Jan. 15, 2011 hit-and-run, but for a spree of robberies and hitting pedestrians while driving a different mini-van in Fair Haven.

In addition to isolating the modus operandi, Dell interviewed a number of witnesses and “people who had knowledge of the crime,” she said. The case was solved with the help of forensic expert Dr. Henry Lee, who worked with DNA samples taken from the recovered van.

The teen is currently in lock-up on unrelated charges stemming from a recent robbery, Dell said.

Making an arrest in the case after 20 months was the result of a “concerted effort to see it closed,” Dell said.

The victim’s mom, Lakhiya Williams (pictured), had been regularly attending police department meetings for the family members of homicide victims.

“Justice has been served,” Williams said at Tuesday’s press conference.

Tuesday’s was the second police press conference in less than 24 hours to mark the arrest of a months-old fatal crime. Police are making an effort to re-examine cold case murders as well as motor vehicle accidents. At both events, assistant police chiefs delivered a similar message. “If you commit a crime in the city of New Haven, there will be consequences,” said Assistant Chief Luiz Casanova (pictured). “We won’t stop.”