I owe Mark Colella an apology. Colella, as you probably recall, is the guy that Lou Deluca accused of beating his granddaughter. I said something in a post yesterday about Deluca sending two thugs to beat up one thug, thus implicitly buying Deluca’s story that Colella really was beating his wife.
I don’t know what came over me. Now, my normal rule of thumb is to assume that everything a Republican politician says is a lie. The burden of proof rests with them, so to speak, on every utterance that comes from their mouths.
For some reason, which is certainly mystifying in retrospect, I bought so much of Deluca’s story as alleged that he had told the cops about the “abuse” and they refused to take action unless the granddaughter complained. Today, we learn in the Courant that even that part of Deluca’s story was a lie.
Waterbury’s police chief Wednesday contradicted state Senate Minority Leader Louis S. DeLuca’s explanation of why he asked an alleged mob associate to intervene in what DeLuca has called an abusive relationship involving his granddaughter.
DeLuca said last week that he sought help from a businessman with alleged mob affiliations only after local police told him they could do nothing about his family’s repeated complaints that his granddaughter was the victim of domestic abuse at the hands of her husband.
But on Wednesday, Waterbury Police Chief Neil O’Leary said in an interview that DeLuca and other family members had come to him only with informal concerns about the granddaughter’s involvement with an older man – and none of them ever said “that she was being abused.”
The chief went on to say that the police don’t require a complaint from the victim to investigate possible abuse. Now, I believe the chief on this one because:
1. There is only a rebuttable presumption that he is a Republican, whereas we know that Deluca is a Republican, and
2. There’s no question that if that’s the policy, which clearly seems to be the case, that he would have followed up for a guy as powerful as Deluca.
So I apologize to Colella, but most of all I apologize to my readers. I’ve let you down. I took the uncorroborated word of a Republican. Oh, I know this is sort of a minor matter in the larger picture, but it was a shameful act. It will never happen again.
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