It’s been six months since a police officer fatally shot Anthony Jose “Chulo” Vega Cruz after a traffic stop in Wethersfield, Conn.
The 18-year-old’s father, Jose Vega, often walks by the site of the shooting on Wethersfield’s Silas Deane Highway. It’s hard not to — he lives just a block and a half away.
Vega moved his family to this suburb of Hartford nearly a year ago, dreaming of a better life for his son, starting with a neighborhood safer than the one they left behind in the city.
He remembers his first thought when he saw their modest, immaculate home. “This is a mansion,” Vega recalls in Spanish. “Thank God things have gone well.”
On April 20, Chulo went out to eat with his girlfriend. Not long after, his father heard the cacophony of police sirens.
“I thought something happened, but I didn’t pay that much attention,” Vega says in a new TV documentary, Collision Course. “Then about an hour and a half later, my daughter gave me the news.”
The half-hour film, produced by Connecticut Public in collaboration with Hartford filmmaker Pedro Bermudez, delves into the dynamics leading up to the police shooting and the lives that collided on that April day. Collision Course is now available for streaming on CPTV.org and multiple platforms.
