"ANOTHER COP GOES BAD"

"BADGE OF DISHONOR"

Officer Accused Of Murder Known For His Dark Side

April 13, 2004

By Christian M. Wade

   Town of Crawford – They called Kevin Griffin "pit bull."

   When Griffin was hired as a full-time police officer in this rural town on the Ulster County border in 1988, talk around town spread about a cop with a nasty temper and a habit of getting hostile if someone rubbed him the wrong way.

   The 40-year-old Griffin was charged April 9 with second-degree murder in connection with the March 13 shooting death of Timothy Ruiz in the parking lot of the Galleria at Crystal Run. An Orange County grand jury indicted Griffin yesterday.

   His life was full of contradictions, according to people who dealt with him and public records.

   There was the model cop and consummate professional who was nominated for Orange County's "Police Officer of the Year" award in 1993. Just four years ago, Griffin helped rescue a 7-year-old deaf girl from drowning in the Shawangunk Kill.

   There was the friendly neighbor, who smiled and waved at neighbors on Bartlett Street, a dead-end street with a dozen houses in Ellenville.

   And then there's the man state police say lay in wait with a rifle and "assassinated" 22-year-old Timothy Ruiz. The guy who called his wife two days after Christmas 2001 and told her he was going to shoot himself.

   Town of Crawford police Chief Daniel McCann described Griffin as a "good cop" who performed his duties and never had problems with other cops or with the community.

   Griffin hadn't been patrolling the town in uniform since July 2001, when he was injured in an on-duty accident in his patrol car.

   Folks around Crawford tell a different story than McCann.

   Clinton Cooper, owner of a construction company, said he was known around town as "Pit Bull." Cooper says he had several run-ins with Griffin over the past decade. Several years ago, Griffin and another officer responded to a trespassing complaint from Cooper's neighbor over property rights to a well.

   Cooper said Griffin cursed at him and threatened to throw him in jail over an insignificant property dispute.

   "I'm not the only one. A lot of people in town are afraid of him," he said. "If you got on his wrong side, he'd have it out for you. He was a good ole boy."

   Griffin worked part time as a police officer in the Town of Montgomery from 1987 to 1988 before taking the full-time police job in Crawford.

   Retired Montgomery police Chief Glenn Schoonmaker remembers Griffin as a young recruit whom he took under his wing in the mid-1980s and trained as a police officer. Schoonmaker said he was "shocked" by the news of Griffin's arrest.

   "Kevin didn't have it in him," he said.

   Griffin also worked as a security guard at the Thruway Market in Walden in the 1990s.

   Griffin and his wife, Deborah, bought a two-story house on Bartlett Street in Ellenville in December 1994, according to village records.

   About seven years after they bought the house, their marriage started falling apart. By 2001, Deborah Griffin was living on Hermance Street, a few blocks away from her husband. On Dec. 27, 2001, she called village police to say that her husband had called her from a pay phone at an ice cream stand in Matamoras, Pa. He was threatening to kill himself.

   She heard what sounded like a gunshot, then the line went dead. Village police called Pennsylvania state police.

   The following day, Kevin Griffin showed up at his wife's home in Ellenville. Crawford police were waiting for him and took him into custody, according to police records.

   But what happened after that isn't clear. There are no records of him being prosecuted in Orange County. One of his lawyers, Paul Trachte of Newburgh, declined to talk about Griffin's past.

   "I'm asking people not to pre-judge the case," Trachte said yesterday.

   State police say Griffin may have been driven to violence by the belief that Ruiz was romancing Griffin's girlfriend. That woman and Ruiz both worked at Old Navy.

   But if Griffin believed that, he was mistaken, according to one of Ruiz's co-workers who spoke on the condition that he not be identified.

   He said Ruiz wasn't involved with the woman whom Griffin called his girlfriend. They were friends and co-workers, but lovers? Not a chance.

   "I don't know where this guy got the impression that they were together," Ruiz's co-worker said, his voice tinged with disbelief.