East Syracuse, NY -- When the sounds of sirens and a heavy truck awoke Carol Patapow at 11:17 p.m. Tuesday night, she thought there might be a fire in her quiet East Syracuse neighborhood. “When I saw him come through the side yard, I said, ‘Oh my God, a dump truck!’” Patapow said. “I kept on saying, ‘Did I really...
East Syracuse, NY -- When the sounds of sirens and a heavy truck awoke Carol Patapow at 11:17 p.m. Tuesday night, she thought there might be a fire in her quiet East Syracuse neighborhood.
“When I saw him come through the side yard, I said, ‘Oh my God, a dump truck!’” Patapow said. “I kept on saying, ‘Did I really see a dump truck?’”
Her call to 911 let the Beard Avenue resident know she was now ground zero in a pursuit that began at the Great Northern Mall. The chase would end on Burnet Avenue in East Syracuse, when police shot Stanley Lostumbo, 37, as the dump truck they said he was driving rammed a police car.
Lostumbo suffered a minor gunshot wound, Sheriff Kevin Walsh said, and a female passenger in the truck was not harmed.
Patapow said she watched as the 11,000-pound truck stopped in her back yard in front of a line of 15- to 20-foot tall trees that separates her yard from her neighbors. Police cars were pulling into her yard on both sides of her house.
“I thought it was a done thing. I thought they had him,” she said.
Patapow saw police get out of a patrol car.
“I heard the cop tell him to get down,” she said.
Then Patapow heard the officer fire at the truck.
On the other side of the tree line, brothers Jason and Shannon Earley were enjoying a warm night with their children outside a house on Calhoun Street, just around the corner from Patapow’s house.
The brothers knew something was up because they could hear the sirens as the chase went up Thompson Road. They could follow the whole thing by watching the helicopter, they said. And it was coming towards them.
And suddenly, there was the dump truck in Patapow’s yard with its lights shining through the trees.
The headlights illuminated the brothers and they told the children to go inside, they both said.
“When the kids went inside, that’s when the shots were fired, Shannon Earley said.
“Pow, pow, pow,” Jason Earley said. “We ducked.”
Asked if they were nervous, Jason Earley said, “Not until the cops started shooting.”
Jason Earley questioned the wisdom of the police shooting in the thickly settled neighborhood.
“Do they know what’s on the other side of these bushes,” he asked.
The Earley brothers remember hearing three shots. Patapow, who was on the floor with her dog at the time, remembers two shots.
That’s about when the dump truck went through the treeline, breaking three of the trees. Jason Earley said the truck hung up a bit on the trees before taking a right turn in the yard and eventually getting on the driveway of a business.
In the mean time, police, including an officer from East Syracuse, continued to flood the neighborhood with guns drawn, Jason Earley said.
In the daylight Wednesday, it was easy to see the path of the truck as it drove south through the neighborhood near the Syracuse-East Syracuse city line. Calhoun Street, a north-south road in the village of East Syracuse, has a break in the middle of it, with green space and guide rails between Cotty Drive where it begins again Beard Avenue.
The chase went through yards between the two streets, crossed Beard Avenue before circling behind Patapow's house.
The neighborhood is about two blocks from Lostumbo’s address of 4403 James St., which is also the address of Lostumbo Asphalt Driveways.