By David Owens, Hartford Courant
WEST HARTFORD — The 23-year-old Hartford man shot and killed by a woman who said he had repeatedly threatened to kill her and her children had a history of violence toward women, records show.
Jose A. Mendez, also known as “Bebo,” had served prison time for assaulting a girlfriend in Hartford and had a case pending against him in connection with a similar incident in East Hartford.
In both of those cases, police said, Mendez threatened to kill the girlfriends and their children. In the Hartford case, he subsequently violated a criminal protective order that he stay at least 100 yards from the woman and her child. Police noted in both cases that the women expressed genuine fear of Mendez.
The woman in the Hartford case was “genuinely afraid that her life was in peril,” an officer noted in a report.
In both of those earlier cases — and as is alleged in the West Hartford case — Mendez sent threatening text messages and made threatening calls to the women.
On Wednesday evening, according to police, Angela Grasso-Cunha shot and killed Mendez in a car on Prospect Avenue in West Hartford.
Grasso-Cunha, 27, of Plainville, later told West Hartford police that Mendez, whom she had been dating for about three weeks, repeatedly threatened to kill her, her children and others in her family. She told police that she shot Mendez in self-defense.
Her lawyer, Walter Hussey, said that text messages on her cellphone bore out that claim.
She shot Mendez in the head with her Glock 9mm pistol, police wrote in a report, because “she saw it as her only opportunity to stop him from following through on his threats, which she believed were inevitable.”