The jury in an ex-Norwalk elections official's murder trial on Wednesday heard the 911 call she made after fatally shooting her tenant over three years ago. It came on the second day of evidence against Ellen Wink, who's on trial at Stamford Superior Court for the death of Kurt Lametta.
“Well, my tenant came after me while I was in there trying to clean up a little bit,” Wink told the dispatcher on Jan. 20, 2022.
Throughout the over five-minute recording, Wink rambled on—at times incoherently—about Lametta.
"He starts telling me what to do, and I'm like, 'Get out! Will you get out? When are you getting out?'" Wink said on the call.
At one point, she mentioned having a gun, but Wink never told the dispatcher she'd just shot Lametta five times.
“You just had a verbal disagreement? Was it anything physical?" asked the dispatcher.
"No, this has been ongoing. This has been ongoing," Wink replied.
She also said, “I've never, never hurt anybody in my life. This guy is just beyond.”
As the prosecution played that call, Wink had no reaction in the courtroom. She and Lametta had a contentious relationship after Lametta allegedly stopped paying rent for 16 Nelson Ave. in September 2020, and Wink wanted him out. The prosecution believes that was Wink's motive when she pulled the trigger in the home's kitchen that day.
But on Wednesday, Wink's attorney, Stephan Seeger, started to lay the groundwork for a possible self-defense claim, pointing to what Wink told the dispatcher. She’s also heard on the recording telling someone who was presumably with her that Lametta came after her.
Seeger hammered the lead detective about why police didn't search any kitchen drawers for possible weapons or test an ice scraper that was nearby in the kitchen.
“Because it wasn't within the scope of the investigation,” replied Detective John Sura.
"Isn't it an object that could cause bodily harm to somebody 2 feet away from where all the blood was?" Seeger questioned.
“Yes, I suppose it could,” responded Sura.
"But in your view, irrelevant?" Seeger asked.
“Yes,” Sura said.
Seeger also again focused on his client's cooperation with police, including Wink telling them where she'd left her weapon.
“So, you didn't go through a separate investigation, and, ‘Through my detective work, I found the gun.’ She told you where it was," Seeger stated, to which Sura agreed.
The investigator who processed the crime scene and took pictures, including of that Smith & Wesson revolver, also took the stand about his work in the case. Sgt. Alexander Tolnay went through his photographs of Lametta’s body, blood on the floor and walls, the recovered revolver and four boxes of ammunition found in Wink’s home at 18 Nelson Ave. Tolnay was also the one who documented where officers located Lametta’s phone—in a bush next to the house.
The day before in court jurors watched a video from that phone showing Lametta's last moments. He'd been secretly recording his encounter with Wink and captured his own death. Lametta appeared to have been holding his phone near his side so the footage doesn’t show Wink firing the gun, but you can hear her. The incident happened after Wink let herself into 16 Nelson Ave. to clean out the refrigerator because she wanted to sell the house.
“That's ridiculous. Every day you're going to come in and throw people's stuff away?” Lametta said on the phone footage.
A few seconds later, the first two shots rang out.
“You, bastard!” Wink said, before firing three more shots.
On Wednesday afternoon, the state’s deputy chief medical examiner testified about those gunshots.
Dr. Maura DeJoseph did Lametta’s autopsy and recovered the five bullets from his body. DeJoseph told the jury Lametta was shot twice in the back, once in his side and twice in the front of his body, but DeJoseph said she couldn’t determine the order of the shots. DeJoseph also said four of the five shots would’ve been lethal on their own, giving Lametta just seconds or minutes to live.