By OWEN BOSS
Staff Writer
EASTHAMPTON — The owner of a Northampton Street auto body shop says she knew the former employee who showed up drunk and armed Wednesday afternoon was not there to harm anyone, but after a recent high-profile office shooting in Connecticut, she wasn’t about to take any chances.
All on-duty Easthampton police officers responded to Nicky D’s at 1:12 p.m. Wednesday after receiving a report that Ryszard Rzasa, 50, a former employee from Chicopee, had shown up intoxicated and was yelling at employees and waving a handgun.
“He wasn’t let go or fired or anything like that, he just hadn’t showed up for work in two weeks,” Betty Duprey said. “He definitely had some alcohol and drugs in his system when he got here. Unfortunately he made the bad choice of pulling a gun out when he was ranting and raving.”
She told police that Rzasa had a strong odor of alcohol coming from his breath, and that she believes his drinking and drug problem had caused him to miss work, according to court documents.
After confronting Rzasa, who was holding what was later discovered to be a black pellet gun, Duprey said he was clearly under the influence of alcohol and she told an employee to call police.
“My job is to protect my employees and myself. Luckily there were only three employees in the building at the time because it happened during lunch,” Duprey said. “I basically distracted him and told everyone else to lock themselves in the office and wait for police.”
Duprey said she wasn’t going to risk trying to calm Rzasa herself after a shooting at a business in Manchester, Conn., earlier this month resulted in nine deaths.
“You just can’t take chances in a situation like that, so we called for police and they were extremely responsive,” Duprey said. “The whole thing lasted 15 minutes, but when you are in the middle of it, it seems a lot longer."
According to court documents, police could not immediately locate the handgun and Rzasa became combative while they attempted to arrest him for disorderly conduct.
“He wasn’t threatening anyone in particular or this place, he just came in angry at the world and when someone is in that kind of a mind-set and they are on drugs and alcohol they don’t know what they are doing,” Duprey said. “I wasn’t about to try to figure out what was going on with his issues, because who the heck knows? We were more worried about trying to figure out what he had put in his system.”
After searching the business, police located the gun in a tool box that Rzasa had used while an employee at the shop.
“You just can’t go around pulling out a gun, whether it is a pellet gun or a real gun, and start pointing it at people,” Duprey said. “Especially when you do it with the intention of scaring or intimidating someone.”
Rzasa pleaded innocent in Northampton District Court on Thursday to charges of assault with a dangerous weapon (handgun), disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.
Judge Richard J. Carey ordered Rzasa released on his own recognizance and scheduled him to return to court for a pretrial conference on Sept. 16.
Owen Boss can be reached at oboss@gazettenet.com.
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