The Wednesday-into-Thursday log is the lightest in a week. After Tuesday's four-arrest, twenty-one-charge entry — the densest single-day total in the Mercury's series so far — Farmington PD recorded exactly one arrest in the twenty-four hours that followed. Two charges. One officer. One stretch of Colt Highway.
According to the Farmington Police Department's official press arrest log covering 4/29/2026 07:00 through 4/30/2026 07:00, Avery Steven Eleby, 31, of 254 Stevens Street, Bristol, was arrested Wednesday at 5:58 p.m. at 360 Colt Highway. Officer Jonathan Sotelo made the stop. Eleby posted bond and is due in court on May 15.
The two charges are both in the motor-vehicle code:
- §14-215(a) — Illegal Operation of a Motor Vehicle Under §14-140 Suspension. $1,500 nonsurety bond.
- §14-213b — Illegal Operation of a Motor Vehicle Without Minimum Insurance. No bond on this count.
The log's remarks line: "Arrested in connection with Motor Vehicle Violations. Posted bond."
That is the whole arrest. The story is in the subsection.
§14-215 Has Appeared Three Times. This Is the First with a Source.
The §14-215 family is the standard "operating under suspension" statute in Connecticut. It has appeared three times in the Mercury's police log series — Kevin Francis on April 17, Chazarae Lee Collins on April 28, paired with a five-charge DUI cluster on Scott Swamp Road, and now Eleby. The first two log entries did not say why the driver's license was under suspension. Today's entry does.
The "UNDER 14-140 SUSPNSN" notation in the official log tells you the suspension came from §14-140 — the DMV statute that authorizes the Commissioner to pull a driver's license when the driver fails to appear in court on a motor-vehicle ticket. In other words: somebody got a ticket, didn't show up to answer it, the DMV suspended the license, and police later stopped the vehicle and discovered the license was still suspended. The Eleby record is the first in the FM series to put the source of the underlying suspension on the face of the arrest document.
The §14-213b charge — operating without the statutory minimum auto insurance — appeared in the FM series for the first time yesterday, on the Collins arrest. Two consecutive logs now feature it.
Sotelo Moves Tiers
Officer Sotelo's prior two appearances in the Mercury's police log series were the March 25–26 nine-charge DUI traffic stop on Scott Swamp Road and the April 23 warrant arrest of Gregory Robert Fernstrom at 319 New Britain Avenue. Today's stop is his third appearance. He moves out of the tier of officers with two log entries and joins Officers Aiello and Finn at three each.
The three Sotelo arrests share no recurring location and no recurring charge family — Scott Swamp Road, 319 New Britain Avenue, and now Colt Highway; impaired-driving felony cluster, warrant service for harassment and threatening, and an on-scene motor-vehicle stop. There is no Sotelo pattern to read here yet beyond presence.
Colt Highway, Two Addresses, Two Officers
The arrest location, 360 Colt Highway, is a new address for the series. Earlier this month, on April 15, Officer Michael J. Smith arrested Christopher John Paparella at 6 Colt Highway on a Failure to Appear warrant. The two addresses are distinct, but Colt Highway — part of CT Route 6, the town's primary east-west commercial corridor — now has two arrests in the FM log series, by two different officers.
A Quiet Twenty-Four Hours
What today's log is not is what most FM logs have been: a multi-defendant batch with at least one penal-code charge — a larceny, a disorderly, a protective-order violation, a §53a-something. The last single-defendant log with no Title 53/53a charges was the April 17–20 weekend, and even that one had two arrests. Today is one stop, one defendant, one motor-vehicle docket, one bond posted.
Eleby is the second Bristol-CT resident to appear in the Mercury's series — Devin Greggory Faulkner of Bristol was arrested at 47 New Britain Avenue on April 27, alongside Caron on a shared incident number. The non-Farmington dominance pattern, which has held across every log since the beat started, continues: of 51 unique arrestees in the series, 7 are Farmington residents, or roughly 13.7 percent.
Presumed Innocent
Avery Steven Eleby has been arrested and charged. He has not been convicted of anything. The next Mercury update on this case will come after his May 15 court date — assuming the outcome is published on the public record.
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— Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's police beat long enough to know the difference between §14-215 and §14-215(a), which is roughly the difference between "operating under suspension" and "operating under suspension because you didn't show up to court." He is on his second coffee. The log was one arrest. He read it twice anyway. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers town government, the police log, the Board of Education, Planning & Zoning, and whatever else moves through a town of 26,000 people who care about their corner of Connecticut. We are always last to breaking news. We make up for it by being first to the actual record.