Don Pesci: The body count in New Haven
New Haven from the south, with The Hill in the foreground. East Rock is visible in the background
— Photo by Emilie Foyer
VERNON, Conn.
Paul Bass of the New Haven Independent is keeping a body count.
From January to March alone, the publication notes, “Alfreda Youmans, 50, and Jeffrey Dotson, 42, were found dead by the police inside a Winthrop Avenue apartment, Jorge Osorio-Caballero, 32, was shot and killed in Fair Haven, Marquis Winfrey, 31, was shot and killed in Newhallville, and Joseph Vincent Mattei, 28, was shot and killed in the Hill. Someone shot Kevin Jiang, 26, to death in Goatville on Feb. 6. Angel Rodriguez, 21, was shot to death in Fair Haven in mid-February, his body dumped by the Mill River in East Rock. Dwaneia Alexandria Turner, 28, was shot to death in the Hill on March 16 during an argument with two other women.”
And the year’s total body count so far for the city that has given us Yale, two nationwide recognized pizza houses, the inimitable Roger Sherman, and William Celentano, a funeral director and the first Italian-American mayor of New Haven -- indeed, the last Republican mayor elected in New Haven 68 years ago – is 21.
“There have been 21 homicides in New Haven this year,” NBC Connecticut reports. “Twenty murders were reported citywide in 2020, according to statistics from the New Haven Police Department” – and we have about 3 months left to close out the year.”
It promises to be a record year, not only for new Haven but for all major cities in Connecticut.
The New Haven Independent, whose reporting on murders in New Haven has been more granular than some might wish, tells us the latest shooting victim is Trequon Lawrence, 27 years old, employed by Yale New Haven Hospital, and a new home owner.
“I purchased my first multi-family dwelling,” Lawrence wrote on Facebook. “Truly blessed and highly favored. Yet this is a bitter sweet time in my life. As some of you may know I lost my baby girl a few weeks back. And in all honesty she was my motivation for buying the house. When she left a piece of me left with her. Nonetheless I still had to make this move toward putting my family in a better position. In life we will experience many highs and many lows. But without the lows we can’t truly appreciate the highs. I am GRATEFUL overall and will continue to strive for greatness in light of my daughter.”
Lawrence was shot eight times. The shooting occurred, the publication noted, “down the street from the home of state Sen. Gary Winfield,” who “observed afterwards that the police department has not been giving the public much information about what’s behind this year’s flood of shootings.”
Contacted for comment by the publication, Winfield said, “My experience over a couple of decades is that you don’t get the intimate details of the shooting itself. But you get, ‘This is what we’re seeing. We’re seeing these are isolated incidents.’ Or: ‘They’re related to gangs or cliques’ …. You get some kind of trending information to give some sense of what is actually happening,’ Winfield said.”
Sure, sure. The causes of shootings in New Haven this year are not materially different than the previous year, and the year before that, and the two decades before that.
Even so, the accumulative data apparently is not sufficient to allow the General Assembly to remediate city shootings through legislation.
“While the police need to keep certain details about individual shootings confidential while they investigate,” the publication noted, “in the past they have communicated more about what’s behind outbreaks of violence, Winfield said. He argued that officials and the community can’t craft an effective response without more information.”
The notice posted on Dante’s Gates of Hell was, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Things are not quite that bad in New Haven. The state delegation, Winfield said, has “reached out to the mayor to have a conversation about what has been going on. In order to tackle the problem we need to know what is actually happening. People in the city have fear. Some of that is born from what is going on. Some of that is born from a lack of information.”
New Haven has had a surfeit of insouciant Democrat politicians over the last 60 years, but Winfield’s indifference to a murder in his city that occurred “down the street from his home” is a high bar to surmount.
Whatever can Winfield mean when he says he lacks the proper data from New Haven police to fashion an answering piece of legislation – other than that legislation for which Winfield is best known: a bill that withdraws from all police officers in the state a partial immunity from suits that would allow plaintiffs to seize the personal assets of police officers in Connecticut? The removal of protective immunity in Winfield's signature bill, some have argued, likely contributed to a drop-off in urban police recruitment, and a flight from urban areas to the suburbs by city police officers, this at a time when New Haven’s murder rate is growing by leaps and bounds.
Following an affirmative vote on the Winfield bill, police chiefs warned, “There is not and cannot be an alternative to this for any police officer or agency. We strongly believe that the loss of qualified immunity will destroy our ability to recruit, hire, and retain qualified police officers both now and in the foreseeable future. We are also very concerned about losing our current personnel at a higher rate than we normally can replace. Any impact on our ability to recruit qualified personnel in general will also impact our minority recruitment efforts, which is a goal in this bill that we strongly support.”
Any of the survivors of the relatives of victims listed by the New Haven Independent in its granular coverage of New Haven murders doubtless would appreciate a clear answer to the above question?
Surely it is the greater part of Winfield’s obligation as a state senator to fix his attention on murders that occur right under his nose and to propose legislative fixes that really do fix the problem.
Don Pesci is a Vernon-based columnist.