by | Sep 30, 2024 9:45 am | Comments (28)
Paul Bass Photo
Tabitha Sookdeo at WNHH FM: "It's all connected."
Tabitha Sookdeo has a new job helping undocumented young people stay settled here — and addressing the conditions that lead some others to come here.
To her, the two issues, immigration reform and climate change, are related.
by | Sep 27, 2024 4:47 pm | Comments (8)
DeLauro's twitter
Don’t understand the headline of this story? Neither do we, really. Our Gen Z correspondent is here to help.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s most recent post on X (formerly known as Twitter) sticks out in the midst of policy-driven proclamations and support for foreign allies. It’s a TikTok-style video, where the 81-year-old congresswoman speaks what to many might be gibberish, but to an entire generation, is perfectly clear.
by | Sep 27, 2024 3:48 pm | Comments (38)
Thomas Breen photo
Welcome back, Chapel Street, looking east from Church.
Eastbound travel lanes are back open for the first time in a year and a half on a downtown block of Chapel Street — which is no longer a roadway-shuttering construction zone, and which now has 166 new places to live.
Continue reading ‘Chapel Lanes Reopen, With "Archive" Apartments’
by | Sep 27, 2024 1:38 pm | Comments (33)
Cross girls' locker room, photo courtesy of Cross counselor Mia Comulada Breuler.
New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) leaders said the district needs 33 more tradesmen to just begin working towards addressing its thousands of building-disrepair work orders — while the head of the school system’s custodial union called for more in-house hiring, and less private contracting.
Continue reading ‘Understaffing Blamed For School Building Decay’
by | Sep 27, 2024 9:59 am | Comments (18)
Nathaniel Rosenberg photos
Protest organizer Kerry Ellington: “The police could have chosen a nonviolent alternative."
Conley's cousins Tamara Flint, Ronisha Moore, and Maya Harris, at Thursday's protest.
A week to the hour after a fatal confrontation between police and 36-year-old New Havener Jebrell Conley, protesters gathered at the car wash where the shooting took place — to criticize law enforcement for how they handled last Thursday’s attempted arrest, and to describe Conley as more than just his criminal record.
Continue reading ‘1 Week Later, Rally Protests Police Shooting’
by | Sep 27, 2024 9:23 am | Comments (6)
Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in Megalopolis, which feels at times like an object lesson in what happens when no one is able to tell a filmmaker when his ideas are bad.
The lights dimmed in a movie theater Thursday night for maybe the most prime example of an arthouse film to come along this year, and together the audience watched as Cesar Catilina, played by Adam Driver, edged out of his office window to stand on a metal ledge at the edge of a skyscraper, balancing vertiginously over traffic. He wobbled, and almost began to fall.
It was the opening scene on opening night for legendary director Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, Megalopolis: A Fable, but we weren’t in an arthouse theater. We were in Cinemark, in North Haven, the closest place screening the limited-release film. With the Criterion closed and New Haven without a first-run theater of any kind, would it be the same?
by | Sep 26, 2024 3:45 pm | Comments (8)
Thomas Breen photos
Union Station, get ready for some new neighbors ...
... at the TOD coming soon-ish to the east parking lot?
Four developers are in the running to build up a state-owned surface parking lot adjacent to Union Station — as part of a transit-oriented development that is likely still several years away from breaking ground.
by | Sep 26, 2024 12:59 pm | Comments (12)
Maya McFadden photo
Michael Carter: CAO Act II looming?
Four days before his public school district operations consultant contract is set to expire, Mike Carter is still “undecided” as to whether or not to stay in the post — or, potentially, return to his former top City Hall job.
by | Sep 25, 2024 5:30 pm | Comments (22)
High Times makes Pastore a national decriminalization hero within months of his becoming chief.
Former New Haven Police Chief Nicholas Pastore, a product of the pre-Urban Renewal Hill neighborhood who implemented groundbreaking reforms decades before America embraced them as conventional wisdom, died Tuesday at the age of 87.
by | Sep 25, 2024 3:42 pm | Comments (18)
Thomas Breen file photo
Community Resilience Director Tirzah Kemp: COMPASS provides an "empathetic, compassionate, humane, and trauma-informed approach to care."
COMPASS data
COMPASS calls, by the #s, as presented in August report.
The city’s non-cop crisis response team will now be on call until 3 a.m. each day — with double the staffers working during the peak hours of 7 to midnight — as the Elicker administration again expands its effort to send social workers and not police to certain 911 calls about homelessness, mental health, and substance abuse.
by | Sep 25, 2024 12:47 pm | Comments (42)
Inspector General photo
Conley, as pictured after shooting at police during fatal confrontation on Sept. 19.
2016 sentencing memo image
Conley's fifth-grade perfect attendance certificate, as included as exhibit in defense sentencing memo in 2016 federal drug case.
The fatal confrontation last week between police and 36-year-old New Havener Jebrell Conley stemmed from a July 3 robbery in Hamden during which Conley and others allegedly hit, pistol-whipped, and shot a man as they stole his drugs and money.
That in turn stemmed from Conley’s years-long involvement in the illegal drug trade and New Haven gang life — which grew out of a troubled upbringing in the Hill in the 1990s and the shooting death of a brother whom he looked up to as a father.
Those details and many more are included in federal court documents about criminal cases involving Conley, who appeared to fire first at — and then was shot and killed by — city and state police as they sought to serve him with a robbery-shooting warrant late in the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 19, at a car wash just over the New Haven-West Haven town border.
Continue reading ‘"Brell" File Reveals Violent Robbery, Childhood’
by | Sep 25, 2024 10:00 am | Comments (40)
Maya McFadden Photos
Cross staffers speak out (clockwise from top left): Brian Grindrod, Eric Teichman, Kathryn Dadio, Dario Sulzman, Mia Comulada Breuler, and Mark CoFrancesco.
Nearly 20 Wilbur Cross educators, parents, and students showed up to the latest Board of Education meeting to give the city’s public school district a failing grade for unsafe, unhealthy, and unsightly building conditions at New Haven’s largest high school.
by | Sep 24, 2024 12:06 pm | Comments (14)
Thomas Breen photo
Yvonne Watts (right), with neighbor Lourdes Oritz, at a Mandy Management building that has failed two recent LCI inspections: "If they fix anything else, they're going to go up on rent."
Yvonne Watts said she doesn’t want Mandy Management to repair her bathroom mirror or replace her kitchen countertops — because she’s afraid that will raise the rent too high.
Continue reading ‘Tenant To Mandy: Please Don't Fix My Apartment’
by | Sep 23, 2024 5:25 pm | Comments (39)
State Police Sgt. Richter's body cam footage. Warning: This video contains graphic violence.
(Updated) Jebrell Conley appeared to fire first as cops boxed him in and tried to arrest him on robbery-shooting charges at a car wash just over the New Haven-West Haven border.
Three of those officers — including two city cops — responded by shooting and killing Conley.
Those details are included in a preliminary report released by the state Office of the Inspector General on Monday afternoon.
Continue reading ‘Report, Videos Detail Fatal Police Shooting’
by | Sep 23, 2024 4:18 pm | Comments (7)
Laura Glesby Photo
Harold Jones, in the "flow" scooping early fall leaves in Upper Westville.
“You can’t work with a cluttered mind,” said Harold Jones as he de-cluttered the Ijeh family’s front yard — on a job outing where stories of incarceration and reentry, witnessed and experienced from different angles, had a chance to intersect.