Leaders Vow Action Amid Violence Wave

Life went painfully on Wednesday for Howard Lewis’s family as they held an outdoor birthday party for his 10-year-old son — while top cops and city officials sought to figure out who killed Lewis and one other man the night before, and how to get a handle on New Haven’s worst stretch of violence in a decade.

New Haven has now surpassed the number of shootings it saw in all of 2019. It’s only July.

The latest spasm of shootings — four between 6 and 10 p.m Tuesday alone, including the fatal shooting of Lewis while he was in his car on Munson Street — led Police Chief Otoniel Reyes and Mayor Justin Elicker to respond with stepped up street outreach, proactive officer check-ins with people on probation and parole, and community engagement on how to end the violence.

Reyes and Elicker delivered those updates Wednesday afternoon during an hour-long press conference held on the second floor of City Hall.

Several dozen pastors, community anti-violence activists, reporters, city workers, alders, top police officials, and the mayor crowded into the atrium for the update on Tuesday night’s eruption of violence across town.

The four separate shootings Tuesday, took place in Dixwell, Fair Haven, and Cedar Hill, and on Whalley Avenue.

Two of those shooting victims died from their injuries. Those were Lewis, a Hamden resident who was shot in the chest through his car’s windshield on Munson Street near Sherman Parkway at around 6:05 p.m.; and 33-year-old New Havener Ibrahim Valentino Shareef, Jr., who was shot and killed near a liquor store on Whalley Avenue near Hobart Street just after 10 p.m.

The two other shootings took place on Ferry Street in Fair Haven and at the intersection of State Street and May Street in Cedar Hill. (See more details below in the story.)

Reyes (pictured) said that police are still investigating the two homicides and two nonfatal shootings. He said, based on preliminary information gathered by the department, several of the shootings are likely related. He also said that three of the shootings appear to have been acts of retaliation in ongoing gang-related beefs.

“We have been stepping up our patrol efforts, and we will be putting every resource possible to quell the violence in our city,” Reyes said .

“We’re going to double down on our partnerships and make sure we are focused completely on violent crime. Every focus in this department will be violent crime.”

Tuesday night’s shooting deaths marked the city’s 10th and 11th homicides of the year so far. The two nonfatal shootings were the city’s 55th and 56th.

In all of 2019, New Haven saw 11 homicides and just over 50 nonfatal shootings, Reyes said. ​“We are already at the numbers we ended with last year. That’s very concerning.”

While Tuesday night’s gun violence was exceptional in its condensed time span and number of lives lost, it also represented just the latest manifestation of a brutal summer so far, including 11 shootings and three homicides over the past 10 days.

During a Monday afternoon press conference at 1 Union Ave., Chief Reyes joined Assistant Chiefs Karl Jacobson and Renee Dominguez to decry the ​“perfect storm” of pandemic-related factors police believe are contributing to this spate of violence. Jacobson said those included unemployment due to Covid-19, people being cooped up due to Covid-19, certain inmates settling scores after being released from prison due to Covid-19, and society’s more critical attitudes towards the police.

Wednesday’s presser was less about the potential causes of the violence — and more about what happened, to the best of the police department’s current knowledge, and what top city officials plan to do about it.

In the short term, Elicker (pictured) said, he and the chief have spoken about resuming some of the proactive, physical interactions with community members that police had put on hold during the first few months of the pandemic so as to minimize potential exposure to the virus. Those include officers making visits to people on probation and parole, checking in on people the department believes are most likely to commit a crime or be the victim of a crime, and engaging street outreach workers trained to defuse volatile situations before they turn violent.

Elicker said he would be hosting a Zoom community conversation Wednesday afternoon with anti-violence activists, community leaders, clergy, and police about how to quell the violence. He said he also planned to knock doors Wednesday afternoon near where the two homicides took place to check in with neighbors.

During her turn at the mic Wednesday, Board of Alders President Tyisha Walker-Myers (pictured) hit on some of the longer-term essentials needed to get at the root causes of violence.

She said that the city must work on putting together an economic plan for the neighborhoods just as it has one for downtown. She said the city must ensure and invest in affordable, stable housing and quality employment for all city residents.

“This violence didn’t just happen this year,” she said. ​“This is a product of years and years and years of things that needed to change, and didn’t happen.”

Varick AME Pastor Kelcy Steele (pictured) agreed. He said that the causes of crime are complex: ​“poverty, parental neglect, low self-esteem, alcohol and drug abuse.”

“We need community support and government funding to put programs in place that address these needs,” he said. That means funding public schools, libraries, and the arts, building affordable homes, supporting unions, and encouraging black homeownership in the suburbs.

“Crime has no color,” he said. ​“But it does have a cause.”

“It Hurts”

Roughly two miles away outside of their three-family house in Beaver Hills, Lewis’s parents, Belinda and Todd Cotten (pictured) spent the afternoon celebrating their late son’s life — as well the life of Lewis’s youngest son, who turned 10 on Tuesday.

Children ran up and down the driveway playing while Lewis’s parents, siblings, and in-laws sat and stood on the home’s front porch, mourning the passing of their loved one and remembering him at his best.

“He had a heart of gold,” Belinda said. ​“A very good heart. He liked roller skating, bowling, traveling.”

And he was dedicated to his family, especially to his 10 children.

She said Lewis was the oldest of four children, and worked for Sikorsky assembling airplane parts before getting hurt on the job and being out on disability.

She said she spoke to him two or three times a day.

Crystal Moore, Lewis’s sister in law, said she most remembers Lewis’s laughter. ​“He definitely here to make you laugh and smile,” she said. ​“He light up a room.”

And Lewis’s dad, Todd, started to describe his son as providing ​“lots of fun and laughter” before he stopped, got choked up with tears, and had to sit down.

“It hurts,” he said. ​“It’s hard to talk about. I can’t believe it. This is hard for me.”

Wiping tears from his cheeks, he said, ​“I think the police need to step up their game. We need more patrols out here. It’s getting worse.”

Last night was one exceptionally violent night in an exceptionally violent summer, he said. ​“It seems like there’s shootings everywhere. This is crazy. I really don’t get it.”

After Wednesday’s City Hall press conference, Ice the Beef President Chaz Carmon (pictured) also reflected on Lewis as someone ​“who was always there for his kids. He was there for his nephews.”

Carmon said he had known Lewis since they were both around 10 years old, and that they grew up together in New Haven. He said they were both single dads for many years, and used to swap advice on how best to raise young men.

“It was just so shocking, the sweetest person that he was, that something like that would happen to him,” Carmon said.

According to the state judicial database, Lewis was convicted of a handful of crimes, including illegal possession of a weapon in a motor vehicle in 2014.

Melissa LyTrelle, Lewis’s sister, told the Independent Wednesday morning that she was among a group of family members at the hospital after Lewis was shot Tuesday night.

“Throughout the night there were families coming in. Throughout the whole city. I have never seen Yale New Haven Hospital like that before,” she said.

“The devil was busy in our city last night.”

She questioned what Mayor Justin Elicker can say to the Black community about the upsurge in violence.

“He’s addressing the city from the perspective of a politician,” LyTrelle said. ​“He’s not from the inner city. He don’t know. He can’t relate to how we’re feeling right now. This is something we’ve been dealing with for years. Every mayor elected knows it. For some reason the money can never properly get allocated to what it get allocated to. … They know our school systems are suffering. They know people are in poverty. They know the crime is going on. They don’t care because this is not their home.

“We put them in office. They have an obligation. We need to make them accountable.”

“Individual Responsibility” And ​“Institutional Accountability”

On WNPR’s ​“The Wheelhouse” radio program Wednesday morning, New Haven resident and Quinnipiac University Associate Professor of Political Science Khalilah Brown-Dean reflected on both the proposed police reform bill that will be taken up during the state legislature’s special session next week, as well as on the recent uptick in violence in New Haven, including Tuesday night’s.

Brown-Dean said that all of the factors that led to Covid-19 disproportionately impacting Black and brown working class communities must also be taken into account when understanding increased rates of violence in cities like New Haven.

“All of the data shows us that, when economic instability is high, domestic violence rises, violence increases, because of that despair and because of people turning to violence to settle disputes.”

If young people are not connected to school or resource programs, they are more likely to engage in negative behaviors, she said. Thus the ​“perfect storm” of Covid-induced unemployment, social distancing, public health crises, and physical school closures.

“It’s not enough to point to protests and say, ​‘Well, you have now turned people against law enforcement and they don’t want to cooperate,’” she said. ​“The reality is that we need more resources, more programs and more funding, so that people feel connected, but they also aren’t living in fear. They aren’t in fear of people who would come into their neighborhoods and commit harm, and also in fear that if they call for help from law enforcement,” that they might also end up hurt.

She called for a ​“dual emphasis” in New Haven on ​“individual responsibility as well as institutional accountability. We can pursue both without privileging one over the other.”

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was asked Wednesday about the simultaneous Black Lives Matters-spurred calls for reduced policing and the uptick in violence across the country, leading to some calls for increased policing.

The policing changes under consideration can ultimately make communities safer, he argued.

He said he supports banning chokeholds, no-knock raids and racial profiling; and reforming qualified immunity for officers and the standard for intent for criminal prosecution.

Those ​“steps in the right direction” will produce ​“responsible law enforcement that stops and prevents crime” in conjunction with the community, he said during an unrelated stop at Ricky D’s barbecue joint on Winchester Avenue to promote federal aid to black-owned small businesses.

“The way to deal with any law enforcement problem is to apply the best science and abide by the law,” the senator said.

Blumenthal has been enforcing and making laws for four decades, first as Connecticut’s U.S. attorney, then a state senator, then state attorney general, and now a U.S. Senator sitting on the Judiciary Committee. He has watched the consensus evolve over that time on how best to address crime. For instance, he noted, federal judges and community activists considered mandatory minimum sentences an important tool; now the consensus is that they unnecessarily imprison people who don’t pose a threat to society without preventing crime.

“We need to be willing to listen,” Blumenthal said. ​“We need to be open to learning and change.”

From West To East Sides

Reyes said that the first shooting of Tuesday night took place at around 6:05 p.m. Police responded to a report of a person shot near 351 Munson St.

Officers found the victim, Howard Lewis, in his car. He had been shot through the windshield in his chest. He was in the car at the time with his 15-year-old son and his 18-year-old brother. ​“They fortunately were not injured,” Reyes said.

He said Lewis was rushed to the hospital, where he later succumbed to his gunshot wound.

The second shooting took place at around 7:01 p.m. near 632 Ferry St. in Fair Haven.

The victim there was seen driving a dirt bike up and down Ferry moments before he was shot by an individual or multiple individuals, Reyes said. Police found eight cartridge cases on the scene.

The 20-year-old New Haven man suffered two gunshot wounds. His bike was also shot.

This man is a known gang member, Reyes said. This is the second time he’s been shot in the past two years. ​“We have done work with this individual to try to prevent him from both doing retaliation and from being shot upon.”

The third shooting took place at around 8:20 p.m. near the intersection of State Street and May Street in Cedar Hill.

The victim was likely in his vehicle when struck, Reyes said. Witnesses told the police there was an exchange of gunfire between the man who was hit and a man in another car. Police found 16 rounds at the scene. The 18-year-old Hamden man was shot in the neck, was driven to the hospital, and survived his wounds.

And the fourth shooting took place just after 10 p.m. on Whalley Avenue near Hobart St. The homicide victim, Ibrahim, was recently released from prison back in March due to a shooting incident for which he was charged, Reyes said. He said police believe the shooting was a retaliation for a previous incident.

“There’s Got To Be A Better Way”

New Haveners took to social media en masse Tuesday night to plead for a stop to the shootings.

Dixwell contractor and community activist Rodney Williams was one such commenter, recording a Facebook Live video in which he called for city leadership to step up, speak out, and come up with an emergency response to this current wave of gun violence.

He also called for the people beefing and engaged in these shootings to put the guns down.

“Please, man, there’s got to be a better way to resolve things than killing each other,” he said. ​“There will be no fruit because you’re killing the fruit trees.”

He concluded with a message mixed with hope and sorrow. ​“Let tomorrow be the day that we say we’ve had enough of this shit.”

Black Lives Matter New Haven leader Ala Ochumare asked on Facebook: What can we do to stop the violence in our communities?

“My answer: become transformation justice advocates and practitioners,” Ochumare wrote. ​“Introduce this to the hood. Introduce it to the people who suffer the most due to oppression.

“Introduce restorative justice and transformational justice to the masses. Have black and brown folx who are STILL in the hood holding this language until it becomes the norm.”

Ice the Beef’s Chaz Carmon had a different take.

“People tell me stop marching against it, they didn’t want to hear me talk about it, but I called this out months ago and people didn’t want to hear me!!!” he wrote on Facebook. ​“Let’s not talk about black on black murders!! Why not!!!! But I won’t stop until we stop!!! Killing each other!!! Think about the children!! We are hurting our own people!!! No one wanted to listen!!! We have to stand together y’all against this madness!!!”

At 12:30 a.m., Mayor Elicker sent out an email press release about the exceptionally violent night.

“I am heartbroken at the increase of violence in the City in recent days and the loss of members of our community,” he is quoted as saying in the release. ​“Across the country, our communities are grappling with a stifling economy, a global pandemic, and an increase in gun violence. Chief Reyes and I have been in nearly hourly communication to determine how to respond.

“Our City faces a confluence of issues that contribute to the violence, and we are working closely with our partners to address these challenges. Our community has already experienced so much loss and pain – I implore those who are involved in the violence to do the right thing and stop contributing to further loss of life.”

Paul Bass contributed.