Nora Grace Flood photo
Mayor Garrett, Acting Chief of Police Tim Wydra, State Sen. Jorge Cabrera, BOE President Melissa Kaplan, and Detective Sean Dolan on Monday.
Elijah Gomez.
Less than a month after 15-year-old Hamden High freshman Elijah Gomez was shot to death while walking home from school on the Farmington Canal Trail, Hamden police have arrested his alleged murderer.
Acting Police Chief Timothy Wydra made that announcement Monday afternoon during a press conference held at the Hamden Police Department.
Standing alongside Mayor Lauren Garrett, Board of Education President Melissa Kaplan, State Senator Jorge Cabrera, Detective Sean Dolan, and Legislative Council member Adrian Webber, Wydra said that Hamden police have arrested an 18-year-old Hamden resident for allegedly shooting and killing Gomez on May 9.
He also said that police currently believe that Gomez was targeted by the suspect.
Gomez — a freshman at Hamden High School whom friends and family described as an avid football player and someone who spent his free time picking up litter around local walking trails — was killed just a week after his fifteenth birthday.
“He was gunned down by cowardly actors,” Wydra said on Monday.
The acting police chief reported at the press conference that, on Monday, the Hamden Police Department arrested an 18-year-old individual from Hamden who now faces three charges — including murder, conspiracy to commit murder and carrying a pistol without a permit. The suspect was assigned a court set bond of $1 million and will appear in Meriden Superior Court on June 13.
Wydra said that the suspect briefly attended Eli Whitney Technical High School, and that he may have also studied at Hamden High.
Wydra: Gomez was targeted.
Wydra said the Police Department is currently looking into who else may have been involved in Gomez’s murder, adding, “We believe he was targeted, but we don’t know why… motive is something we are interested in.”
Mayor Garrett described Gomez as “a very loved and respected young man.”
“Elijah’s death has had a very profound impact on his family and on his community,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do to bring Elijah back, but I hope this arrest brings some measure of relief to Elijah’s family and friends.”
“We must do more to stem the scourge of gun violence in our community and in our state,” Garrett continued. “I’ll be reaching out to our governor and to our legislative leaders, like Jorge Cabrera, to ask them to find ways to increase funding for violence prevention programs and to revisit our gun and ammunition regulations.”
While Wydra said the department will continue to focus on assigning officers to patrol spots that the public has perceived to be unsafe, like the canal line or the plaza, BOE President Melissa Kaplan spoke to the Independent about how Hamden could aim to prevent youth violence by providing strong emotional support services to students.
After news first broke that Gomez had been killed, an event which collided with the more recent massacre of school children in Texas, Kaplan said that the high school principal visited each classroom to discuss students’ feelings, brought in specialists from Clifford Beers mental health clinic, and even invited therapy dogs into the hallways.
But, Kaplan said, many of the broader responses to threats and real instances of gun violence this year have been “reactionary,” she said, such as installing metal detectors in the high school.
Now that the Legislative Council has flat-funded the Board of Education, she said she worries about continued, chronic understaffing.
“We need more hires — there aren’t enough nurses, not enough social workers or school psychologists.”
“We need more resources to support students at the younger level. Students slip through the cracks in middle school,” she said — and then larger issues, some as severe as loss of life, “manifest in high school.”