Thomas Breen photo
Sam's on Whalley.
Police had the image and nickname of “Money,” a man suspected of stabbing a man to death outside a Whalley convenience store. But they didn’t have his real name.
So they took to social media.
Police posts on an internal law-enforcement Slack thread and on the department’s public-facing Facebook page led to a handful of tips as to who the suspect might be.
Those social media-inspired tips — along with the more traditional detective work of interviewing witnesses and reviewing relevant surveillance video — ultimately led police to arrest a 48-year-old New Havener for the stabbing homicide.
The fatal fight at the Sam’s Mart on Whalley that took the life of 47-year-old New Havener Travis James occurred at around 1 a.m. Saturday. City police announced their arrest of the alleged culprit, a 48 year-old New Havener, on a charge of felony murder just two days later.
That man has not yet entered a plea to the charge. He is currently being held on a $2 million bond.
A seven-page arrest warrant affidavit written by city police Det. James Marcum details the role that social media outreach played in helping New Haven cops make an arrest in this case.
Marcum wrote that, at around 1:09 a.m. on Saturday, June 1, New Haven police were dispatched to the St. Raphael’s hospital campus on Chapel Street for the report of a gunshot wound victim. They soon learned that the victim, James, had actually been stabbed. He was pronounced dead at the hospital nearly two hours later.
Through witness interviews, city police found out that James had been fatally injured during a fight that took place in the early hours of Saturday morning inside, and then outside, the Sam’s Mart at 285 Whalley.
Police traveled to the Whalley Avenue convenience store to interview witnesses and review surveillance footage, the latter of which showed James getting into an altercation with a man nicknamed “Money” inside the store. The full-blown fight, however, took place just outside the store, outside of view of the store’s cameras.
Police had a picture of “Money,” wearing a Def Leppard sweatshirt, from the surveillance footage. They learned that he was a regular at the store, but no one they spoke to knew his name.
So Sgt. Christopher Alvarado created a “Wanted for Questioning” flyer that included a still image of the suspect from the Sam’s Mart video surveillance. He posted that image on Slack, “an information sharing network between participating police agencies,” as Marcum described it.
On Saturday at around 12:45 p.m., patrol Officer Jurgen Reci reached out to Alvarado. He said he had seen the image on Slack and recognized the suspect “from previous police contact” — namely, from a “suspicious person stop” at the Sam’s Mart on Whalley from April 11. Reci was able to identify the man as the 48-year-old who wound up being arrested. Reci’s body-worn camera footage from that April 11 stop showed a man wearing the same style “Def Leppard” sweatshirt as that worn by the man in the Saturday’s surveillance footage around the fatal fight. The man’s “facial features also look identical” to the suspect police were looking for.
In addition to posting the Wanted for Questioning flyer on Slack, police put that same picture of the suspect on the New Haven Police Department Facebook page.
At 11:20 p.m. on Saturday, Det. Marcum spoke with an anonymous person via telephone who said they saw that flyer on the NHPD’s Facebook page and knew the suspect by name. They gave the same name that Officer Reci had, and said they knew him from three decades ago when that man lived at the old Farnam Courts public housing complex.
At 11:47 p.m., Marcum fielded a second call from a second anonymous tipster who also said they saw the picture of the suspect on Facebook, who also identified the suspect by the same name as Reci and the first caller, and who also said they had known the suspect for several decades, dating back to when they lived at Farnam Courts.
Those identifications — plus the witness interviews and surveillance footage reviewed by police — ultimately led to Marcum’s filing of the arrest warrant affidavit and indicating that police had probable cause to believe this suspect had murdered James.
According to a Monday press release sent out by New Haven police spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart, the suspect “turned himself into the police without incident and was charged with Murder.”
