Chief Cisco Ortiz (above) appealed at a mid-day press conference outside police headquarters Wednesday for the public’s help in solving four shootings, including a murder, that took place within 32 hours of each other.
“These four shootings are all connected, clearly,” Ortiz said. “It’s senseless. It doesn’t make much sense to any of us. The men and women of the department are up to the challenge.”
In response to the shootings, the police were working with a team from the Yale Child Study Center. The Center and the police force work together regularly on cases involving troubled families and are familiar with ongoing problems in the neighborhoods where the shootings occurred, according to Ortiz.
Ortiz said he has assigned extra detectives to the case “around the clock,” as well as a task force that concentrates on “hot zones.”
He appealed to people in the neighborhoods, especially the families of the young men involved in the shootings, to work with the cops. Otherwise, the cycle of violence could continue, Ortiz said.
Anyone with information is urged to call the police at 946‑6316.
“We’re going to gear up for the wake. We’re going to gear up for the funeral. We’re going to stay on this for 10, 15 days” to stop any more retaliatory shootings, Ortiz vowed.
The first shooting was reported at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday. An 18-year-old man was shot on a porch on Gilbert Avenue. Seven minutes later, a 23-year-old man showed up at Yale-New Haven Hospital with a gunshot wound to the left leg; he claimed that two men he didn’t know attacked him while he was walking on DeWitt Street in the Hill.
Then, around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, 22-year-old Marquis “Toby” White was fired on by one or more men in a car passing him on Kensington Street. He was taken to the Hospital of St. Raphael, where he was pronounced dead Wednesday morning around 5:30 a.m. It was the city’s 14th murder this year.
At 8:53 a.m., a 25-year-old man showed up at the Hill Health Center with gunshots to his leg and arm. He’d been shot at Congress Avenue and Redfield Street. That shooting was probably in retaliation for White’s death, Ortiz said.
Police officials said at the press conference that the victims and suspected perpetrators in these incidents knew each other and had criminal backgrounds. They said the shootings didn’t involve gangs or drugs, but rather disputes over “respect” and neighborhood loyalties among young men in the Dwight and Hill neighborhoods.
“A whole group of people coming of age haven’t grown up with the opportunities for respect,” said Steven Marans (pictured) of the Child Study Center. “Too often when they’re left feeling insulted, violence is the only recourse.”
Ortiz noted that gun-related violence has been increasing not just in New Haven but in cities like Hartford and New York. “We’ve got to figure out why young people are settling disputes with guns,” he said. Ortiz said the department has probably prevented more shootings this year by making 124 weapons-related arrests, of which 70 percent involved felons.