Bleeding on the sidewalk on Kensington Street, 22-year-old Marquis “Toby” White said those words to Ed Beamon after a man in a passing car shot him Tuesday. Beamon (above) returned to the scene of the shooting Wednesday and recalled consoling Beamon until the police arrived. Toby White did die in his hospital bed Wednesday morning. The shooting was one of four within 32 hours that police said were related to a spat between young men from the Dwight and Hill neighborhoods.
Ed Beamon was about to travel to police headquarters to i.d. some suspects in the shooting Wednesday afternoon when he revisited the shooting for a reporter.
Beamon recalled standing outside 12 Kensington St., a home he inherited from his mother, around 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, talking to a neighbor. Toby White was there, too. Lots of people, including kids, hang out that time of day on Kensington. The street, around the corner from the Hospital of St. Raphael, also attracts drug dealers and other criminals and has been a “hot spot” in the recent upsurge of shootings in New Haven.
“He was just standing here smoking a cigarette and minding his own business,” Beamon said of White.
Then three young men pulled up in a maroon car, Beamon said. They shot at White and hit him. Beamon rushed over to White to help him.
“They backed up to shoot again. I asked them to stop shooting.” For some reason the men in the car heeded the request and sped off. (Police soon thereafter found the car in the Hill neighborhood and arrested a passenger; the others escaped.)
Beamon said he covered White’s body with his own. “You’re gonna be all right,” Beamon told White.
White was taken by ambulance to St. Raphael’s. He was pronounced dead around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday. About three and a half hours later, a man was shot in the leg at Congress and Redfield streets in the Hill and taken to St. Raphael’s as well. Police Wednesday termed that shooting retaliation for White’s death. They said they believe that four shootings in all involved young men from the two neighborhoods who knew each other had a beef. The beef didn’t involve gangs or drugs, they said. Unlike a rash of gun violence in the late ’80s and early ’90s, recent shootings in New Haven appear to involve petty squabbles over “respect” and neighborhood allegiance rather than turf for criminal activity, according to police.
Beamon, 53, a former teacher who lives on disability, said he has known White all of White’s life. White lived around the corner on Chapel Street. Beamon lives in public housing on Park Street and rents out his house at 12 Kensington, where he grew up, and which he and a nephew inherited from his mother. Beamon recently evicted problem tenants from the house and has been painting it in anticipation of renting it out again.
He said he appreciated the police not terming the shootings gang-related. The police dealt with him and others at the scene with “compassion,” he said.
But he insisted that White didn’t know the shooters.
“These guys just got new guns and they were out there testing them,” Beamon insisted. “That’s the words on the street. And believe me, the word on the street is good.”
According to police spokeswoman Bonnie Winchester, White had been arrested in the past, more than once, on drug-related charges.
“He wasn’t a drug dealer. He wasn’t no criminal,” Beamon said of White, as candles burned on the sidewalk alongside a teddy bear in a memorial. Beamon has kept replaying the scene since the shooting. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” he said. “I keep seeing him here right now. If I keep talking about it now, I’m gonna cry.” So he stopped talking about it.
A “Fucked Up” World For a 15 Year-old
Olga, a high school sophomore shown at right in this photo with her friend Shurell, wanted to talk about it. Olga lives nearby. She was on the block when White was shot. She heard the gunshots, and got scared. She knew White.
“He was real nice. We all looked up to him. He was cool. You can’t even stand on ‘K’ Street anymore. You hear gunshots; you feel you have to go in the house.
“That’s fucked up. That’s real fucked up. Little girls like me — I’m 15 — can’t stand on the street. That’s fucked up.”
Another group of women, older than Olga and Shurell, seemed angrier than scared, although they said they, too, feel unsafe in their own neighborhood.
“We were real friends of Toby, like family,” said one of the women, who declined to give her name. She said he’d been in school; she didn’t know what he was doing for a living now. “I know he wouldn’t bother nobody. He was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
She scoffed when told that police officials were appealing to the community to help them solve the murder.
“They can’t solve this. This isn’t the first time you’re over here talking to us about one of our friends dying. We had all these cops out here when kids were out riding bikes this summer. Where at the cops fucking now?”
