Paul Bass file photo
Latasha Brown at a 2021 vigil across from Edgewood Park, one day after the murder of her son Tashawn: The cycle of violence continued.
Latasha Brown was driving towards the city’s homicide memorial when her son opened the car’s rear door and allegedly started shooting.
She was on her way to pay tribute to another son who had been murdered the year before.
En route, according to police, the son she was traveling with became a murderer himself.
Those grim details are included in a 24-page arrest warrant affidavit for the 19-year-old New Havener whom police have charged with murder for the Dec. 19, 2022 shooting death of 16-year-old Joshua Vazquez on Valley Street near Harper Avenue in the West Hills neighborhood.
The young man whom police believe pulled the trigger was 17 at the time of Vazquez’s homicide. He has not yet entered a plea, and is being held on a $2.5 million bond.
During a recent press conference heralding the arrest, top police officials also revealed that the alleged killer’s mom, Brown, was at the wheel at the time of the fatal shooting.
Brown, a 46-year-old woman from Bridgeport, has been arrested on one felony count of accessory to murder. She has not yet entered a plea, and is being held on a $1 million bond.
Months prior to that latest charge, she had also been arrested on two other felony counts related to Vazquez’s murder: one for hindering prosecution in the second degree, another for tampering with evidence. She has pleaded not guilty to both of those charges.
The arrest warrant affidavit for Vazquez’s murder was written on June 20 by New Haven Police Department Det. Maegan Moran. The Independent obtained a redacted copy on Monday.
The document provides details on the interviews, surveillance footage review, license plate and cell phone tracking, and other investigative work that led to the arrest of Vazquez’s alleged shooter.
Moran’s affidavit also opens a painful window into a cycle of violence that two families were trapped in and perpetuated in the years leading up to Vazquez’s murder.
The story is spelled out in the warrant over the course of several interviews with the alleged killer’s mom, who spoke extensively with police, sometimes providing contradictory information.
The first such police interview took place on Dec. 22, 2022 — three days after Vazquez’s murder.
During that interview, Brown denied any involvement in Vazquez’s murder.
She also acknowledged that she knew Vazquez. She said he had previously stabbed her 15-year-old son. (The warrant states that police had arrested Vazquez for that stabbing back in November 2021, and that the case against him was dropped only after Vazquez’s own death.)
Brown said that, on the day of Vazquez’s murder, she had driven to New Haven to visit the murder site of another son, Tashawn Brown, who was killed at the age of 18 in May 2021 near Edgewood Park.
She claimed that she had visited that site on Ella T. Grasso Boulevard at 5 p.m. with five of her children, who were between the ages of 10 and 17, including the son police would ultimately arrest for Vazquez’s murder. She said she then went to her niece’s house in Newhallville before returning home late at night to Bridgeport.
The mom would change her story a number of times over the course of her interviews with police — in regards to the car she was driving the day of the murder, in regards to who exactly was in the car, in regards to what exactly happened at the time Vazquez was shot.
Her final interview with police — in May 2024, roughly a year after she had been arrested for hindering prosecution and tampering with evidence, and three months after she had been arrested for accessory to murder — offers the most detailed account of what Brown said happened that day, and why.
She said that she was driving a Toyota RAV4 with several of her children in the car. After stopping at the Dollar Tree on Amity Road to pick up balloons for a balloon release for Tashawn — who had been murdered in New Haven the year before — she and her family drove down Valley Street.
“Brown maintained that she was driving down Valley Street to pass the botanical garden where Tashawn’s memorial brick is located,” the warrant reads.
She said that one of her children was in the “trunk area” of the car, and had been bouncing around. She said she stopped the car on Valley Street to tell that child to sit down. That’s when one of her children opened the front passenger’s side door and said, “Ma, that’s him.”
Brown told police she did not know who her son was referring to. She said she then heard two gunshots as she pulled off.
She told police that her 17-year-old son — the one ultimately arrested for murder — held the rear driver’s side door open with his left hand as he shot with his right hand. She said she looked back after the shots had been fired and saw Vazquez fall off his bike. She pulled off in the car as her son hit the back of her seat, telling her, “Go, go, go.”
Brown told police she was “stressed.” She turned off Valley, then onto Whalley. She stopped on Dayton Street and told her son, the one who allegedly had just shot Vazquez, “you can get the fuck out ’cause I don’t know what I’m doing.” The son then jumped out of the car. She proceeded to drive to her niece’s house.
Brown implied she hadn’t told police this full story earlier because her son, the alleged murderer, had been in the house at the time of each prior interview. She said “she feared he would pull out his gun” depending on what she said. Brown then described two previous occasions when her son had pulled a gun on her or other members of the family over various disputes at home, including a fight about a towel on the floor and who needed to clean his room.
Brown said she never spoke with that son about Vazquez’s murder “because she kept her distance from him.” She said he was “off his meds, and using drugs, and she was angry.”
Asked why Vazquez’s murder happened, Brown described a “beef that started in 2017.”
She said that the son who would ultimately be arrested for Vazquez’s murder had a beef with one of Vazquez’s cousins and another person nicknamed “Quay.”
In 2017, her son “was jumped by a couple boys,” possibly Vazquez’s cousin and Quay. In response, later on, her son and his older brother “jumped” Vazquez’s cousin and Quay.
“In 2020, there was a big fight on Valley Street” near where Vazquez would be murdered two years later. The fight started between her older son, Tashawn, and Vazquez’s cousin. Brown alleged that Vazquez was going to shoot one of her sons, “but that never happened.” She also said Vazquez’s cousin said at the time “he wanted to be done fighting.”
Then, in May 2021, her older son, Tashawn, was killed at the age of 18 near Edgewood Park. One of the involved parties was “Quay.”
In November 2021, Vazquez allegedly stabbed one of Brown’s sons.
The son who would ultimately be arrested for Vazquez’s murder was in Department of Correction (DOC) custody at the time. Brown said that her son — who would allegedly shoot and kill Vazquez a year later — told her then he wanted “some get back.”
“This terminology,” Moran’s warrant concludes, “is slang for retaliation or revenge.”
The son who was arrested for Vazquez’s murder, meanwhile, told police a different story about Vazquez’s shooting death when he was interviewed in February 2023 after being arrested for an unrelated shooting.
He said he had been with his girlfriend at the time, and only heard about the shooting of Vazquez from a brother of his after the fact. He heard that another person, a family friend from North Carolina, was in the car on Valley Street and had fired the shots that killed Vazquez. He later told police that that person was not actually the shooter.
He said “he knows who the shooter is, and he refused to identify the shooter, because he was not going to be labeled a snitch.” He also denied being the shooter himself.
Still another version of what happened emerges in the middle of the warrant, as told by a confidential witness who spoke with police in the spring of 2023.
That witness said she had met the mom while both were incarcerated, following the mom’s arrest for interfering with prosecution in Vazquez’s murder case.
That confidential witness said Brown told her that “she and her son committed a murder sometime late October, early November” of 2022. She said Brown said that her son had killed Vazquez because Brown and the son’s father “were selling drugs” and Vazquez had robbed them.
Still elsewhere in the warrant is a partial transcript of a phone call conversation that the son had with his father. Both were incarcerated at the time.
“I don’t know the situation I know bits and pieces,” the father said, “but you know that’s for another conversation.”
And later, he said to his son that Brown wasn’t “built for jail,” and that this was her first time there. “Listen, at the end of the day man you gotta free your mother, you can’t let your mother go down for some shit, na mean?”