Police charged a Yale senior with larceny Monday evening after three Occupy New Haven members chased him and his friends to their frat house.
The chase began with a confrontation on the Upper Green, where the anti-corporate Occupy New Haven encampment has stood for the past six months.
Around 6:45 p.m. three “inebriated” Yalies paraded through the encampment screaming, “We’re the 1 percent. Fuck Occupy!” according to Roger Card, an occupier who has been at the encampment since its Oct. 15 debut.
Card said the three identified themselves as Yale seniors on the varsity football team. “They pushed down our gardener, who’s in his 60s” then ran across the street to Yale’s Old Campus, Card said.
Card said he and two fellow occupiers followed onto the Old Campus, where the trio allegedly pushed down a young woman, then grabbed a trophy cup away from a Yale freshman male.
“Can I please have my cup back?” the freshman asked the three, who spat at him and responded, “You ain’t getting nothing back,” Card said.
The three Yale students then ran toward Popeye’s on Dixwell Avenue, followed by the three occupiers. The Yalies then went inside a frat house on Goffe Street. The occupiers called the police.
Cops from the city and Yale departments showed up. The occupiers and the freshman who’d lost his trophy cup (and had also joined the pursuit) identified the assailants, according to Card.
The freshman got his cup back.
New Haven police spokesman Officer David Hartman said Monday night that the police issued one student a summons for sixth-degree larceny. Hartman said the report he received from the field was that “a group of Yale frat kids who had just gotten tattoos were walking through the upper Green” then stole a student’s trophy.
Meanwhile, an attorney for Occupy New Haven is scheduled to square off against city lawyers in the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New York City Tuesday morning over New Haven’s third attempt to evict the encampment.