Sophie Sonnenfeld Photo
Lead Detective Conklin: 80+% clearance record.
Several people said they saw someone stab a 49-year-old man to death during a fight at a Fair Haven intersection. Two separate cameras caught the stabbing on video.
Within three days police arrested the alleged killer.
The 56-year-old alleged stabber appeared in court Wednesday to answer to a murder charge in connection with the fatal stabbing, which took place at the intersection of Lloyd and Exchange streets Saturday at around 1:30 p.m.
The defendant did not enter a plea, and his case was continued to Aug. 2. He is being held on a $2 million bond.
Meanwhile, the arrest warrant affidavit describes the mix of technology and footwork that led to the man’s swift apprehension. It also partly reflects how police have been making more homicide arrests, with 15 completed so far this year compared to five at this same time last year.
The affidavit, written by Detective Daniel Conklin, details two eyewitnesses’ descriptions of the fatal fight. Those descriptions matched video footage of the fight taken from two vantage points: one recorded by a city-owned surveillance camera, the other by a camera at a nearby privately owned building.
According to all those descriptions, the victim, Robert Franklin, got into an argument, then a fight with the 56-year-old man, who “pull[ed] a knife from his waistband” and stabbed Franklin once in the left of his chest.
Franklin collapsed by a fire hydrant at the Lloyd-Exchange intersection. The stabber, meanwhile, drew a knife sheaf from his waistband and threw “it on the hood of an older model, red Corvette.” A minute later he entered a corner store, bought a beer, then walked out the door and away from the scene. His face was clearly caught on camera, as was a stomach tattoo of a “cursive tattoo reading “Dinjely,” seen through an unbuttoned shirt.
Cops arrived on scene to find the knife sheath, a black baseball hat, and a bloody checkered shirt. They began interviewing witnesses.
An ambulance crew, meanwhile, took Franklin to Yale New Haven Hospital, where Dr. Adrian Maung officially declared him dead at 2:10 p.m.
Cops quickly heard that the alleged stabber was known in the community as “Hommy.” A search of the name in the department’s “OpCenter” system brought up the suspect, “who appeared to match the physical characteristics of the male seen on security camera footage,” Conklin wrote. Conklin added that he knew police suspect Hommy had carried out a stabbing at the same corner on May 5, a fact he confirmed with the lead detective in that separate ongoing investigation.
A state corrections officer assigned to the NHPD Criminal Intelligence unit gave Conklin “numerous photos” of Hommy from when he was previously incarcerated; the photos showed the same “Dinjely” tattoo seen in the surveillance video footage, Conklin wrote.
A probation officer who has been supervising Hommy for a year also confirmed that he was the man pictured in the videos.
Based on that information, a judge signed a warrant for Hommy’s arrest on Tuesday, the same day police arrested him.
Police Chief Karl Jacobson said that on top of the probable cause cited in the warrant, investigators are waiting to receive DNA tests results on the physical evidence recovered on the scene.
He credited “officers’ ability to connect with the community” for producing crucial initial evidence, buttressed by detectives’ follow-up work. He noted that Conklin, the lead detective on the case, has more than an 80 percent clearance rate on cases assigned to him, among the highest in the department.
“He’s an excellent detective,” Jacobson said of Conklin. “He works really hard on homicides.”