The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Cops: Pan stole car to come to Connecticut
NEW HAVEN — Qinxuan Pan, named a person of interest in the killing of a Yale graduate student, allegedly stole an SUV, changed his cellphone number and dropped out of contact with his family ahead of the incident, according to a police report.
The Attleboro District Courthouse in Massachusetts released the report, written by Mansfield, Mass., police to secure a warrant for Pan’s arrest.
In the report, Officer Joshua Ellender said a salesman at a local dealership had reported a car stolen at around 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6, the day Kevin Jiang was killed.
According to the report, the salesman “explained that Qinxuan Pan walked in today and wanted to test drive” a blue GMC Terrain SUV and bring it to his mechanic for inspection before potentially buying it. Pan left with the vehicle around 11 a.m., according to the report.
The salesman asked Pan around 5:30 p.m. when he would be returning the vehicle. Pan initially asked for more time, saying he had a family emergency, then stopped responding to texts and calls after being told he needed to return the car by closing time at the dealership.
Ellender asked Malden police to check whether the vehicle was at Pan’s residence in that community.
Pan’s mother reportedly told Malden police that Pan had “changed his cell phone number and wouldn’t tell them where he was,” but that he would return the vehicle.
A call from Hearst Connecticut Media to a number for Pan’s home in Malden Friday was unsuccessful, as the line had been disconnected.
The salesman also vouched for Pan, saying he believed he wasn’t stealing the car, as he seemed like a squared-away individual.
Ellender thus “delayed entering the vehicle as stolen and gave Qinxuan a chance to contact me or to return the vehicle,” he said in the report.
At 10:30 p.m., he checked on the matter; Pan had not returned the SUV. He entered the vehicle as stolen at 10:40 p.m., he said in the report.
He was then notified at 10:45 p.m. that North Haven police had reported “they had just towed the vehicle,” as Pan had gotten it stuck on railroad tracks while driving it in a scrap yard in Connecticut.
Pan allegedly had attached a commercial Connecticut license plate to the vehicle, replacing the dealer plate, according to the report.
In asking for the warrant, Ellender noted that Pan was believed to be potentially involved in “a serious criminal case” in New Haven, had concealed the vehicle’s identity, and “fled to another state” before New Haven police arrived to question him.
A nationwide manhunt has since ensued for Pan, considered a person of interest in Jiang’s death, with a $10,000 reward.
He reportedly last was seen in Georgia, according to the U.S. Marshals Office for Connecticut, and could be staying in the Duluth or Brookhaven areas of that state.
U.S. Marshal Matthew Duffy on Friday said there had been no developments in the search.
Jiang’s body was found around 8:30 p.m. Feb. 6 on Lawrence Street near its intersection with Nash Street, according to New Haven police.
Pan reportedly checked into the Best Western Hotel on Washington Avenue in North Haven around 10:30 p.m., roughly two hours after Jiang was killed.
Jiang was engaged to be married to Zion Perry; his fellow students and members of Trinity Baptist Church, where he volunteered, are raising funds to support his family .
Perry attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the same time as Pan, who is a graduate student there. Photos of the two of them interacting have been posted online; Perry has not returned requests for comment regarding them.
Police believe Pan was
“in the area” at the time Jiang was killed, New Haven Police Chief Otoniel Reyes has said.
The department considers Pan a person of interest; at this time, he is not officially suspected of committing the shooting.
North Haven Chief Kevin Glenn previously said that Pan was found behind the wheel of a vehicle with a flat tire in the parking lot of Sim’s Metals, a junkyard on Universal Drive, by North Haven police. Officers found Pan had a valid license and that the vehicle was properly registered, Glenn said.
He said it was reported stolen by a Massachusetts police department later in the evening.
Pan then booked a room at the Best Western Hotel on Washington Avenue, but seemingly did not enter it, according to General Manager Rohit Sawhney.
New Haven police previously said that anyone who knows of Pan’s whereabouts should use “extreme caution” and is asked to call the department at 203946-6304.
Last week, while much of the state got rained on, I got iced.
I live on the northeast edge of Litchfield County. In my town, and the towns nearby, it was cold enough at ground level that the rain froze when it fell on tree limbs, railings and clotheslines. The birches in my yard were suitably bent.
A lot of this had to do with elevation and cold pockets of air — when I drove east, downhill, the ice was a no-show.
Nor did the rain — which forecasters first thought might glaze larger parts of Fairfield and Litchfield counties — freeze much of anything there.
“We measured .08 inches of ice,’’ said Gary Lessor, director of The Weather Center at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury. “We knew by Saturday it would be less than a tenth.’’
Matt Spies, of Brookfield — state coordinator of CoCoRHAS, the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network, which uses a corps of volunteers to collect precipitation data — said by the time he checked his gauges, the little ice that might have been was washed away.
“I got a half-inch of rain,’’ Spies said
This is one of the problems of ice storms — they can weigh heavily in some towns, and lighten up a few miles away. They’re largely unstudied and hard to calibrate. Rain falls into gauges, snow gathers on the ground. But how do you measure ice — radially, on the branch of a tree, or horizontally, on top of a flat surface?
But when the temperatures and storm patterns line up correctly, they have the potential to do serious damage to the environment, as well as make human lives miserable. The events of last week showed that, with icing shutting down a good part of the Southwest U.S.
Because that storm caused minimal problems here, we could dismiss it as something happening in Texas. But the rain and ice we got was part of the same system that proved a killer down south.
“These are massive winter storms,’’ said Bill Jacquemin, senior meteorologist at the Connecticut Weather Center in Danbury.
Ice storms happen when a layer of warm air flows into a column of cold winter air, while a narrow layer of freezing-temperature air gets trapped at the earth’s surface. If snow falls, the warm air melts it into rain. When it hits the earth, it freezes on contact.
Jacquemin said a hard, steady rain doesn’t convert into an ice storm, because the rain washes away the ice as it forms. What’s needed is sustained drizzle and mist. Then, the ice accumulates.
When that happens, the weight of the ice downs tree limbs. Those falling branches, in turn, take down power lines and make travel treacherous.
“Even if there’s a blizzard, people think they can drive, if they give themselves more time,’’ Lessor of Western’s Weather Center said. “People are afraid of ice.’’
New England generally gets a moderate ice storm every five to 10 years and a severe one every 35 to 85 years.
In 1898, a severe ice storm shut down the state’s Northwest Connecticut, with witnesses saying the sound of tree limbs cracking reminded them of July 4 fireworks.
On Dec. 16, 1973, another severe ice storm caused a third of the state to lose power. That storm caused more damage to Connecticut’s trees than the Great 1938 Hurricane.
There has been recent work to study ice storms and how they work.
In the winters of 2015-16 and 2016-17, researchers at the 7,800-acre Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire’s White Mountains created the first man-made ice storms, using fire hoses to spray trees with water on freezing nights.
What the research team found was that at a quarter-inch of ice or less, trees suffered minimal damage. At a half-inch or more, the branches started falling.
The team estimated that a heavy ice storm could bring down a year’s worth of woody debris in one night. The trees also suffered wounds that did not heal readily. Where icing was heaviest, the damage opened the forest canopy, letting more light onto the forest floor.
Lindsey Rustad, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service, who led the ice storm research at Hubbard Brook said that with climate change making extreme weather events more frequent, it’s important to better understand how ice storms work.
“They happen from Texas to New England to Oregon’’ she said. “They happen all over the world.’’
For all the constraints that COVID-19 has laid on people of faith, houses of worship across southwest Connecticut are undergoing an awakening that is changing how congregations connect with each other and expanding how they reach out to neighbors.
“This has been a great exercise in looking past our own faith community to come together to meet the needs of the people of our city,” said the Rev. Carl McCluster, the longtime pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Bridgeport. “People don’t need ceremony – they need the love of God itself, and maybe we’re being forced now to make good on that.”
The spiritual leader of a Stamford synagogue agrees that the urgency of the COVID emergency has given his congregation a renewed appreciation for “the fragility of life and being more active in preserving it.”
“It has been a transformational year,” said Rabbi Joshua Hammerman of Temple Beth El in Stamford, where bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals are now streaming online along with weekly services. “We have always prided ourselves as being a congregation without walls, and this year we have had to prove it.”
Clergy and lay leaders in Hamden, Norwalk, Greenwich and Danbury tell similar stories about how the coronavirus crisis has “leveled the playing field” and inspired their congregations to do more to help the hungry, the homeless and the poor.
The stories of innovation and inspiration are so prevalent, in fact, that a leading researcher in Hartford believes they amount to more than a collection of pandemic anecdotes, but a seminal moment in American history.
Researcher Scott Thumma, who is embarking on a national multimillion-dollar study about the subject, believes something is happening at the “deep interpersonal and spiritual level” that “may signal a new reality for American congregational life.”
“The tremendous amount of change that congregations have put into effect in an incredibly short amount of time is frankly shocking to me,” said Thumma, a professor of Sociology of Religion at Hartford Seminary, and the director of the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. “It’s taken a crisis for congregations to risk making these sacrifices.”
Thumma has just been awarded a $300,000 planning grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to design a five-year study that explores