When crime came to campus, Yale University responded
Three homicides over an 18½-year span, beginning in the early 1990s, shattered the notion that an Ivy League university in the center of a city then known for crime was immune to the violence that occasionally erupted near its doorstep.
The media storm that resulted after the slayings of Yale University students Christian Prince in 1991, Suzanne Jovin in 1998 and Annie Le in 2009 pushed issues of class and privilege front and center.
New Haven has had years of high levels of violence that terrorized neighborhoods and devastated families and communities. But the media covered the Yale incidents more intently, because, despite evidence to the contrary, people still interpret colleges as a place where nothing bad happens, said Richard Hanley, associate professor of Journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden.
“As we see with sexual assaults and hazing incidents, etc., colleges don’t deserve that part of mythology. They are just as susceptible to social ills as anywhere else,” Hanley said.
Changing the landscape
“These tragedies showed that Yale and New Haven are linked in so many different ways. It didn’t make any sense to keep Yale as a separate entity, so Yale and New Haven police established a partnership,” Hanley said.
Police bulked up patrol routes around the city, and Yale started offering shuttle buses throughout the area, particularly protecting graduate students who lived in East Rock and other areas, he said.
“Seeing Yale security vehicles has become more common throughout town, outside of the Yale campus proper,” Hanley said.
Looking back
But in 1991, the slaying of Prince, a 19-year-old, fourth-generation Yale University student shot dead in a robbery gone bad, rocked the campus. It was a random crime perpetrated against a student at one of the most elite universities in the world.
Prince was the first Yale student killed on campus since 1974. Melvin Jones was convicted in the 1974 shooting of a Yale student, Gary Stein, and served 15 years in jail for the crime, the Register has reported. Jones and a number of New Haven teenagers robbed Stein near campus.
Prince, of Chevy Chase, Md., was more than 6 feet tall, blonde and athletic, and set to graduate in 1993. He had dined at the private club Mory’s and went to an on-campus party until about 1 a.m. While his friends went out for pizza afterward, Prince walked home to his apartment on Whitney Avenue.
He was found dead, shot in the heart, on the steps of St. Mary’s Church on Hillhouse Avenue.
Four months later, 16year-old James Duncan Fleming, of the Newhallville section of New Haven, was arrested for Prince’s murder after his accomplice that evening tipped off police that the two had mugged Prince in an attempt to steal money for concert tickets. Two juries later acquitted Fleming, then 18, of murdering Prince. But the state Appellate Court later upheld the first jury’s finding that Fleming was part of a conspiracy to rob someone on the night Prince was killed
“That’s when Yale and the city began making overtures to each other,” said former New Haven Register reporter Walt Kita. “Yale recognized they couldn’t live in this ivory tower, so they had to integrate into the community.”
Yale started to embark on a philosophical shift, buying a lot of land on Church Street in central New Haven, Kita said.
“They recognized ‘We’re part of this urban setting. We can’t isolate ourselves from it,’ ” Kita said.
Yale University spent millions on campus security following Prince’s slaying, the Register reported in 1993, with more police, more street lights, more emergency telephones, more shuttle buses and escort services.
An assistant secretary of the university who was responsible for security issues told the Register in 1993 that the security efforts — including bringing in experts and state-of-theart systems for buildings — would continue under the administration of Yale’s then-new President Richard C. Levin, who went on to serve in that post for 20 years. Levin worked closely with then-Mayor John DeStefano Jr. to make changes in the city and the towngown relationship.
“(Yale) realized it was losing professors and students to Princeton and Stamford because of the unfair reputation that New Haven got,” said New Haven Independent Editor Paul Bass, who has been covering the Elm City for more than 30 years, and graduated from Yale in 1982. “If you looked at Harvard, Stamford, and how much more they were doing with their city, Yale needed that 180-degree turnaround.
“Christian Prince shattered the notion that Yale could have a moat around it separating it from New Haven,” Bass said.
Nearly eight years later, the Dec. 4, 1998 murder of 21-year-old Jovin, a student from Gottingen, Germany, quickly elicited worldwide media attention. Jovin, who was stabbed 17 times in the back, neck and head, was found on the mansion-lined intersection of East Rock Road and Edgehill Road, less than 2 miles away from where she was last seen walking.
The murder weapon was never located. Her homicide remains unsolved.
The evening of her death, Jovin participated in a gathering at Trinity Lutheran Church for Best Buddies, a group she volunteered for, which helps people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Afterward, she went home and then to Phelps Hall to return the key of the Yale vehicle she borrowed for the event.
She was last seen leaving Phelps Gate around 9:25 p.m. It is believed that was the last time anyone, except the killer, saw her alive.
A 911 call placed just before 10 p.m. alerted police a white female was lying in the street at Edgehill and East Rock. Today, this sleepy residential intersection offers no clues to the attack that took place there nearly two decades ago.
Jovin was entering her final semester at Yale, where she was studying political science and international studies.
Four days after her slaying, James Van De Velde, then a 39-year-old political science teacher at Yale, was a person of interest in the murder. Van De Velde graduated cum laude from Yale University, was granted fellowships at Stanford and Harvard, and earned his Ph.D. from Tufts University, according to the New York Times.
He was Jovin’s senior thesis adviser for her dissertation on Osama bin Laden. The former Naval intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency worked on al-Qaida’s interest in biological weapons, among other duties.
Shock waves from the crime were felt throughout the community. By this time, Yale and the city were working closely on towngown relations.
“Everyone was distraught. It was something that just rocked Yale hard,” Kita said. “People were truly devastated by it.”
In July 2008, police released a sketch based on the account of one witness who described a man running from the area of Huntington Street and Whitney Avenue, near where Jovin was found.
Police released the description of a physically fit, athletic-looking white male with defined features, in his 20s to 30s, with wellgroomed blonde or dark blonde hair wearing dark pants and a loosely fitting green jacket.
“His personality, his manner, and all these coincidences just made him a natural person of interest,” Kita said.
However, no evidence was found linking Van De Velde to Jovin’s murder and in 2013 then-State’s Attorney Michael Dearington, asked if he doesn’t consider Van de Velde to be in “the pool of suspects,” where he was placed by officials shortly after Jovin’s death in 1998, said, “I think that’s fair to say.”
In a March 2000 ABC news episode of “20/20,” show host John Miller asked Van De Velde if he killed Jovin, which he denied.
When asked if he stabbed her, Van De Velde said, “I have never committed an act of violence in my entire life. I have never so much as kicked a cat in my life. There can never be, there are no reports ever of me committing any violence or threatening anyone.”
In June 2013, Van de Velde settled a lawsuit against Yale and the city.
“I am pleased to announce that my legal action against senior officers of Yale University and the city of New Haven for having been wrongly labeled a suspect in the unsolved 1998 Suzanne Jovin murder investigation is officially over,” Van de Velde said through his lawyer.
Van de Velde is now a lecturer at the Center for Advanced Governmental Studies at Johns Hopkins University and adjunct faculty at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserve, according to Johns Hopkins.