Feature Story: Coping with the Tragedy on Amistad St.

On Mon., Sept. 14, as flickering candles lit the warm evening, Yale students packed the Cross Campus lawn to honor the memory of a girl that most of them had never met. Following the tragic and disturbing events of last week, which culminated in the discovery of Annie Le’s body in the wall of a Yale laboratory facility, it was an emotional and moving show of how much sadness and anxiety the crime had produced in the Yale community. There was a moment of silence full of muffled sobs, accompanied only by chirping crickets and the clicking cameras of national news media.

President Levin called it, “the gathering of a broken community.” A community, it seems now, that was broken from the inside. Unlike the frequent crimes that occur on the streets of New Haven, news of which reaches Yale students through Chief Perrotti’s emails, the murder of Annie Le occurred inside a Yale building. Even more disturbingly, it seems likely now that the murderer was a Yale employee, with a white, bar-coded Yale ID—for many students, the ultimate badge of safety, security, and trust.

Normally, a tragedy of this nature becomes associated with the place where it happened. Observed from a distance, this association helps relegate the potential for violence to another location. But if the perception of a crime is so closely tied to where it occurs, what happens when we find it inside the gates of our school?

IN EARLY MAY, A BEARDED 29 YEAR-OLD MAN

named Stephen Morgan walked into the Wesleyan University campus bookstore in Middletown, CT, and fatally shot Johanna Justin-Jinich, a Wesleyan junior. She died that afternoon. With a gunman on the loose, the Wesleyan campus shut down. The following evening, Morgan turned himself in. Investigators discovered that Morgan had known Justin-Jinich from a summer program at NYU, and had sent her 38 harassing emails.

For Wesleyan students, it was a frightening time. Wesleyan junior Sabina Friedman-Seitz said that worried students confined in their dorms received advisory text messages and emails from the university, telling them there was evidence that the killer was still armed and dangerous. “We got an email saying that the suspect was planning to kill Jews on campus. A Jewish Columbine. At that point, we were not allowed to leave our rooms. By the time he turned himself in, many people had left campus.”

Because location is an easy way to identify a crime, the national media referred to the murder as “the Wesleyan shooting.” So although the murder was not causally connected to either Wesleyan University or Middletown—but rather the result of a deranged man’s obsession—the violence was inextricably connected, in minds and in media, to Middletown.

Melanie Boyd, a professor at Yale who teaches “Cultural Narrative of Violence Against Women,” says that to attribute violence, site-specific or not, to the place it occurs is the natural reaction for both residents and the media. The media, said Boyd, uses this trope to help viewers achieve a facile understanding: “The media has a better story—a story that’s more visceral—if it’s a story about particularly dangerous location that pretty much fits in with something we already know, but has a certain twist.”

For people trying to cope with tragedy, the same tactic carries some psychological comfort. It’s unlikely that acts of violence at Wesleyan, or the shooting in the basement of a Harvard house later that month, made Yale students think twice about the safety on their campus. “If something happened on a corner, and you blame it on that corner, that makes you feel safer,” said Boyd.

THE ANNIE LE TRAGEDY LEFT THE CAMPUS VISibly shaken; in quiet dining halls, students discussed the day’s news in hushed tones, and at Monday night’s vigil, they stood in tearful silence.

National news sources decried the violence of New Haven’s poor neighborhoods. As with Middletown, they noted how dangerous the neighborhoods around the medical school are. Crime in New Haven has actually been steadily declining, and the murder of Annie Le, like the case at Wesleyan, was not the result of random community violence. But in the media, it was easy to tie the story in with New Haven’s gritty reputation. Clearly, this association would not be so simple for Yale students.

To provide psychological reassurance to a battered student psyche, and presumably, to try to bolster Yale’s image under the constant gaze of news cameras, Yale police made themselves a constant presence on and around campus last week.

In the medical center area, they were ubiquitous, standing in groups of two or three behind the Crime Scene caution tape and parking squad cars on every other corner. During the vigil, policemen flanked the entrances to Cross Campus.

On the midnight bus back from the train station Sunday night, not four hours after President Levin’s email broke the grisly news that Le’s body had been discovered encased in a wall, the flashing lights of parked police cars painted the walls of surrounding buildings blue and red. As the bus passed Amistad Street, every pair of eyes swung towards the windows.

Apart from the flashing lights, the scene looked normal, even mundane. The same deserted streets and the same empty park. A Yale facility like any other, protected by the usual network of ID scanners and security cameras. And this is precisely why the murder of Annie Le has hit the Yale community so hard. There is no mistake that needs correcting, no fault in the security system. This is simply a breech in our conception of human nature

TO SAY WE LIVE IN A STATE OF PERPETUAL FEAR, as the national news would have you believe, would be a great exaggeration. But the disturbing incident at 10 Amistad Street has forced students to change the way they think about being alone.

Maddie Haddon, JE ’12, has a job in Green Hall on Chapel Street. She works in a basement office, where there is generally little activity. Two weeks ago, she might have described it as peaceful. On Monday, she felt differently.

“When I was there by myself,” she said, “I realized there was no noise, no movement, there was no one around me, and I had no cell phone service. I tried to call someone to pass the time, realized I was pretty far away from any stairwells. Usually I would have enjoyed being alone for a few hours to get some work done, but…”

It is not as though the murder of Annie Le weighs on Yale students at all times, but in moments of anxiety, when the comforting words were once, “That would never happen here,” it is a dark reminder that human intentions, even in the most secure environments, are not always good.

Haddon went outside and sent a text message to a friend saying where she was, and when she was due back. “I was pretty freaked out the entire time,” she said.

RAYMOND CLARK III, THE LAB TECHNICIAN

charged with Le’s murder, was subject to the usual intensive background check required of Yale employees and was not a resident of New Haven. And so the crime has inspired meditation on something much larger than inner-city violence. As President Levin said in his email to the Yale community Thursday morning, following Clark’s arrest, “This incident could have happened in any city, in any university, or in any workplace. It says more about the dark side of the human soul than it does about the extent of security measures.”

To take a violent act involving two acquaintances and tie that crime to its community helps distract from the real conclusion: Man has a disturbing capacity for violence, even within the keycard gates of Yale University. But it is not so easy to rewrite our geographies of fear: As Boyd points out, we have always been most likely to be hurt by people we know, in places we feel safe.

And still the streets remain, in our minds, the place where dangers lie. This is the coping mechanism of the human mind: to keep safe what we think should be safe, and to continue to avoid what is supposed to be dangerous. Yale will remember that the murder of Annie Le occurred at 10 Amistad Street, in a desolate neighborhood—although the fact is that, qualitatively speaking, one secure Yale facility is not so different from any other.

By Henry Grabar Sage

<—Previous                                                                                              Next—>