New Haven Independent

It was his house the victim approached stumbling out of the cemetery, and from there that the calls to police were made at 10:36 a.m. His mom, he said, had given her a blanket to wrap up in. “I was just sitting here on my porch and…”

Manuel cut his comments short as his younger stoop-mates, casting glances at the cop car parked across the street, reminded him “he didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

It was Lucy Otero (pictured), Manuel’s next-door neighbor, who identified him and his mom Cruz as the first-responders after the graveyard crime. They “gave her a blanket and called 911” was the story Otero heard when police cars next door prompted her to “go to [her] neighbor and ask, ‘What’s going on?’”

Otero saw no reason for tight lips. “If I know something, I’ll tell it. I’ve got family. If something happened to them and every went quiet, I don’t like that. I’m scared about that guy.”

Normally, Otero’s main Bright Street worry is a lack of lighting at night, so that it’s intimidating to go to the store and harder to stay clear of cars that come speeding by, she complained. “None of the streetlights are working.” Streetlights wouldn’t have been a help to the victim of Thursday’s mid-morning crime, but Otero seemed to lump the safety issues together. “When you live near to a cemetery you think everything is quiet. But it’s not. They need to be more vigilant here.”

Thursday’s assault drove home a need for more attention to block safety for others, too. “They should have done that a long time ago,” said a woman named Angie, referring to the heavy presence of police poking around the area.