New Haven Independent

Cruz and Emilio’s partner of eight years, Jenette Camacho, sat on the Cruz porch at 153 Atwater St., just north of Chatham Street, as more than 100 neighbors paid their respects and solemnly gathered, bearing candles and roses, in a spontaneous tribute. An all too brief but lifelong son of Fair Haven, he had played baseball for Cross and amateur teams after high school, and was clearly beloved by neighbors.

According to the city’s press release, Cruz was found lying not 25 yards from the house at Atwater and Chatham at 2:36 Saturday morning with a gunshot wound to the chest. He died at Yale-New Haven Hospital shortly thereafter. The police were soliciting any tips or help from the community. The release, issued by spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga, said that no motive or suspect information was being released.

But Saturday night people seemed to be gathering with little talk of what happened or might have happened, with few tips or even words. Instead a stunned dismay seemed to pervade the slowly shifting groups of neighbors that the premature dying of young men continues in a seemingly unstoppable pattern.

As more and more people gathered, placing candles and bouquets in the intersection, or writing farewells in the crosswalk with red chalked hearts or words, two police cruisers were on hand as well. There clearly was no permit for this spontaneous outpouring, but the police were not hampering the swelling crowd, only observing.

“Look at all these people,” Gloria Cruz said as Jenette placed her own candle and roses on the street. “This tells me what I know already, that Emilio was best friend to all these people. I have to be strong, too, I just have to be strong,” she said, “for my other boys.”

Gloria Cruz has two other sons, Emilio Jose and Cheche. The family has been in the neighborhood for 29 years, first on Peck Street and now on Atwater for 18 years. She described her son as someone who made a bad decision early on, but had straightened his life out, and had pursued the baseball he loved at Cross into playing for amateur teams in New Haven, while working a factory job on State Street.

And many of these people were not only related but also all too familiar themselves with the stages of grief the Cruz family was going through.

Kim Rodriguez, pictured on the right, is the mother of Domingo Rodriguez, III. He and Cruz were best friends, both pitchers on the Cross baseball team. “On July 12, 2006,” said Rodriguez, “Domingo was killed, also in a robbery gone bad in the Hill.” Two months later, his child was born. In the middle is Angelina Burroughs, Domingo’s grandmother, and on the left is Betsy Colon, whose daughter bore Domingo’s child. Colon said in her neighborhood on Woolsey Street in Fair Haven, not two houses down from where she lived, there was yet another homicide, just a week ago on July 26. “Miguel Gonzales was shot and killed in his car.”

After the death of her son, Kim Rodriguez said her family — three sons remain — moved out of Fair Haven to Morris Cove. After the Saturday shooting of Emilio, she said, it was not long before she heard from Gloria Cruz, and then others did too, many others.

Bad news travels fast, said Betsy Colon.

“You know how Gloria can remain strong?” Rodriguez asked, rhetorically, as people silently moved the candles from the street to a plot near a light pole. “I know. In the immediate aftermath, there’s so much to do. Later she will fall apart, but now you must do right by your boy. And Emilio was just remarkable. After Domingo was killed, I’ll never forget, he came to me and he said, ‘Mamma,’ - - he always called me mamma - ‘I’ll take care of your boys.’

He was amazing. Gloria said to me, on the phone, ‘At least they’re together again.’

Colon and Rodriguez said that two days before he was killed, Emilio was mugged. It was reported to the police. They surmised that in that first incident, the assailants were black. They said they thought the assailants who killed him Saturday were Puerto Rican.

It was not clear whether Mrs. Cruz offered a version of what the police had told her, or what she had heard from the street or surmised. However, she said in her view it was just a random, senseless robbery attempt. “My son ended up taking the bullets.”

She added only that the police were investigating and keeping the family informed.

In a drifting general conversation haunted by deaths present and past, people appeared to be speaking Saturday night not in anger but more in a kind of resigned, disturbing hush. Angelina Burroughs: “There are too many deaths over absolutely nothing.”

Rodriguez: “It’s almost as if the police can’t do anything to stop it.”

In the photo that Gloria Cruz had asked Jenette Camacho to bring down to her on the porch, Emilio is dressed in a white tuxedo. He’s a genial-faced young man. There’s a red flower in the lapel of his immaculately pressed white tuxedo. Has a warm smile, and he’s giving his mother a kiss before he leaves to go to the Cross Carnation Ball.

“At the end of that dance,” said Jenette Camacho, “he was elected Mr. Cross-Annex.”

“People need to speak up,” said Mrs. Cruz. “As a community, people need to help the cops solve this.”

A formal funeral, she said, is being planned for Monday or Tuesday at the 2nd Star of Jacob Church on Chapel at Lloyd Street. “It’s the largest place we could find in the neighborhood,” said Mrs. Cruz. “All these people are Emilio’s family.”