Paul Bass Photo
Detective Juan Monzon at the crime scene.
Detectives scoped out the area of Lloyd Street between Wolcott and Exchange Monday to try to gain a fuller picture of how a 51-year-old man lost his life after a fight there this weekend.
The fight took place around 9 a.m. on the steps of a Lloyd Street home in the Fair Haven neighborhood.
A 42-year-old man whose family rents the house told police he came outside to find two other men, whom he didn’t know, “smoking drugs” on the front steps, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman.
The 42-year-old man confronted them. They all “ended up fighting,” Hartman reported in a release. “One of the men was holding a metal pipe.”
The 42-year-old man struck, Manuel Vega Ruiz, 51, one of the alleged drug users, unconscious during the fight. Vega-Ruiz never regained consciousness. He died at the hospital Sunday morning at 1 a.m. He had “recently moved to New Haven from Florida. He’d not yet found a permanent residence. He’d been staying with his nephew in New Haven,” family told the cops.
Officers responding to the scene found the 42-year-old man nearby. He was arrested and charged with second-degree assault. Now it will be up to the state whether to charge the arrestee with manslaughter as well.
On Monday, the arrested man’s wife, Tajuana, said the fighting hd woken her up Saturday morning. She came outside to find the victim on the ground across the street, she said.
“They jumped him and he was defending himself,” Tajuana said of her husband, who remains incarcerated. “He was defending his house.” She said she did not see the fight. (She declined to be photographed.)
She and her husband moved to the house from New York City a few months ago to live in the house with some of his relatives, she said.
A man who lives a half-block away said he hadn’t heard the commotion. He said he has seen four shootings on the block in his 11 years living there; he said he stopped two other shootings by calling out loud when he observed a shooter approaching a victim.
He spoke highly of his neighbors, whom he called “family, God-fearing people” with whom he had planted a community garden on Wolcott. But he said much the area has been “overtaken by drugs,” and he plans to sell his house and move to Florida.
The only camera near the crime scene that might have captured Saturday’s incident was apparently broken. The investigation is ongoing.
So a person can't defend his home from drug addicts who squat and do drugs on his property? Seriously?