Thomas MacMillan Photo
Police arrested a 53-year-old man for allegedly raping a homeless woman at Occupy New Haven.
So announced police spokesman Officer David Hartman Wednesday morning.
The victim was wheeled off on a stretcher Tuesday afternoon after she claimed a man tried to assault her in her tent.
Members of the fire and police departments responded to the Green at around 3:30 p.m. Tuesday after occupiers found the woman apparently unconscious in her tent.
Fire staff treated the woman, who was inebriated and told them a man had come in her tent and tried to rape her, according to two people who spoke with the woman. EMTs took her to the hospital.
The details of the incident were unclear. Some people said it had happened Monday night. Others said it was less than an hour before police showed up Tuesday.
Police spokesman Hartman later said police believe the attack took place Monday night.
Occupier Jill Tupper said the woman had been camped for months on the upper Green, near the occupation. She initially was part of the main occupation, but people asked her to move away after people were found to be smoking crack in her tent, the occupier said.
Tupper said she’s been checking on her daily since then. She said the woman had been drinking cooking sherry in her tent.
Kenneth Driffin, a social worker who has helping move homeless people from the Green into shelters, said the woman suffered a black eye from the man who entered her tent.
Driffin said he and others had removed about 20 people out of 10 tents on the Green. He was shuttling people and their belongings to the Columbus House shelter in a white mini-van.
While some fled the Green, others dug in. Fortification of the camps central compound continued in advance of the city’s Wednesday noon deadline for people to leave Occupy New Haven.
Attorney Kevin Smith (at left in photo), who filed an injunction to block Occupy removal Tuesday along with attorney Norm Pattis, sat in the center of the camp, answering occupiers’ legal questions. He said people are nervous and anxious to know what to expect Wednesday if and when cops show up.
“A lot of these folks have never been arrested before,” Smith said. “They’re not hardened criminals.”
He adopted the language of the Occupy movement when he spoke about the Proprietors of the Green, the self-perpetuating private body that has technically owned the Green since the 17th century. “The 1 percent in the 1600s got to put in place that they were going to own this,” and they’ve handed it down among themselves ever since, he said.
Tourists stopped behind the metal fence on the Green to snap photos.
"Occupier Jill Tupper said the woman had been camped for months on the upper Green, near the occupation. She initially was part of the main occupation, but people asked her to move away after people were found to be smoking crack in her tent, the occupier said."
This is very similar to how the early puritan residents and the merchant class in New Haven treated the poor early in the town's history. The poor were marginalized from the town and placed on the outskirts of the 9 squares on the west bank of the west creek in an area that was known as "Sodom Hill", which later became simply "The Hill". These areas outside of town were the suburbs where undesirable people like the Irish and the poor were stuck next to undesirable uses like tanneries and waste deposits. This was a time before transportation innovation changed the purpose and character of suburbs, and the center of town was where business men and civic leaders conducted daily life without the nusiance of the "undesirables" in sight.
This occupation is quite the little microcosm of New Haven itself.