Thomas Breen photo
Grandma Yolanda Herring (center): "Maleak, we love you and miss you always."
City police have arrested a 21-year-old man from Waterbury for the slaying of 16-year-old New Havener Maleak Sweets in Newhallville in January 2024.
Asst. Police Chief David Zannelli announced that arrest at a Wednesday afternoon press conference held on the third floor of police headquarters at 1 Union Ave. He was joined by Mayor Justin Elicker, lead Det. Michael Haines, Sgt. Josh Kyle, and members of Sweets’ family, among others.
According to state court records, the 21-year-old Waterbury suspect was arrested on Monday, and has been charged with one count of murder and one count of carrying a pistol without a permit. He has not yet entered pleas in response to either of those charges, and he is currently being held on a $2 million bond.
“Our days are filled with unbearable silence” since Sweets’ death, his grandmother, Yolanda Herring, said at Wednesday’s presser. “Maleak, we love you and miss you always.”
“We have been here many, many times,” Elicker said about the police department hosting yet another press conference about a murder arrest. May today be the “start of that process” of getting some justice, he said to the family. And to the public, he said, “we are yet again asking to stop the violence and put the guns down.”
Elicker also said that when he was killed, Sweets was expecting his first child, who is now just over 1 year old.
According to an eight-page arrest warrant affidavit written on May 7 by Det. Haines, city police officers responded to a house on Newhall Street at around 7:34 p.m. on Jan. 29, 2024, in response to a ShotSpotter report of two gunshots. Dispatch also received two 911 calls reporting a person shot.
Upon arrival, officers found the victim, later identified as Sweets, lying on the sidewalk. He was unconscious, and appeared to be suffering from a gunshot wound to the chest. Officers also observed a white Kia Rio parked nearby with bullet holes in it, and they found one projectile at the scene.
Sweets was transported by ambulance to Yale New Haven Hospital, where he later died from his injuries. The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined that the cause of Sweets’ death was gunshot wound to the head, and the manner of death was homicide. During the autopsy, a single projectile — consistent with a .45 caliber gun — was removed from Sweets’ body.
Det. Haines details over the course of the affidavit how a key interview, license-plate-reading cameras in Bridgeport and New Haven, and the assistance of Waterbury police led New Haven cops to a house on Ludlow Street in Waterbury, where they found a Ford Focus they believed was involved in Sweets’ homicide.
Officers observed two people, one later identified as the murder suspect, in the car. When the officers approached the car outside of the Waterbury house, the driver attempted to take off a fanny pack he was wearing. He placed the fanny pack “on the passenger seat and officers observed in plain view the handle of a handgun sticking out of the fanny pack.”
That gun was a .45 caliber Glock 30 with a serial number. Police later determined that this was the gun that likely fired the bullet that killed Sweets. Waterbury police arrested the suspect on charges of carrying a pistol without a permit, interfering with an officer, and illegal possession of a weapon in a motor vehicle.
Subsequent police work — including a witness interview, a review of phone records and pending CashApp payments, and messages between the Telegram accounts of users named “Rambo Ebk” and “Get Fried” — led cops to believe that the murder suspect was in Newhallville the day of the homicide to sell marijuana. A witness told police in a voluntary interview that he and Sweets were in that area of Newhallville to “take some weed,” which the witness confirmed “was to rob the individual delivering the ‘weed.’ ”
The warrant also includes a transcript of phone messages sent between the murder suspect and a different friend of his. In those messages, the suspect reportedly wrote that the person who showed up at the scheduled marijuana deal in Newhallville was not the person he had been messaging with via Telegram. “Its cool I ain’t worried about that shit,” the alleged killer allegedly wrote, “I fired and they ain’t even get right so I’m coolin.”
Det. Haines and Sgt. Kyle.