In the wake of a group attack on a jogger by Edgewood Park, a top cop is urging people to take precautions while exercising in public.
The attack occurred after a rain shower last Friday around 5:30 p.m.
The victim, a 63-year-old retired state employee who lives in the Beaver Hills neighborhood, described what happened in an interview with the Independent on Thursday. He asked that he remain anonymous.
The man said he has jogged regularly since moving to Beaver Hills in 1988. The asphalt road through Edgewood Park is one of his routes.
It had just stopped raining when he jogged along the route last Friday afternoon. Fewer people than usual were out.
He had passed the duck pond and was jogging along the road toward the skateboard park when between five and seven teens “came riding past me.” He had moved to the side to let them pass.
“I heard someone say something about ‘turning around,’” the man recalled. Then he saw one of the teens get off his bike and roll it at him. The rolling bike knocked the jogger down.
He got up. “What is this about?” he remembered telling them. “I don’t have any money.”
Then one of the teens “charged at me and knocked me down” again. Others joined in and punched and kicked him repeatedly for about 20 seconds, he estimated.
“Then they got back up and took off.”
They didn’t check his pockets. They wouldn’t have found a cellphone or any valuables on him if they had.
Somewhat disoriented, the man walked a trail up a slope to West Park Avenue. He realized partway up that he didn’t have his glasses. He figured that they’d been broken — and that it was more important to get help as quickly as possible.
He stopped a woman walking her dog on the street. The woman didn’t have a cell phone on her. Then the man tried flagging down passing drivers. The second driver, a parks employee, stopped and called 911. Soon cops and firefighters appeared. The man was taken by ambulance to Yale-New Haven Hospital.
Two of the officers went looking for the man’s glasses. They found them down in the park and brought them to the man in the hospital.
They weren’t broken.
The attack left the man with a broken arm and stitches in his forehead.
“It could have been worse,” he reasoned Thursday. He said the incident was not in any way of the magnitude of the bloodying of a New Haven Power Sports technician on Goffe Street the previous Friday afternoon. (Read about that here.)
Top Westville cop Sgt. Renee Forte emailed members of the neighborhood’s management team this week to tell them about the incident and warn them to take precautions while exercising in public.
Forte said she hadn’t heard about the incident initially; it didn’t appear in police department media releases, nor was it mentioned during this week’s CompStat data-sharing meeting at police headquarters. She said she learned about the incident from a New Haven Independent reader who saw it referenced in the site’s comments section. She then followed up with the victim, calling him at his home.
“Unfortunately assaults and fights happen frequently” and don’t always rise to the attention of district managers, Forte said. She cautioned against comparing this incident to the bloodying of the New Haven Power Sports technician.
In her email to community management team members, she added this advice:
“Please be mindful of your surroundings when walking/running/exercising. Please try to do these activities without talking on your cell phones or listening to music, as those make you less aware of the surroundings and also make you more of a target for robberies.”
The victim, meanwhile, said he does plan to resume jogging when he recovers from his injuries — “although I don’t know how I’ll feel about jogging on that route.”
The Top Cop was not aware of the incident. There seems to be a major breakdown in communication between the District Manager and the District Officers. There also seems to something amiss if the incident, of such violence and injury was not picked up by Detectives and discussed at the Com Stat meeting. Nothing mentioned about more patrols/bicycle officers/investigation, just a it of blaming the victim. And as a aside, the comment about not bringing a cell phone,, Um no more Call Boxes and almost no pay phones,and what I have seen in most parks never a Police Car.