Somebody shot a 22-year-old man to death in Fair Haven overnight.
Responding to a 911 call, cops went to a Clay Street house around midnight. In the side yard of the house they found a man named Marquis Harris shot to the head, according to police spokesman Officer David Hartman. Harris went by ambulance to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 2:41 a.m. Monday.
Sgt. Al Vazquez said Monday morning that the police do not yet have a suspect in the homicide. Police ask anyone with information to call 203 – 946-6304.
The house has a history in New Haven’s ongoing slumlord-mortgage fraud drama.
It was one of many homes in low-income neighborhoods supposedly purchased by a public-housing tenant working for an alleged mortgage-fraud ring run by a man going by the alias Kwame Nkrumah (the late liberator of Ghana from British rule). The public-housing tenant was actually a “straw buyer” who received cash to pretend to buy properties for the ring, which then used fake, inflated sale prices to obtain and walk away with mortgage money, according to a subsequent federal indictment. (Read about that case here.)
The building is currently owned by a North Haven-based limited-liability corporation called Bertone Associates, according to city land records.
It was previously owned by Janet Dawson, part of a slumlord team that has left a trail of sometimes deadly blight throughout New Haven neighborhoods like Fair Haven. The house is next door to a former crack house the city took over and resold last year.
How many is that this year? Seems like we're regressing a bit this year with violent crime, or perhaps it's just my imagination.