Two Yale students were held up at gunpoint outside of Timothy Dwight College on Wed., Sept. 20. Margaret Hayden, TD '98 and Ada Sheng, TD '98, were walking home from Koffee? at 10:30 p.m. when they noticed a man walking towards them on the right side of the street.
According to Hayden, as the students were about to pass People's Bank, the man approached them and demanded that Sheng give up her wallet. "He walked in between us and pulled out a gun - not a handgun, but a semiautomatic gun. Ada was holding her wallet, and he took it and kept walking, and we kept walking too," Hayden said.
Sheng reported that the students had attempted to identify the perpetrator from a lineup of five suspects, but were unable to do so. The police are still investigating the matter. "They have found the wallet and have taken fingerprints," Sheng said.
An article published by the Yale Daily News on Thurs., Sept. 20, reported that it was not Hayden but Maggie Malone, TD '98, who had been walking with Sheng on Wednesday night. According to the Daily, the students had been walking home from the People's Bank ATM machine when the mugger threatened them with a small handgun, and then carried off a backpack, coursebooks, and hundreds of dollars of cash and personal belongings.
"The Daily's article was inaccurate," Hayden said. "We were confused and wondered where this story had come from."
Sheng, Hayden, and Malone reported that they had not been approached by Daily reporters. "They made absolutely no attempt at contact at all," Malone said. "They did not speak to my roommates or even call to apologize after the article came out."
Malone said that her telephone has been ringing off the hook since the Daily article came out. "This incident is a tribute to the sympathy and concern of the Yale student body. At the same time, it is embarrassing insulting that two TD-ers on the Daily staff do not care enough to correctly identify individuals in their own residential college."
Copyright 1995, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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