A tale of two tragedies

Meanwhile, in far-off New Haven
    By Ben Smith

I was here for three and a half years before I heard the name Christian Prince. The sophomore murdered on Hillhouse Avenue in 1991 had drifted in Yale's communal amnesia until late this fall. Then, campus and national press covering my classmate Suzanne Jovin's stabbing invoked the Prince murder as Yale's last communal tragedy. At the beginning of this decade, the Prince murder became a symbol—of racial hatred, of Yale's distance from New Haven—creating a picture of Yale for the 1990s. As the decade comes to a close, Jovin's murder has shattered that picture.

The public interpretation of Prince's murder is captured in the title of Geoffrey Douglas' 1994 book about Prince and his alleged killer: Dead Opposites. Sixteen-year-old James Duncan Fleming, Jr., was a black gang member from Newhallville. Prince was a lacrosse player from the affluent neighborhood of Chevy Chase, Md. Fleming, the police claimed, had gone out with friends on the night of Feb. 17 to rob "a cracker." At 1:00 a.m., drama student James Van Bergen found Prince splayed out in front of St. Mary's Catholic Church on Hillhouse Avenue—just a block, as The New York Times pointed out, from the official residence of then-President Benno Schmidt, TC '63, LAW '66.

The Prince slaying came before conservative politicians began to call black teenagers "superpredators," but its symbolism fell along those lines. The nation saw Yale as an ivory fortress holding back the ghetto. Within the University, students marched for better security and more cops, and they got what they wanted: a $5 million investment in security ranging from an expanded police force to blue phones to the 2-WALK escort service. Yale—a conglomeration of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff that has always proven a bit hard to conceive of as a "community"—came together in fear of the city that surrounded it.

The event itself didn't measure up to its symbolic value, though that made little difference at the time. Fleming was never convicted of the murder (though he is still serving time for related robbery charges), and the author of Dead Opposites ended up finding more similarities than differences between the Prince and Fleming families. Community leaders, meanwhile, protested that the media and the police were ignoring the "routine" murder of a black man around the time of Prince's death, a murder within the city that Yale had begun to see as a homogenous, hostile force.

Since then, Yale has slowly moved toward a working relationship with the city. Students are again jogging down well-lit Hillhouse Avenue at night, and Prince's prep school, Lawrenceville, resumed sending its top graduates to Yale in 1995. But the old uneasiness pervades Yale's relationship with New Haven, expressed in the freshman-year security lecture and in a police force the size of a small army. For Yale's most recent show of insecurity, see this week's Herald cover story about Yale's creation of a "gateway" crafted to avoid downtown New Haven.

The immediate press spotlight on Jovin's death has turned into an accusing stare at the city that produced Fleming. Early New Haven newspaper articles hinted that the local mentally handicapped adults whom Jovin aided might be responsible for her murder. And some national media, in particular The New York Times, began writing about Jovin's death using words borrowed from the Prince slaying: her stabbing, the Times reported, had students "looking over [their] shoulders" (presumably for murderous locals). But that interpretation never got off the ground, thanks to obsessively reported gossip about Jovin's adviser, Lecturer James Van de Velde. Current student fixation has turned from suspicious talk of street gangs to whispers about a Yale faculty member and the possible significance of his former position in the Central Intelligence Agency.

This is Yale, and, for better or for worse, Jovin's tragic death will be construed to mean something. So far, her legacy is, thankfully, far less divisive than the "dead opposites" that memorialized Prince. But Jovin's murder may ultimately have as much influence on the shape of Yale as Prince's death did. Her murder is sad and frightening. It is also enormously confusing for a community that has spent a decade feeding on the myth that danger can only come from outside.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Yale oversteps its jurisdiction, 12/4/98
• Exit poll, Wards Two and 22, 11/13/98
• More than muffins, 10/30/98

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