New Haven police investigate city's 6th homicide

Police in New Haven are investigating the city's sixth homicide this year, and its third in a week.

Police said 23-year-old Shane Deran Barrett was shot several times at the corner of Gibbs Street and Dixwell Avenue Tuesday afternoon.

Police said someone posted pictures of Barrett online and fled the scene before police arrived.

Hey, no jokes, folks! New Haven is my home town. Most businesses have long since fled. Homicides are New Haven's most important industry. Last year, 35 out of a record 36 homicides in one year were, ummmm, ghetto dwellers from the 'hood. None were Hispanic despite a quite substantial Hispanic community. One was a white woman killed near a housing project.

New Haven's crisis was that, until a week ago, New Haven had only three known homicides. That has doubled in the last week. I imagine that the City Fathers and Mothers on the Board of Alders (as it is called) must have been considering an ammunition stamp program and beefed up marksmanship lessons in the gummint skewels (basically toxic babysitting agencies employing patronage hires by the local Demonrat Machine. Some, at least a few of the hires, are rumored to be able to recognize letters of the alphabet and to count to ten on two hands.

They just had a general revaluation of real estate and some folks (in the few remaining safe neighborhoods) are being charged (hold onto your hats) $60,000 per year for real estate taxes on one family homes. AND, we are not talking mansions here. All this for the pleasure of living in New Haven, shooting gallery of the East Coast.

See what the elite have in store for your future by following, as I do, the ongoing saga of New Haven in the New Haven Register or New Haven Independent on-line,

New Haven is also my hometown. It became a joke on its own starting with Mayor Dick (For those of you not familiar with New Haven, he went by Dick not by Richard except at his federal felony trial.) Lee and the urban removal (I think the official word was renewal) program which turned most of the city into slums.

There are a few nice and reasonably safe sections of the city—around the green for about a half mile but most of that to the west and nort is owned by Yale University, over in Westville, and in the hills north of Edgewood park. But the rest of the city is simply unsafe.

A few years ago I arrived in town around 3:00 a.m. and stopped at the Dunkin’ Donuts on Chruch Street for a cup of coffee and a donut. The place was a 24 hour coffee shop with a door that seemed more appropriate for a jewelry store. I had to be buzzed into the store. I later leared that there had been a half dozen murders near the center of town and a lot of rapes. By the way, the Dunkin’ Donuts is about three blocks from police headquarters.

Yale New Haven Hospital is on the edge of one of the worst sections of town. It’s unofficial motto have become “You stab ‘em. We slab ‘em.”

It’s ashame that the City of New Haven has fallen on such hard times but what should one suspect of a sancturary city lacking in leadership and foresight?

I don't remember Dick Lee being indicted or tried by the federales. Please provide details to jog my fading memory.

Under Lee, many distinguished downtown commercial buildings were bulldozed on the theory that they would be replaced by new spiffy buildings that would make everyone feel more "modern" and feel good about the new New Haven. A lot of distinguished buildings fell and were replaced by nothing but gravel parking lots to fatten city coffers by meager fees where fine taxable buildings had stood. These outrages were also the source of New Haven being named the first "All-American City."

Do you remember one-time Republican Town Clerk nominee Arthur T. Barbieri, who changed parties and became the Democrat Boss of New Haven? I knew him, liked him (I confess) and occasionally worked for him since he had been kind to my penniless Democrat grandmother. Arthur decided to get rid of Dick Lee after eight two-year terms in 1969. The New York Times stringer in New Haven got wind of the coup in the making and interviewed Arthur asking him how much Lee's victory margin would be in 1969. Arthur told him flat out that Lee would not be re-elected. The shocked reporter asked: Who could possibly defeat the nationally famous DicK Lee? Arthur deadpanned: Blindfold me, position me on the sidewalk at Church and Chapel Streets (the major downtown intersection) at noon and whoever I am pointing to just before you remove the blindfold, I will be able to make him a victor over Dick Lee. In the actual event, he supported a veteran Italian-American alderman from the St. Stanislaus parish area on State Street, Bartholomew Guida who was a lovely man but quite controllable by Arthur. Lee, figuring the odds, announced his sudden retirement (in the future at the end of his term) from the job he loved because of medical problems with his neck. He never ran for office again. His neck had probably been thoroughly wrung by Arthur.

In recent decades, the Democrats have an ever tighter death grip on the city but no talented youth. John DeStefano, the current mayor (for twenty years or so) and undisputed Democrat boss was once state Vice Chairman of College Republicans and a member of Young Americans for Freedom. He has degenerated greatly since. New Haven is one of America's worst tax hells.

Since you have moved to Texas and are a FReeper, you must certainly be intellectually capable but you arrived in downtown New Haven at 3 AM in some recent year and yet you survived and you are alive. You must be one tough hombre!

I lived near SCSU (as it is now called) formerly SCSC in St. Aedan's parish and later attended St. Mary's ner Yale and Sacred Heart.

May God bless you and yours!

P.S. Cruz or Dewhurst?

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