According to the Yale University Police Report, George had just finished an evening run and was heading down the pathway between Toad’s Place and Mory’s back to his car when he heard two males shouting and cursing. Thinking the two had been cursing at him he turned and said, “Fuck you!” The two males ran at him, and George drew his handgun. He reportedly warned the males to back up, but claimed they continued to advance. George walked backwards to the stairs between Morse and Stiles, holstered his gun, and then ran to Tower Parkway where his car was parked. Then, he called the police. When they arrived, George told the officers, “When they ran at me I was in fear of serious bodily harm…Those two guys were half my age and about 200 pounds.”
Two female witnesses corroborated George’s statement: “The two males were very aggressive and cursing. They seemed like they were going to do something to the guy.”
The two men, Arryn and Miguel, said they were dealing with Arryn’s breakup with his girlfriend when George cursed at them. They walked up to him and told him to keep walking, when George drew his weapon and pointed it at them. Arryn and Miguel said they moved away as George backed toward the stairs pointing the handgun at them.
The incident was declared an act of self-defense and for violating Yale’s policy on weapons on campus George was hit with a lifetime ban from Yale property.
This police report does not tell the whole story. There was a witness account from that night that was dismissed from the official narrative of the event—my own. As a fourth year student at Yale, I have walked that path thousands of times, and on that night, George was walking a few feet in front of me.
Here’s what I saw:
George, a middle-aged white man, and I both turned around when we heard a loud noise. A young Black man, whom I had seen earlier holding his head in his hands, shouted at us from where he sat at the fire escape. George and I both walked a few more paces before he stopped and declared, “Oh fuck you!” He turned around to yell back at the young men, now approximately 30 feet behind me, “Shut the fuck up!” I continued walking, until I heard one of the young men shouting, “Why are you threatening my life? Why are you threatening my life?” I looked behind me to find that George had his gun pointed at the two men who were still back near the Toad’s fire escape. I backed up slowly so as not to draw attention, and ran inside the gate of the nearest residential college, Morse. I watched the tense standoff for a few seconds from behind the gate before moving away, understanding that despite my disbelief, there was in fact a gunman on Yale campus. Within a minute, blue and red lights lit up the path and a small army of police engulfed the area. I went back out, relieved that the police had come so quickly and ready to tell them what I witnessed.
I spent 40 minutes trying to get an officer to listen to my account, to write any of my experience down, but I was told to wait until someone could talk to me. No one did. One officer informed me, “The guy’s claiming self-defense,” before shrugging and walking away. My last resort was to invoke the privilege afforded to my status as a Yale student; I began telling officers “I’m a Yale student and I saw what happened.” Only then did someone stop long enough to write down my information and give me a form on which to write my official witness account, where I tried to explain that George and the two men were too far apart for him to have justified drawing a weapon in self-defense. The report lists my race as unknown despite the fact that I present unequivocally as Black, a fact that an officer who had taken the time to engage with me directly would have been immediately aware of.
To compound the dismissive encounter at the scene, the Yale administration remained silent. There was no signature “Message from the Chief” that typically accompanies crimes on campus. It took three days of persistent emails and a nearly three hour face to face meeting with Chief of Yale Police Ronnell Higgins and the acting Master of Yale Summer Session, Joel Silverman, for there to be any official acknowledgement of the incident, which was sent to the summer students at Yale five days after the initial event. No mention of the incident was made to the broader Yale community.
The Yale administration’s response to this event has been disturbing in several ways, the first of which is their hesitance to take definitive action against a man who so egregiously violated the safety of Yale campus and New Haven residents, and could very well do so again in the future. In the email sent to summer students, it explains that the man had a legal permit to carry the gun and that he was no longer allowed to return to Yale campus without express permission. Yale has declined to comment on whether they will press charges against him, even though in bringing a handgun to Yale Property, George broke the explicit prohibitions of weapons and firearms on Yale Campus outlined in the Yale Campus and Workplace Violence Prevention Policy. Connecticut state law would also support such charges, and in Chapter 529 of the State of Connecticut General Statutes, section 29-28(e), it explicitly states that a pistol permit “does not thereby authorize the possession or carrying of a pistol or revolver in any premises where the possession or carrying of a pistol or revolver is otherwise prohibited by law or is prohibited by the person who owns or exercises control over such premises.”
More than just a Yale issue, this incident is yet another example of violence against Black Americans. George’s testimony in the police report focused on the size and youth of Aryyn and Miguel, and shares an unsettling similarity to that of Darren Wilson, who claimed that Michael Brown was “like Hulk Hogan,” despite the fact that both men were 6’4. When Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy, was shot in the park for having a BB gun, police defended their actions by claiming he was the size of a 20-year-old man.
While, as Chief Higgins pointed out, the gunman himself may not have posed a “significant and on-going threat” once he was apprehended and subsequently banned from campus for life, such an argument ignores the broader implications of what happened that night. The impact of racially charged events like this one has been an ongoing threat to the Black community for years. To deny that this incident is part of the larger pattern of marginalizing and abusing the Black community leaves Black students at Yale without the institutional support given to their peers.
It was offensive to find that the Yale administration was adhering to the minimum federal requirements in their official response and nothing more.
It’s time for the Yale administration to acknowledge the impact of stereotype driven fear on the lives of Black Americans across the country, including those in New Haven and at Yale. This incident is an opportunity for Yale to break its official silence on social justice issues and distance itself from a history of oppressing marginalized communities.