She walked into a building in New Haven, Connecticut and was never seen again. She was a bride to be that disappeared off the face of the Earth just days before her wedding. Was she a run away bride or a victim of foul play? This mystery would throw New Haven, Connecticut into the national spotlight and the nation would focus on an unspeakable murder and crime around the small city that is the home place of Yale University.
Annie Li, a Yale graduate, was murdered and her body, found on the day she was going to be married, was stuffed inside a wall in the Yale medical building where she worked.
The media coverage of this heartbreaking and puzzling crime focused in on the crime that students faced that go to Yale University. Quick to defend the Yale area of New Haven, many of its staff claimed the crime had nothing to do with University crime but it had everything to do with violence in the workplace.
Even with Yale's quick rebuttal of the claims of violence, the fact remains that New Haven isn't the safe haven many think it is.
In 1638, 500 Puritans sailed into the harbor of the land known as Quinnipiac. The land was sold by the Quinnipiac Indians to these Puritans in exchange for protection from aggressive neighboring tribes. This was the beginning of New Haven.
New Haven would play important roles in history of this country from the Revolutionary War to the home of Yale University. It held a major part of the development of the telephone to the invention of the hamburger. New Haven shined with pride and surged forward.
In recent years, times have changed in this Connecticut city. The once promising city has become infested with crime, drugs and violence. This peaceful haven was no longer a haven for many.
This Yale student's murder brought back memories of a crime that was committed against myself a few years ago and the death of yet another Yale student.
It was two days before Christmas and I decided to give New Haven shopping a chance. I was walking back to my car after hunting for presents and I felt a tap on my shoulder. As I turned around, a man pushed a gun into my left temple and told me to give him my money.
He was about my hight but very thin. His face looked sunken in and his eyes were glassy and bugged out. There was not a question in my mind that this was a drug addicted loser that was very desperate for a fix. He then cocked back the hammer of the gun.
As I tried to get my thoughts together, a woman, not realizing what was happening, walked toward the area where we were standing. My would be robber became agitated and began shifting back and forth and hopping slightly up and down while pressing the gun harder into my face. He told me to hurry.
I kept calm. I had the habit since I was a kid of putting money in my front pocket and on this night I had over two hundred dollars in it. I also had twelve one dollar bills in my wallet. I thought quick and I reached for my wallet and crumbled the twelve ones in my hand and gave it to this scum bag. He then turned and ran.
At that moment I don't think I realized the danger I was in. I was more pissed than anything. After all, I work hard for a living. I earned that twelve dollars. I'm an honest man. I wouldn't think twice of taking something that belonged to someone else.
I knew in my heart that the money he ran off with wasn't going to help some starving child or help pay a utility bill. It was going to help this low life get high.
It wasn't until hours later, while walking my dog that it hit me like a ton of bricks. This guy could have killed me. My life could have been over with a simple pull of a trigger.
From this day on, I would never look at strangers in the street the same again.
A couple of months later, not to far from where I was robbed, Christian Prince, a student at Yale, was robbed and than shot to death. The man arrested and convicted was a thin, bug eyed drug addict that looked far to familiar to me.
It turned out not to be some soulless, skinny, bugged eyed drug abusing monster who has no respect for human life that murdered Annie Li.
This monster was your average Joe. A working class individual who blended in with society and worked hand to hand with Li every day and yet had the same lack of respect for human life as the maniac who murdered Prince years before.
I now wonder who we could sell New Haven to in return for protection, not from neighboring aggressive Indians, but this time from ourselves.
