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Police release photos of alleged York Street hate crime assailants

BY YASH ROY AND SOPHIE SONNENFELD STAFF REPORTERS

The New Haven Police Department has released photos of five individuals who they believe were witnesses or suspects in an alleged hate crime that took place outside Davenport College in early September.

This move comes after police hit an apparent dead end in a month-long investigation that was initially marred by miscommunication between NHPD and the Yale Police Department.

“The identification through these videos is very important,” NHPD Chief Karl Jacobson said at a Friday press conference. “It’s helped us with numerous cases with homicides, shootings, everything so it’s really important we get this out.”

The photos were taken by a city-owned camera on the Broadway parking lot. Police said the suspects appeared to drive off in two white pickup trucks and a gray or silver Hyundai Genesis.

The incident, which took place just after midnight on Sept. 3, left a New Haven resident — identified publicly as “Franklin” — with a broken jaw.

Franklin had been walking with his partner and two other friends when at least two white men hurled antiBlack and anti-Latino racial slurs at him on York Street. The assailants then physically assaulted and beat Franklin until he fell into the street.

While the assault occurred in a spot downtown under both Yale and New Haven cameras, technical issues prevented these cameras from capturing license plates or other identifying details of the suspects.

Images of the vehicles and license plates were “distorted” due to distance from the cameras, NHPD Assistant Police Chief Bertram Ettienne said.

When asked if YPD was concerned that NHPD took almost a month to release the photos to identify suspects and witnesses, Campbell told the News that he understood that NHPD had many active investigations which may have led to the timing of the release.

“They’ve got a lot going on here,” Campbell told the News. “Even though we would have loved to have done it sooner, we understand that as serious as this is, they’re dealing with a lot.”

When asked about the delay, Ettienne told the News that the department wanted “to be cautious with the release of information” to ensure that people are not wrongly implicated.

Ettienne added that the NHPD also plans to release footage of the incident soon, and will do so once the investigators have finished sifting through it.

“We want to be cautious with releasing footage,” Ettienne added, saying that the NHPD wants to make sure that any individuals shown were likely involved in the incident.

YASH ROY/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

New Haven police continue to search for individuals they believe attacked a Latino man outside Davenport College.

“The last thing we want to do is release video of footage that is not clear or of someone who was not involved being wrapped into this unnecessarily.”

While the initial confrontation was not captured on camera, Ettienne said they are able to see two to three individuals assaulting the victim.

In addition to the NHPD and YPD camera footage, the NHPD is also working with cell phone footage from a civilian. Jacobson said that even a “snippet” of a video footage from civilians will be useful for the investigation, encouraging people to send anything they might have.

Campbell mentioned the success YPD investigators found when they released images of the perpetrators who vandalized the Kline Biology Tower with racist and anti-Semitic graffiti last year.

“We hope that through these pictures and information that we provide, we know that someone out there will recognize these individuals,” Campbell commented at the press conference. “We believe that we can bring true justice and solve this incident and help the anxiety and the frustration that the entire community is feeling.”

Elicker too joined in the appeal, asking for the public’s help to identify the suspects.

“Hate has no home in New Haven, discrimination has no home in New Haven and we will not tolerate it,” Elicker said at the press conference.

Jacobson was confirmed unanimously by the Board of Alders on July 5th, 2022.

Contact YASH ROY at yash.roy@yale. edu and SOPHIE SONNENFELD at sophie.sonnenfeld@yale.edu.

Local teachers’ union receives $75,000 grant to lobby for increased funding

BY AVA SAYLOR STAFF REPORTER

A local teachers’ union will hire a professional organizer to advocate for the increased state funding they hope can address teacher shortages.

The New Haven Federation of Teachers received $75,000 from its nationwide parent organization, part of a total $1.5 million granted to 27 chapters around the country.

The new grant program aims to support teachers’ unions and community engagement in grassroots work. In New Haven, the funding will primarily be used to boost advocacy surrounding progressive revenue, equitable school funding and expanded resources for community schools at the state level.

“Our students’ learning conditions are our working conditions, and our students’ living conditions are their learning conditions,” said NHFT President Leslie Blatteau, who traveled to Washington, D.C. to accept the award. “Everybody — teachers, students, family members — is feeling the impact of decades of underfunding in urban districts like New Haven.”

The grants are part of the American Federation of Teacher’s Powerful Partnership Initiative, which provides direct assistance to AFT affiliates, community organizations and parent groups looking to engage in education-based advocacy.

Public schools in New Haven currently face chronic underfunding and teacher shortages in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. At last week’s NHPS board meeting, Superintendent Iline Tracy announced a district-wide shortage of 81 teachers. The district currently employs approximately 1900 teachers across its 44 schools.

Blatteau said her organization plans to use the grant to hire an organizer that will meet with stakeholder groups and compile their concerns, as well as help lobby state lawmakers to boost school funding in urban districts.

“Ultimately, we want to improve teacher retention and educational experiences for our students, and a lot of those problems are rooted in economic issues,” Blatteau said.

The New Haven Federation of Teachers intends to collaborate with community partners Recovery for All Connecticut and Students for Educational Justice on this project.

Alex Kolokotronis, an organizer at Recovery for All, emphasized the partnership’s common goal of eliminating existing discrepancies in school funding.

“Urban school districts need to receive a greater share of money in order to provide an equitable education,” Kolokotronis said. “Connecticut schools are mainly funded through property taxes, so [students at] urban schools receive an education that is not up to par with what wealthier schools can provide.”

This is not the first time these organizations have joined forces to combat educational inequities. Ear-

COURTESY OF LESLIE BLATTEAU

New Haven AFT will receive a grant to advocate for better funds to combat chronic underfunding and teacher shortages.

lier this year, Recovery For All organized a rally for school staff, parents, students and union members to advocate for increased funding for New Haven Public Schools.

“When this opportunity came up to do a more in-depth partnership, we went for it,” said Norma Martinez, organizing director at Recovery for All. “The students and the teachers are on the frontlines of this disinvestment. We want to build a strong coalition in New Haven to advocate for life-changing policies and legislation for the people that need it the most.”

The New Haven Federation of Teachers aims to capitalize on this continued partnership to ensure the most effective possible use of the Powerful Partnership Initiative funding, Blatteau said. For these organizations, this work is more crucial than ever.

“We have shared experi ences and shared values,” Blatteau said. “But now, we need to have shared action. We are losing our teachers, and too many of our high school students don’t have teachers in the subject areas they need to graduate high school. We have reached a tipping point, and we’re ready to organize and fight.”

The American Federation of Teachers was founded in 1916.

Contact AVA SAYLOR at ava.saylorr@yale.edu .

Wi-Fi outages impact student learning and classroom experience

BY PRANAVA DHAR STAFF REPORTER

Daniel Spielman ’92 wasn’t expecting to win $3 million dollars.

But the “Oscars of Science” called, and the Sterling Professor of Computer Science was informed that he had won the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, one of the most prestigious awards in his field.

The Breakthrough Prizes, awarded on Sept. 22, were established in 2012 by a group of entrepreneurs and philanthropists including Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. Laureates in the three categories — mathematics, fundamental physics and life sciences — each receive a $3 million award.

“I didn’t see it coming because the Breakthrough Prize has always gone to people who are much more on the pure side than I am, and I’m really, you know, part time pure mathematician, part time computer scientist,” Spielman told the News.

Spielman was recognized for his contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including in spectral graph theory, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization and coding theory, according to the prize’s website.

The professor is no stranger to acclaim; he was awarded the 2008 Gödel Prize with collaborator ShangHua Teng for work on smoothed analysis of algorithms. Their work established a novel mathematical framework to better study the behavior of algorithms in the real world, beyond traditional methods.

In 2014, Spielman, along with collaborators Adam Marcus and Nikhil Srivastava GRD ’10, received the George Pólya Prize for their work on the proof of the Kadison-Singer conjecture, a long-standing unsolved problem with far-reaching applications in areas such as network science and quantum physics.

In 2015, Spielman and Teng once again shared the Gödel Prize for a series of papers on nearly-linear-time Laplacian solvers, a set of algorithms that helped resolve an outstanding open problem in linear algebra.

Spielman is also affiliated with the statistics and mathematics departments; on Oct. 14, he will launch Yale’s Kline Tower Institute, a data science initiative, and serve as its director.

“I’ve always liked pure math, but the things I’m most excited about are usually motivated by an application somewhere,” Spielman said. “For me, the strangest thing is, there’s a lot of mathematics that I read that to me is very obviously useful, or in an applied sense, but the people who did it, don’t think of it that way. It was interesting to them for entirely different reasons.”

Teng, a long-time collaborator and close friend of Spielman, recounted the latter as having been a star mathematician ever since his years as an undergraduate at Yale.

Moreover, Teng commended Yale’s role in producing a wonderful scholar who is also an eloquent writer — sometimes found lacking in academia.

“Dan has three things that set him apart as a scientist: excellent taste in choosing problems, remarkable problem-solving skills and persistence,” Teng said. “Beyond answering existing open questions, he is a thinker who can envision new emerging questions at the frontiers of science to guide the coming generations.”

Spielman will formally accept the prize at a gala award ceremony, which traditionally features casts of performers and presenters. Notable attendees of prior ceremonies have included figures such as Pierce Brosnan, Lupita Nyong’o DRA ’12 and Lionel Richie.

Marco Pirazzini GRD ’27 described Spielman’s colleagues’ reaction to the award announcement as merry, with a feeling that few other scientists — or people — could have been more worthy of such an accolade.

“We joked about it during our meeting, but then, it was business as usual,” Pirazzini said. “The best part about Dan is that the only thing he really cares about is the math. He is not after any accolades. He just likes to think about problems.”

Spielman graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1992, with exceptional distinction in Computer Science.

NEWS

New Peruvian restaurant opens downtown

BY KHUAN-YU HALL STAFF REPORTER

Chacra is bringing Peruvian cuisine to downtown New Haven, opening its doors last week.

The upscale restaurant and pisco bar is located on Temple Street — across from the Omni Hotel — in the heart of downtown New Haven. City officials gathered with Walter “Jefferson” Vera last Friday at the storefront to celebrate the restaurant’s opening.

“A lot of the dishes are really authentic, from Peru, and most of my kitchen staff are also Peruvians,” Vera said. “We contemporize the cuisine and blend it to make innovative dishes … We have a little bit of everything.”

Chacra represents a new adventure for Vera, who has been a presence in the New Haven food scene for 20 years, first working as a server and rising through the ranks to become a restaurant manager. Now, he will be taking on yet another role, that of owner and proprietor.

Chacra’s expansive menu includes nine types of ceviche and 16 varieties of pisco, a brandy native to the winemaking regions of Peru and Chile, as well as classic dishes like lomo saltado, pollo a la brasa and yuca frita.

The restaurant has a modern feel, with large floor-to-ceiling glass windows supported by a grant from the city’s New Haven Facade Improvement Grant Program. The Facade Improvement Grant Program has invested about $150k into the facades of local businesses over the past five years.

Vera arrived in New Haven about two decades ago when he came from a job at the Yale Club in New York to work at Mory’s Temple Bar, where he worked for a few years before arriving at Pacifico Restaurant. At Pacifico, Vera said, he started as a server and worked his way up until he became the assistant manager and then the general manager. Eventually, Vera left Pacifico and spent some time as the manager of Barcelona Wine Bar.

The restaurateur credits his experience in these many different roles for having brought him to the point of being ready to open his own restaurant.

“Every place I worked, everyday I would learn something from everybody,” Vera said. “No matter what position you have in this industry, customers will come give you feedback. Everyday is a challenge, and everyday you learn something … I also went to school for business management, so you put it all together, the restaurant industry and college, and it makes a perfect combination.”

Ward 1 Alder Alex Guzhnay ’24 shared that he was moved by Vera’s story and his success given that Vera, like Guzhnay’s parents, is an immigrant from Ecuador.

Speakers at Chacra’s ribbon-cutting ceremony emphasized the restaurant’s prime location in downtown New Haven.

“This is one of the key locations not only for downtown restaurants, but really a key location, a linchpin location for all of New Haven, for New Haven restaurants,” said Carlos Eyzaguirre, the city’s deputy economic development administrator. “Anybody who takes this space is taking up one of the most highly visible spaces in the city, one of the places that sees the most foot traffic, that really is a forward facing restaurant in the city.”

Mayor Justin Elicker echoed Eyzaguirre’s emphasis on the collaboration between private business

KHUAN-YU HALL/CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Local restaurateur Walter Vera is taking on a new project with Chacra, an upscale Peruvian restaurant.

owners and the city government that made Chacra possible.

“This is a real partnership, this is such a good example of a partnership between the City of New Haven and local restaurants,” Mayor Elicker said. “The grant of $31,500 from the Facade Improvement Program is going to support not only this restaurant but the whole block.”

Chacra is located at 152 Temple St.

Contact KHUAN-YU HALL at khuan.hall@yale.edu .

MINIPNG brings a piece of New York to Audubon St.

BY SARAH BEN TKHAYET CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Fun, fashionable and funky — MINIPNG is the newest fashion retailer on Audubon Street.

The brainchild of Connecticut designer Eiress Hammond, MINIPNG sells clothing, hats, shoes, jewelry and handbags. Some are vintage pieces, while others are handmade by Hammond herself.

Hammond opened the storefront in September, an extension of a passion for fashion that began just out of high school, when her earliest designs went viral on social media. MINIPNG, Hammond says, brings a piece of New York to Connecticut, particularly the “super colorful, fun and crazy,” side of the city.

“The store is basically a showcase of what I learned in New York,” Hammond said. “When people walk in, it makes them feel like they’re somewhere that’s not in Connecticut. And that’s exactly what I want.”

As a 19-year-old pre-law student at Wittenberg University in Ohio, Hammond looked to connect with her artistic side, beginning to experiment with painting on clothing. Her first-ever design, “In the City,” was a tank top embellished with abstract faces. Proud of her design, Hammond decided to post it to her Instagram page — a post that kickstarted her career in fashion design.

Hammond’s post went viral, with thousands of people asking how they could get their hands on her design. She decided to turn to Depop, an online platform that allows individuals to buy and sell pieces of clothing. Once she began selling her tank tops, she recalls receiving as many as 50 orders a day.

“It was super overwhelming, but it was also great,” Hammond said.

Looking to expand her reach, Hammond started organizing popups in New York — even the first of these events sold out.

On top of her commercial success, Hammond was also able to form valuable connections within the city, particularly with the organizer of Hester Street Fair, an independent arts market. This connection allowed her to continue selling her designs at the event throughout the pandemic.

However, Hammond said that she also faced several obstacles on her designing journey. One of which was online fashion retailer Aliexpress stealing one of her designs — her very first tank top. Fortunately, by June 2020, she was able to get a pro-bono lawyer to help her fight back and enforce the copyright that she had placed on her designs. She also took to social media, posting a video about her experience that went viral and garnered her further support. Eventually, Hammond won the case in court and Aliexpress took the design down.

Inspired by her designer friends who had stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Hammond began her search for the perfect location for her own store, but was faced with a new wave of challenges. She recalled not being taken seriously as a young woman of color, receiving judgment from real estate owners as she searched for a space for her business.

“When I was looking at spaces, it would be kind of like, ‘You’re the one looking at the space?’” she said. “I

SARAH BEN TKHAYET/CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHER

Fun, fashionable and funky — MINIPNG is the newest fashion retailer on Audubon Street.

just had to work twice as hard in letting them know how serious I was.”

One property Hammond was looking at in Manhattan fell through at the last minute. However, after moving to New Haven in order to be closer to her hometown of Middletown, CT, she discovered the open space at 77 Audubon St. on her way to Good Nature Market.

Noticing a for-sale sign, Hammond decided to call the number and started working on bringing her idea for MINIPNG to life.

As the store has opened its doors, Hammond said she was proud of how the space had come together. Victoria Zapata Quintero ’26 praised MINIPNG for its “unique style” and “one of a kind” vintage pieces.

Hammond said that she wanted to create a space where even non-customers felt comfortable and welcome.

“I have kids from [Educational Center for the Arts] across the street and they’ll come on their lunchbreak and just chill out on the couch and that’s fine with me,” Hammond said.

MINIPNG is focused both on the sustainability and the affordability of its products. All items in the store are second-hand, Hammond said, “and there’s a huge range of pricing … from $5 to $200.” Alex Guzman Caceres ’26 voiced her support for MINIPNG’s attention to affordability.

“They had a sale on Saturday and I was able to get so many pieces for $50,” she said.

Hammond formally founded MINIPNG as an LLC in 2020.

Contact SARAH BEN TKHAYET at sarah.bentkhayet@yale.edu .

Yale’s overlooked special divisional major

BY KINNIA CHEUK CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

For students dissatisfied with the regular major options offered at Yale College, there remains an oft-overlooked alternative: the special divisional major.

The special divisional major does not belong to any department or have uniform prerequisites or core courses. Instead, with the approval of the Director of Undergraduate Studies, two or more faculty advisers and the Committee on Honors and Academic Standing, students design their own majors, allowing them to focus on academic interests that cannot be met by an existing departmental or special major. Students in the major have to complete at least 13 term courses, or 14 if they work on a two-term senior essay or project.

“I want first years in particular to know that they have options,” Tulsi Patel ’23, who is a part of the program, said. “They can make Yale fit them. They don’t have to fit to Yale.”

As one of Yale’s only two special divisional majors, Patel designed her major in Digital Age Studies, in which she studies technology from different perspectives, mainly focusing on its sociocultural impact.

While she acknowledged that Yale offers many different fields of study, she said she found existing majors restrictive.

“[There are] very few fields that are focusing on the present and the way it’s shaping us,” Patel said. “A lot of stuff we learn is from when we look back at history and go, ‘Oh, this is what happened.’ But there’s stuff happening right now that we need to be aware of so we can protect the future.”

Patel found that there were individual courses from vastly different departments at Yale that viewed society from a current technological perspective. To her, the most fulfilling experience was incorporating these diverse classes and studying the Internet broadly in ways that would not be possible within the confines of an existing major. Courses included in her curriculum range from “Ethics of the Internet: Data, Algorithms, and Society” to “Interactive Design and the Internet: Software for People.”

Hannah Cevasco ’24 is pursuing a special divisional major in Computational Biology. Unlike Patel, versions of Cevasco’s major exist at other universities like Stanford and MIT. Pursuing the major was just specializing in an established field that Yale did not already have, she said, instead of carving out a path herself.

Cevasco hopes that Computational Biology becomes a department at Yale in the near future.

While she was on the Committee on Majors, Cevasco helped approve a new track for Computational Biology & Bioinformatics in the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry major. The Committee on Majors, which consists of University faculty, Yale College Dean’s Office administrators and undergraduate students, is in charge of considering proposals for establishing new majors.

However, Cevasco admitted that she would still have chosen the special divisional major over both this MB&B track and declaring an Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology major with the certificate in programming, even if these options were available to her a few years ago. She said that she values the flexible and personalized learning experience that the special divisional major offers.

“I’ve been able to take classes from a variety of departments including CS, MB&B, BENG and S&DS, whereas if I tried to double major in MCDB and CS, I would’ve had to take a lot more prerequisites and core courses that basically would have taken up my entire time at Yale,” Cevasco said.

The special divisional major requires the submission of an application, including letters of support from faculty advisers, to the Committee on Honors and Academic Standing. Students may apply to the major at any time from their fourth term of enrollment to one month after their seventh term of enrollment begins.

Dean Sarah Mahurin, the director of undergraduate studies for the major, wrote in an email to the News that prospective majors should set up a meeting with her to discuss how best to approach the application process, including strategies for proposing a curriculum with breadth and depth comparable to other majors within Yale College.

When crafting her major, Cevasco referred to the Computer Science and Molecular Biology major at MIT and the Biomedical Computation major at Stanford as guidance, then recreated a similar curriculum based on Yale’s classes.

During her preparation process, she consulted multiple people, including Amit Kaushal, the executive director of the major at Stanford, people in the biotechnology industry and faculty members at Yale, in order to put forward a proposal that she was confident Yale would accept.

Cevasco said that Yale’s faculty members, especially Dean Mahurin, have been a great resource in helping her achieve her academic goals in the major. However, she noted that a huge challenge has been finding more specialty classes that truly tackle computational biology at Yale, as most Yale artificial intelligence or machine learning courses, for example, are not specific to biological applications.

Both Patel and Cevasco believe that the special divisional major and its benefits could be more publicized at Yale.

Application forms for the major are available at the Timothy Dwight College Dean’s Office.