Man surrenders after killing woman, threatening others
MIDDLETOWN, Conn. — A man who Connecticut police say sparked two fearful days on a university campus by killing a student and threatening a campus shooting spree surrendered Thursday night after seeing his photo in a newspaper.
Stephen P. Morgan, 29, was taken into custody about 9:15 p.m. after stopping at a Cumberland Farms convenience store in Meriden, about 10 miles from the Wesleyan University campus.
Clerk Sonya Rodriguez told WFSB-TV that she didn’t recognize Morgan when he got a drink and scanned the newspapers. She said he had trouble using her phone and asked her to call police, but she wasn’t suspicious.
When police arrived, they told her the man she had been talking to was wanted for Wednesday’s fatal shooting of 21-year-old Johanna Justin-Jinich in Middletown.
“I started crying,” she says. “I was nervous. He killed someone.”
Morgan is being held on $10 million bond and is due in court today.
Justin-Jinich was shot several times inside a bookstore cafe just off campus by a gunman wearing a wig. Authorities have said Morgan and Justin-Jinich have known each other since at least 2007, when Justin-Jinich filed a harassment complaint against him while they were enrolled in a summer class at New York University.
An official with knowledge of the investigation told The AP that police stopped Morgan shortly after the shooting, spoke to him and let him go, only to later realize he was a suspect.
When police confiscated Morgan’s car they found a journal in which he spelled out a plan to rape and kill Justin-Jinich before going on a campus shooting spree, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the case is under investigation.
Wesleyan officials said police told them Morgan targeted Wesleyan students and Jews in his journals. Justin-Jinich, of Timnath, Colo., came from a Jewish family, and her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.
Morgan’s brother Greg told the AP that Morgan wasn’t anti-Semitic. His family issued a statement pleading with Morgan to turn himself in “to avoid any further bloodshed.”
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