Police in New Haven announced Tuesday that an anonymous donor has offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a gunman who fatally shot a 17-year-old boy last week.
Daily Jackson was walking along Shelton Avenue at around 7 p.m. last Tuesday when someone exited a vehicle, fired a volley of shots at him and sped away, police said, citing surveillance video. The teen was rushed to the hospital, where he later died.
The vehicle was stolen and has since been found, Police Chief Karl Jacobson said at the time, according to WTNH.
Jackson’s death came less than two weeks after someone gunned down his 16-year-old friend Uzziah Shell in a Nov. 22 shooting that saw an elementary school bus catch a stray bullet, police said.
“He is a friend of our murder victim from a week and a half ago who was the 16-year-old, so we believe there is probably some connection to that homicide,” Jacobson told WFSB when Jackson was shot.
Investigators believe the attack on Jackson was targeted, since both teens were said to be feuding with other groups. The probable connection between the two homicides prompted police to relocate three families outside the city out of precaution in case of retaliation, Jacobson told WTNH.
An anonymous donor has since offered the award — not through the police department or the state’s attorney’s office, but those agencies support the move.
Both boys were students at Riverside Academy, an alternative high school with 120 kids enrolled. Principal Derek Stephenson mourned the students’ “tragic passing,” and its connection to “senseless gun violence.”
Residents also called for an end to the violence.
“We’re losing all our children. I mean, what can we say?” New Haven resident Raymond Jackson told WFSB, who did not identify him as a relative of the latest victim. “We are too late again. We are too late again.”
