Arrest Made In 16-Year-Old’s Murder

A year and a half after 16-year-old Joshua Vazquez was shot and killed on a Monday afternoon in the West Hills neighborhood, city police have arrested an already-incarcerated 19-year-old on one felony count of murder.

Police Chief Karl Jacobson, New Haven Police Department (NHPD) spokesperson Officer Christian Bruckhart, and Mayor Justin Elicker announced that arrest during a brief Friday afternoon press conference held on the third floor of police headquarters at 1 Union Ave.

Jacobson and Bruckhart talked through 13 different arrests made by police in recent weeks in connection with crimes ranging from a February 2023 shooting on Howard and Washington Avenues to the July 4 seizure of handguns and crack cocaine at a property on Chapel Street to a July 5 robbery of a Subway sandwich shop on Whalley.

He said that police have two more homicide warrants that have been signed and are waiting to be served for two different 2024 murders.

Poloce served a murder warrant on a 19-year-old — who was 17 at the time — for the shooting death of Vazquez.

The state’s criminal court database shows that that 19-year-old is currently incarcerated for a slew of gun-related felony charges from February 2023, to which he has pleaded not guilty. He has not yet entered a plea to the murder charge, for which he was arrested on Wednesday.

“As you can see, we’re making a lot of arrests. We’re taking a lot of guns off the street,” Jacobson said about all of the cases discussed on Friday.

Jacobson declined to go into much detail at Friday’s press conference on what led to the arrest of the 19-year-old a year and a half after Vazquez was shot and killed while on his bike near Valley Street and Harper Avenue.

He said police will go into further detail on the matter at a press conference next week that police and the mayor plan on holding alongside Vazquez’s family and the neighborhood’s alder, Honda Smith.

“It was a very difficult warrant,” Jacobson said. The Independent was not able to obtain a copy of the arrest warrant affidavit by the publication time of this article.

“It’s tragic that he’s lost,” added Elicker, reflecting on going out to Valley Street and being with family and friends and community members mourning Vazquez’s death soon after the fatal shooting. ​“I hope the arrest gives some sense of closure” to those still grieving his death.

Jacobson also said that he wanted to show just how much work the police have been doing to ​“lower the temperature in the city” after last weekend saw three different shooting incidents that left seven people shot and injured. At this time, he said, all three of those shooting incidents appear to be unrelated.