In the first light of a recent autumn day outside New Britain High School, there was no marker on the spot where Miguel Dejesus fell, mortally wounded, on a very similar school morning some 30 years ago.
Other than the smartphones in their hands, the students of today’s NBHS look much as they did three decades earlier. Most are Latino or Black, wearing sweatshirts and carrying backpacks, happy to spot a friend across the asphalt, all of them on that segment of life’s path between cute kid and cool teenager. Their conversation is also familiar: The football team is good. The marching band is large. The school feels safe.
What about gangs? Most of the students shrug or shake their heads. It’s not something they think much about. “You do hear about them some days,” one says, but even he has to struggle to remember what they’re called. “AST? OME?” he asks a friend, who shrugs indifferently. How about the Latin Kings? Ever hear of them? “No,” the kid answers. “I mean, not here.”
The events of Nov. 4, 1993, at the front entrance of New Britain High are pre-history to today’s students, even to some of their teachers who were born years after the day a masked man got out of a stolen car and pumped five shots into Miguel, a cherubic and intelligent senior who held a leadership post in the local chapter of the Latin Kings.
To those who were there or nearby that day, however, the event is never that far away. The former mayor was recently thinking about it when he dropped his granddaughter off at the school. Multiple former students who were present said they remembered the events of that Thursday morning as if it were yesterday. And Miguel’s mother, who dropped him off at school moments before he was slaughtered, still has the McDonald’s breakfast wrappers from his last meal.
The killing of Miguel Dejesus had an impact well beyond those who knew him or went to NBHS. It was a milestone in a years-long regional gang war that garnered national attention. It occurred before Columbine, Sandy Hook or Newtown — back when school shootings, even those that claimed a single life, were absolutely shocking. The incident became a talking point in the deliberations in Congress and the state Capitol over the tough-on-crime legislation of the 1990s.
At the time of the shooting, gangs had long been present in Hartford and its environs, but the new organizations had bigger footprints, established hierarchies and intricate philosophies.
First on scene was the Latin Kings, a gang with Chicago roots that developed a Connecticut chapter in the state’s prison system. It was led by a Crown Council based in Bridgeport that oversaw smaller chapters throughout the state. Los Solidos, sometimes referred to as “the Solids,” formed in the early 1990s out of alliances between existing gangs like the Savage Nomads and the Ghetto Boys and was led by a committee of top members, including Godfather, President, Vice President, and Enforcers. It also had philosophical underpinnings, reflected in a gang handbook.
In the early 1990s, “the drug trade made the Solids wealthy and powerful,” recalled Albert DiChiara, a University of Hartford professor who was involved in efforts to attach the Solids to social services in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the Kings were facing structural problems, so much so that the Crown Council was reportedly considering “decertifying” the Hartford chapter because of its lack of organization. The changing fortunes of the gangs bred conflict, which erupted in the summer of 1993, when Los Solidos leader Felipe “Pipe” Santana was gunned down in Hartford. His funeral procession was five miles long, and his death triggered what is known as “the three day war,” in which, according to DiChiara, there were dozens of shootings and at least five deaths.
In the wake of that spasm of violence, Solidos soldiers were initially given a “green light,” meaning they could kill Latin Kings members on sight. The rules of engagement changed by autumn of ’93 to a “yellow light,” under which deadly force could only be used if it was necessary. It was apparently the yellow light that governed Los Solidos activity in New Britain in November, DiChiara said.
The shooting
That Thursday was Miguel’s first day back at NBHS after a two-week suspension for fighting. According to Miguel’s older sister, Liliana, their mother, Carmen Dejesus, rarely drove her son to school but made an exception that morning. The Dejesuses stopped at the McDonald’s on West Main then headed to the high school on Mill Street, where students were just beginning to arrive. Miguel got out of the car, put on his headphones and turned on his Walkman, and his mom drove away.
As Miguel reached the curb in front of the school’s entrance, the gray car pulled up. Two people inside fired shots, missing him. Then one of the gunmen, wearing a mask, exited the car, approached Miguel, and shot him several times in the abdomen and once behind the ear. The car sped away.
Robert Francini, a teacher at the school for many years, was having coffee with two colleagues upstairs when a student ran into the hallway screaming. The adults raced to the vestibule to find a dying child. “Basically all the way surrounding him was blood,” Francini recalled. “There was no way to get to him without stepping in blood.” A different teacher called 911. A third ran to get a cloth to place over the boy. Francini saw school buses beginning to arrive and ran to the corner to tell the drivers not to stop. “I just told them to keep driving.”
Imagine going to school thinking it was going to be a good day without a care in the world, seeing your best friend … in a pool of blood.
Jackie Flores, Friend of Miguel Dejesus
Emergency medical personnel and police arrived, and Miguel was taken to what was then called New Britain General Hospital, in critical condition. TV news trucks rolled in. As students arrived, administrators directed them to alternate entrances, but no one missed the signs of violence on the concrete.
“When we walked into school, you could hear a pin drop,” said Arlene Douglass, a senior at the time. “It was the quietest I ever heard that school while students were in it.”
Some who walked into school that day felt their childhood end.
“Imagine going to school thinking it was going to be a good day without a care in the world, seeing your best friend … in a pool of blood with paramedics performing life saving procedures?” said Jackie Flores, a close friend of Miguel’s.
Aftermath
Violence was hardly unheard of in New Britain in 1993. At the time of the shooting, the city was already seeking federal funds to build police sub-stations on Broad and North streets. However, “the shooting at the high school was a shock because it’s not like today, when it seems like every week there are shootings at a school,” recalls Don DeFronzo, who served as mayor from 1989 until the week after the shooting. “It was the first one in Connecticut.” Indeed, the incident was national news, getting ink in The New York Times, USA Today and local papers as far away as Ontario.
Dejesus died just after 11 a.m. the next morning. Police knew of Miguel’s gang connection and quickly connected his shooting to the Hartford-area war. Miguel’s wake on Sunday and his Monday funeral featured a heavy police presence.
Meanwhile, school officials scrambled to address concerns about security. At a heated meeting with parents, principal Evan Pitkoff resisted calls for metal detectors but had to admit that budget limitations had prevented the school from operating three of its four existing surveillance cameras.
Miguel DeJesus was a real person. He is now the latest casualty in the undeclared war on the streets of this nation.
Former U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.
Gina West was a 23-year-old teacher at New Britain’s Slade Middle School at the time. In the days after the shooting, “My middle schoolers broke down and started to share stories about how they were afraid of their older siblings’ friends, or they were afraid of kids on their block or walking home from school,” she wrote. “I never knew how much it affected them. They were scared and as innocent as babies as they looked to me for guidance.” She and her fellow teachers, she believes, knew that there were gangs and violence in the city, but “I don’t think they really knew the reality of what kids faced daily.”
West had her seventh-graders write letters to one of their U.S. senators.
In Washington, on the day Miguel died, that senator, Democrat Christopher Dodd, took to the Senate floor the day of the shooting to decry the violence and the day after to lament Dejesus’ death. “As we continue debating the crime bill, I think it is important for us to remember that real people’s lives are at stake here,” Dodd told his colleagues. “Miguel DeJesus was a real person. He is now the latest casualty in the undeclared war on the streets of this nation.”
Dodd would go on to mention Dejesus on several other occasions on the Senate floor and in committee appearances, even reading into the Senate record several of the 125 letters he’d received from the seventh-graders. The crime bill to which Dodd referred was the 1994 Crime Bill, a milestone in “tough on crime” policymaking that has been much criticized in recent years.
‘We couldn’t build prisons fast enough’
Away from the halls of power, the war between the Kings and Solids only intensified after Dejesus’ death. Hartford’s gang violence eventually earned it prime-time prominence. In a Peabody Award-winning CBS News special report called “In the Killing Fields of America,” Dan Rather walked the streets of Connecticut’s capital in the mid 1990s. Law enforcement soon began to dismantle the gangs. Learning of an internal dispute within the Solids that was about to spark a bloody civil war within that organization, they moved in to make a wave of arrests in the summer of 1994.
Amid the violence and police response, state lawmakers in 1994 passed new gun legislation. That autumn, Republicans swept offices nationally, installing John Rowland as Connecticut governor and seizing control of the state Senate. What followed were state-level versions of the punitive measures that Washington had already rolled out, including measures that permitted prosecutors to try more youths as adults.
“Back then,” said University of New Haven professor Michael Lawlor, who was then a state representative and later became Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s criminal justice director, “we couldn’t build prisons fast enough.”
[The federal] crime bill … gave us the opportunity to hire police officers.
don defronzo, former New Britain mayor
Neither the federal nor the state laws of that era created the country’s mass incarceration crisis. Connecticut’s prison and jail population, for instance, had already nearly quadrupled between 1980, when 4,000 people were locked up, until the year of the Dejesus murder, when the census was nearly 12,000, according to data from the state Department of Correction.
But thanks to the Rowland-era toughening of state laws, the rate of growth accelerated in the mid-1990s, and by 2008, nearly 19,400 people were behind bars.
Under Malloy, the state changed its approach. In 2012, it launched Project Longevity, which used direct engagement to target gang members with a combination of threatened prosecution and social services — an intensive, carrot-and-stick approach. The state also phased in “raise the age” legislation to reduce the number of juveniles charged or incarcerated as adults. At last count, the state’s prisons held approximately 6,600 sentenced people, up from a low of roughly 5,400 in 2021.
Some of the people who lived through the Dejesus tragedy aren’t as quick to condemn the laws that emerged in its aftermath. As mayor, DeFronzo recalled how deflating it was to deploy police officers to deter violence on one street only to see crime move to the next block.
“You really needed resources. That’s what was good about the [federal] crime bill: It gave us the opportunity to hire police officers,” he said. He estimates that New Britain was able to add five to seven officers, a small but significant addition to its police force.
DeFronzo also pointed to the state’s 1994 gun legislation as a positive response to the era’s violence. That law required permits for purchasing handguns, even for weapons transferred via private sales, raised the age for legally purchasing handguns and toughened permitting and training requirements for all handgun buyers. A 2015 study in the American Journal of Public Health estimates that the law had reduced gun violence by 40%, saving 296 lives from 1996 to 2005.
Connecticut had 136 murders last year — more than most countries in the world, but far fewer than the 216 recorded in 1994. The Kings and Solids are still present enough to be targeted in major busts, but in Connecticut and elsewhere, hierarchical gangs have largely been replaced by smaller, less impactful groups.
It’s different today
Like the state as a whole, New Britain is a safer place these days, with an annual murder count hovering in the low single digits, far lower than the 10 killings that set a city record in 1994. A 2022 statewide survey of school officials by the Connecticut Center for School Safety and Crisis Preparation at WCSU found that gang violence was among the least prevalent concerns in school buildings: Only 3% pointed to gangs as a worry.
Yet today’s high school students still face a daunting, if different, set of threats.
The WCSU survey found 76% of respondents cited mental health as a leading concern in Connecticut schools. Meanwhile, according to state data, the number of weapons found in New Britain schools nearly quadrupled between 2018-19, the school year before the pandemic, and last year, when 112 were recovered. Statewide, “2021-2022 was a record year for the number of weapons confiscated. Last year was even higher,” said Amery Bernhardt, the director of the WCSU center.
NBHS is now 500 students larger than when the shooting took place. Superintendent Tony Gasper said the school system has, since Dejesus’s death, “implemented a range of measures designed to ensure the safety of our students and staff” that includes school resource officers at the high school and a swipe-card system at NBHS to keep outsiders out.
Those measures in some way memorialize Miguel’s murder. Other reminders of the killing are few. The three men convicted in the killing — driver Thomas Mejia, gunman Mandy Fernandez and Maurice Flanagan, the masked man who fired the fatal shots — were sentenced to between eight and 15 years in prison, but those terms ended years ago. Miguel’s grave is a flat marker in a corner of St. Mary’s Cemetery that identifies him as “beloved son and brother.”
Memories of Miguel, however, remain raw and powerful. Friends and teachers recall Miguel as funny, instinctively friendly.
“He was always laughing. You could hear him down the hall,” says David Romeiko, who attended middle and high school with Miguel. His sister Liliana remembers him as “a clean-cut kid” who liked going to church on Sunday and was a member of the congregation’s youth group at South Church. He was doted on by his mother, a social-services worker. Miguel’s dream was to go to Wesleyan University and become a high school counselor.
Flores says Miguel explained his gang membership as a search by a chubby kid for protection.
“He had told me, because of his size, he used to get bullied when he was younger. And although he lived in a quiet, good neighborhood, the surrounding neighborhoods were not so good. So he joined for protection and for the feeling of belonging.”
Miguel was a talented writer. For four years, he attended a summer college-prep program, where he won an award for an essay he penned. The Latin Kings also recognized Miguel’s writing skills: According to Liliana Dejesus, his position in the gang was not president, as some media reports indicated, but “philosopher.” His job was to write the prayers that the gang would recite at ceremonies.
Fittingly, it is Miguel’s writing that endures. After he died, Miguel’s essay, “The End of Innocence,” was reprinted in the local paper, in the Congressional Record, and in the 1994 NBHS yearbook. The context is different now, but a generation later, in a world where many people live in ever-more robust bubbles amid a mental-heath crisis in our schools, his message is still striking.
“That’s how we lose our innocence,” Miguel wrote. “We don’t care about nobody, just ourselves. In the street nobody cares if you’ve eaten, or if you have a place to stay. They don’t care if you’re mentally ill. Because they don’t care, they have no time for sympathy, for nobody has sympathy for them.”
Jarrett Murphy is a freelance journalist and an ER nurse who lives in the Bronx. He grew up in New Britain and was a senior at NBHS in 1994.