on the Wesleyan murder.
‘GUN FIEND’ HAD CO-ED IN SIGHTS
E-MAILED THREATS AS NYU CLASSMATE
TURNS HIMSELF IN TO COPS IN CONN.
CAMPUS ROCKED BY SAVAGE SLAYING
By LORENA MONGELLI in Middletown, Conn., and MURRAY WEISS and JEREMY OLSHAN in New York
May 8, 2009
Crazed co-ed killer Stephen Morgan, who surrendered late last night, started stalking tragic Wesleyan junior Johanna Justin-Jinich two years ago, sending her twisted e-mails and texts and bombarding her with threatening phone messages, police sources said yesterday.
Morgan, 29, had been obsessed with the beauty—even concocting a chilling rape fantasy in his journal—ever since they both took a summer course, “Sex and Society,” at NYU in 2007, the sources said.
He gave up yesterday at 9:14 p.m. in Meriden, Conn., just 10 miles from Wesleyan’s Middletown campus, and is expected to make a court appearance this morning.
Morgan had walked into a convenience store and, after seeing his picture on the front page of a newspaper, asked clerk Sonya Rodriguez to call the police, according to The Hartford Courant and WFSB-TV. She didn’t recognize him and thought he was having car trouble.
When cops arrived and took him into custody, they told Rodriguez that the man she had a friendly chat with was wanted for Wednesday’s fatal shooting of Justin-Jinich—and for threatening to kill more students and Jews.
He’s being held in lieu of $10 million bond.
Although it was not clear when Morgan and Justin-Jinich first met—both have family from Colorado—it was in New York that Morgan’s dark obsession surfaced.
Justin-Jinich, then a 19-year-old English/philosophy major from a wealthy Jewish family in Fort Collins, Colo.—her grandmother is a Holocaust survivor—was interning at Planned Parenthood in SoHo while taking the NYU course, according to her online journal.
She and Morgan exchanged e-mails. At first, they were innocuous. But when she got back from a weeklong trip, he suddenly started inundating her with a slew of e-mails and phone calls that left her “threatened and scared,” she later told New York cops.
The messages showed Morgan was strangely annoyed, asking her, “Why aren’t you responding to my calls and texts?”
The messages soon took on an even darker subtext.
“You’re going to have a lot more problems down the road if you can’t take any [expletive] criticism, Johanna,” he warned the gorgeous co-ed in an e-mail, according to the NYPD, which had been called in after she filed a complaint with NYU security.
For some reason, Justin-Jinich decided not to press charges.
Instead, she just stopped responding to the still-coming e-mails.
Her stonewalling, however, seemed only to energize him. Morgan began outlining his sick love/hate obsession—and his plot to rape and murder the beauty—in a sinister journal uncovered by police.
On Wednesday, he pumped seven bullets into the beauty at her job at Broad Street Books, a bookstore/cafe near Wesleyan.
It was a shift she wasn’t even supposed to work, according to a friend who said the victim had been covering for her.
Morgan had not been living in Connecticut, and it was not clear how he found out Justin-Jinich was at the store. Cops said his car had Colorado plates, but his last known address was in Massachusetts.
Morgan once lived in Boulder, Colo., where a man now living in his apartment told the Daily Camera he was “a little odd… . It just seemed like he wasn’t very social.”
After he shot the object of his obsession, a security camera captured him leaving the store, and police believe he then removed a wig and glasses he had worn as a disguise and dropped the gun, authorities said.
But he milled around long enough to chat with cops, according to published reports.
Cops even took down Morgan’s name and number along with those of other shocked people outside the bookstore. WFSB said he took a cab from the crime scene, and had been staying at a motel in nearby Middlefield.
For a short while, it was Justin-Jinich’s boyfriend whom police focused on.
“She was seeing my friend … and at first, he was a suspect,” said sophomore Miles Bukiet, 21.
“Police went over and raided his home. The police were pretty intense about it. They were pointing guns at everyone.”
It was not until Justin-Jinich’s relatives, recalling her trouble with Morgan, named him as a possible suspect that detectives realized he had been within their grasp, according to the Courant.
Morgan was believed to be long gone by the time police located his car.
At his motel, cops reportedly found his journal, in which he wrote that he hoped to make Wesleyan “the Jewish Columbine,” WFSB.com reported.
His also outlined how he’d track Justin-Jinich down and rape her.
The journal prompted cops to put the whole campus and local synagogues on lockdown.
“We are all breathing a little easier with this news [of his capture],” Wesleyan President Michael Roth said after Morgan’s arrest.
For students, the lockdown was eerie and frightening.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty about what could happen next,” junior Efrain Riberio, 21, said before the arrest. “As a classmate, it’s scary. You could’ve been there. It could’ve been you. He could be anywhere, and that’s causing people stress.”
Students noted the rampage erupted as the school was readying for its annual “Spring Fling.”
“It was that whole idyllic college vibe. The weather was nice, then this paranoia settled in,” Bukiet said. “The whole atmosphere on the campus changed. Everything was closed down, so the only option was to feel nervous and sad, so that’s why it’s been so weird.
“We were constantly being hit by e-mail advisories, and then we’d get these text messages, and it would just re-trigger thoughts about the incident.”
Before his capture, Morgan’s family issued a statement urging him to turn himself in “to avoid any further bloodshed.”
His brother, Greg Morgan, said, he and his family are “absolutely distraught over everything that’s gone on. We’re just hoping that they find my brother and no one else gets hurt.”
Greg Morgan said his brother has not shown anti-Semitism in the past.
“My brother was a very sweet person and had a big heart, and I hope he’s OK,” he said.
Outside his family’s home in Marblehead, Mass., Morgan’s sister, Diana said, “We are shocked and sickened by the tragedy in Middletown, and our heartfelt condolences go out to the family and friends of the victim.”
She issued a desperate message to her brother, still on the loose at the time.
After the arrest, a woman answering the phone at the home said, “We are very relieved—it’s been a long day.”
Justin-Jinich’s family had no comment on the arrest.
For her friends, there was only a gnawing sadness.
She was remembered as a beautiful, young woman with a magnetic personality who was sometimes a little too gregarious.
“She was a lovely human being,” said senior Wes Moss, 21. “She was happy all the time.”
Prior to her studies at NYU and Wesleyan, Justin-Jinich went to the Westtown boarding school in Pennsylvania.
At Westtown, she was “an exceptional student,” the headmaster said. She was also an accomplished tennis player.
Another friend from the Wesleyan bookstore, however, noted, “She did some crazy things—and had a tendency of talking to the wrong guy.
“She’s very open to different types of people, and then will realize too late it’s not the person she should be talking to.”
On her blog, she wrote poetry and touched on subjects ranging from her lack of luck in love to the finer points of feminist philosophy.
Her family arrived in Connecticut yesterday.
“She was just a wonderful kid, very smart, very loving,” said Justin-Jinich’s stepmother, Karin Radcliffe.
Additional reporting by Perry Chiaramonte, Austin Fenner, David K. Li and AP
lorena.mongelli@nypost.com