Just before 10 a.m. on Tuesday, an unidentified individual was assaulted and robbed on the same block as Yale’s Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges.
Michelle Zheng
Staff Writer, The Buckley Beacon
On Tuesday, Yale University students, faculty, and staff members were alerted by email of an assault and robbery that had occurred at approximately 9:43 a.m., directly adjacent to Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray colleges, two of Yale’s fourteen undergraduate residential colleges. The victim has not been publicly identified.
Tuesday’s alert was sent through Yale Public Safety’s schoolwide “Timely Warning” notifications, which track robberies, assaults, break-ins, and other lower-level crimes in and around the university, and are often sent a few times per month. Tuesday’s robbery occurred on Prospect Street between Sachem Street and Trumbull Street, directly next to Pauli Murray College, Benjamin Franklin College, the undergraduate admissions office, the Watson Center, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Per the alert, the victim, who was assaulted by three juvenile males, sustained minor injuries and was transported to the hospital for evaluation. The New Haven Police Department is currently leading the investigation.
Tuesday mornings are among the most trafficked for students’ seminars and discussion sections, which has made the recent daytime robbery a source of concern for some students.
“I’ve seen a lot of instances – not only this one, but a friend was harassed by people in a car on Broadway just two weeks ago,” a first year student in Berkeley College told The Buckley Beacon. “These things are happening on campus and we feel unsafe. … It’s just ridiculous how, like, this kind of stuff happens, and literally, there’s no repercussions.”
The same student also expressed concern about attending late-night activities. “It made me more stressed about going to office hours late at night or study halls, which can extend up to 10 p.m. sometimes,” they said.
A first year student in Benjamin Franklin College, which is located just next to the scene of Tuesday’s robbery, noted that the frequency of the “Timely Warning” alerts has decreased their sense of urgency over time.
“I don’t really have that much of a reaction,” they told The Beacon. “We got a lot of them over this summer and I just ignored them. … In psychology we learned something called optimism bias, which is basically when a person thinks that nothing bad is going to happen to them, and in my head it hasn’t.”
In 2024, 64 percent of violent crimes in Connecticut were concentrated in New Haven, according to the FBI’s 2024 Uniform Crime Report. Since August 17 of this year, the move-in date for new first-year students, there have been a total of seven “Timely Warning” notifications sent to students—most of which were burglaries or robberies.
“Campus safety remains a top priority of the university,” Chief Anthony Campbell told The Beacon in an email. “Our Public Safety team works closely with New Haven Police. Safety resources for Yale community members included walking escorts, … the LiveSafe app, and real-time safety alerts.”
Campbell, who called Tuesday’s robbery an “isolated incident,” noted that the investigation remains ongoing.