In the four weeks or so preceeding the murder of Suzanne Jovin, by persons unknown, something truly bizarre happened at Yale University. Acting on a tip, supposedly one provided by a University computer technician conducting some basic repairs and upgrades on university-owned office computers, federal officers opened an investigation into Professor Antonio Lasaga.
At that time, in the autumn of 1998, Professor Lasaga was one of the leading authorities in the country on Geophysics: he was a full professor, tenured, in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. He was also a master of a residential college for undergraduate at Yale, married, and highly respected. To be a Master of one of the twelve residential units ( called colleges after the Cambridge model ), was to have a position of extraordinary prestige, responsibility and authority.
Each of the twelve residential colleges at Yale houses some two hundred to three hundred sophomores, juniors and seniors: every student at Yale College is assigned to a residential college upon matriculation, but the Freshman Class always lives together in the dormitories on The Old Campus, and dines together in the University Commons, except for some Saturdays, when they take their meals in the residential dining halls. Every one of the twelve residential units has its own name, its own heraldry and flag, its own dining hall, library and study rooms, and many also have snack bars and exercise rooms. One college has its own print shop, others have courts for squash or racquetball.
Antonio Lasaga was the Master of Saybrook College, one of the original ten college dormitory units built in the 1930s, and like Branford, Calhoun, Trumbull, Silliman, Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards ( where John F. Kerry lived when he was an upper-classman at Yale ), it is built in the Gothic style. The brick and stone work of these buildings is truly amazing, and much of it was accomplished by Italian immigrants resident in New Haven in the '30s. In recent years the University has raised and spent many tens of millions of dollars in a thorough program of renovations. The fine stonework has been repointed, repairs made, new stonework added where the old stone was not fixable, and all the rooms inside upgraded.
But it was a computer upgrade and maintenance which tripped up Antonio Lasaga.
The federal agents, acting on the aforementioned tip, obtained warrants and did searches which revealed that Professor Lasaga was a devotee of child pornography. In all something in the area of 250,000 images were found stored on both university-owned computers and on his own computers, and many of these pornographic pictures involved clearly underage young women, young men and boys. As events happened, about three weeks before Jovin was murdered, the authorities acted.
Antonio Lasaga was arrested on charges of trafficking in child pornography and of using the Internet to get and send these images. He was suspended from his position as a professor of geology and he was suspended from his post as Master of Saybrook College. But because he had tenure, and because tenured professors can assert the rights that supposedly belong to all Citizens of the United States, his salary was not stopped nor his benefits revoked at that time.
THE JOVIN MURDER OBSCURES THE LASAGA SCANDAL
In the days following the murder of Suzanne Jovin, the police investigators of New Haven were, frankly, baffled. The place where she was found bleeding to death was in the city's finest neighborhood. Yet there was no reason for her to be there.
There was nothing of interest on East Rock Road for a young woman of Yale, no caberet, no bar or restaurant, no facilities belonging to the University and nothing of any interest at all. However, one half of a mile down that same street -- which changes its name to St. Ronan about a quarter of a mile from the spot of her murder -- was the apartment rented by her advisor.
James Van De Velde had a definite connection to Saybrook College, as well, and thus to Antonio Lasaga. During the time that Lasaga was the Master, Van De Velde had served as the Dean of the residential unit. As noted, every student at Yale College is assigned to one of the twelve residential colleges.
The Dean of the residential college is their liason with the academic structure of the undergraduate experience. It is a difficult and often thankless job and it is often laid off on very junior faculty members. The Dean of each college is required to counsel students on their program of study, to assist them with finding the appropriate courses of study for whatever major they might select or be interested in selecting, and to sign off on all course selections and changes.
The Dean of a college is a key factor in the life of the undergraduates. The Master, by contrast, is in charge of overseeing the administration of the residential units, of hosting public and private events for the students and faculty, and for keeping things running smoothly. By tradition and then by regulation, only tenured professors now have that responsibility. As might seem logical, the Dean has to work fairly closely with the Master of each college. And it is a certainty, that if a faculty member aspires to rise in the ranks at Yale, then doing a year or two or three as a Dean is mandatory. The Master is also responsible, therefore, for the advance in the career of any instructor or assistant professor who takes a job as a dean of a college.
Inquiries into the matter have not revealed any known conflicts between James Van De Velde and Antonio Lasaga, but Van De Velde did leave Yale for a post at the Hoover Institute, following some duty in the U.S. Naval Reserve, which took him into Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1997. In point of fact, when his job with the Hoover Institute didn't work out to his liking ( nor, apparently, to their liking either ), he was lucky to be able to return to Yale for an instructor's position in political science.
Besides counseling seniors on their senior essays, Mr. Van De Velde was apparently retained to teach two courses each semester.
But when someone in the New Haven Police Department leaked a story to the local media -- naming James Van De Velde as the principal subject in the murder investigation -- the doors began slamming on this Yale graduate. They slammed shut in a big hurry.
Despite the fact that Suzanne Jovin had a boyfriend, that she had only been known to date young men her own age, despite the fact that none of her friends had any concept that she might have been "seeing" Van De Velde .... He was accused in the local media by innuendo from an unattributed source. Despite the fact that a man with his level of ambition, who was some thirteen years older than Suzanne Jovin, would hardly be inclined to risk his budding academic career for a secret romantic intrigue, he was accused in the media.
Nothing was held back by Van De Velde, in the early days of the investigation. He talked willingly to the New Haven police investigators and he told them that Jovin was a good student, a very promising student, and that she was likely to get an A for a grade in his course. She had been a lively participant in the seminar and had often sparred with Van De Velde, something noted by her classmates in his seminar, over politics. Van De Velde was an unabashed Republican conservative. Jovin an unabashed Hillarycrat. Yet there was no apparent animosity between them, and the New Haven Police Department looked very hard to find some. They didn't.
After a few weeks of being the only named suspect in a supposed "pool of suspects," Yale came back into session for the Spring semester. Van De Velde found that the university was unwilling to extend to him the presumption of innocence that was extended to the full professor with the library of child pornography. His courses for the Spring were cancelled.
He was relegated to a desk doing some office-type work which amounted to nothing at all. He was made aware, in no uncertain terms, that his contract would not be renewed for another year of instruction. He was paid through the end of the academic year but he was not allowed to teach, counsel or tutor any students. And in that whole time, Van De Velde was never once charged with any aspect of the crime of murder, never once even brought before a grand jury for sworn testimony.
Weeks turned into months, the academic year ended, and Van De Velde left Yale and New Haven. But he was a ruined man.
He had been pursuing a graduate degree in Communications at Quinnipiac University ( then college ), where he was well-regarded by the other students as an expert on politics. He was not well-liked, however, and both other graduate students and some of the instructors in that program had the opinion that Van De Velde was cold and ambitious, a career-driven man.
Quinnipiac cashiered Van De Velde from the graduate course of study without any due cause, except for the fact that he had been vilified by innuendo in the local media. The New Haven Police Department had nothing much to go on, no witnesses to the crime, no useful physical evidence. And despite the fact that he had cooperated with them in the early phases of the investigation, they somehow settled on the absurd notion that Jovin had been a victim of unwarranted sexual advances by Van De Velde and had rejected him.
Lacking facts to justify such a conclusion, the only thing that they had to base this 'notion' on, was the fact that Van De Velde was alone in his own apartment at the time she was killed and that he lived 1/2 of a mile from East Rock and Edgehill.
In the on-going furor over Van De Velde as "a suspect" in a pool of suspects which apparently had no other members, the matter of the child pornography charges against Antonio Lasaga was shoved to the backroom of the local media kitchen.
Eventually, Lasaga was convicted on federal charges and sentenced to serious prison time. He was then brought up on State of Connecticut charges for molesting a young boy in New Haven, a boy he had met through a city-sponsored mentoring program !! He had a mind to fight those charges, until the prosecutors revealed that they had obtained videotapes he had made of the young boy in question, being molested and being asked to pose in pornographic situations ....
So he caved in and took a plea-bargain on the State charges. Lasaga was terminated from all his connections with Yale as a professor and as a Master of a residential college.
Now, nobody at Yale wants to speak of the infamous Antonio Lasaga, disgraced Master of Saybrook residential college. But James Van De Velde is still seeking vindication, still seeking to clear his name and to be removed from "the pool of suspects."
The image which displays below shows the entrance to the Master's House of Saybrook College: every college Master gets living quarters and a budget for food and entertainment and other social purposes, as a part of their compensation and for the benefit of their college --
Serving Freedom
and Liberty
