UConn player dies
Stabbing victim was expectant father
STORRS, Conn. – A Connecticut football player who was an expectant father was stabbed to death early Sunday after an on-campus dance, just hours after helping his team to a homecoming victory.
Jasper Howard, 20, of Miami, and another student were stabbed during a fight after a fire alarm was pulled during a university sponsored dance at the UConn Student Union just after 12:30 a.m., police said.
Police had not identified a suspect or released the name of the other victim.
Connecticut coach Randy Edsall said the team was heartbroken and devastated over the loss of Howard, a junior and the team’s starting cornerback who came to the school to get away from the violence on the streets of his hometown, and became the first person in his family to go to college.
“I know this,” Edsall said, his eyes red and welling with tears, “he loved UConn; he loved his teammates; he loved everything about this.”
Edsall said Howard’s death was especially tragic, because he was about to become a father.
The coach gathered his team at its training facility at 6 a.m. to deliver the news.
“As Jazz looks down on us, I can promise him and his family, that son or daughter will have 105 uncles,” punter Desi Cullen, a team captain, said during an afternoon news conference. “And we will do what it takes to not get through this, but to grow from it.”
UConn Police Major Ronald Blicher said this is the first homicide at the university in the more than 30 years he has been associated with the school.
Blicher said Howard was stabbed following a fight between two groups that included students and non-students, which broke out just after a fire alarm went off in the student center, forcing the evacuation of about 300 people. Police had cordoned off the crime scene near the university’s Gampel Pavilion basketball arena.
“Certainly not all 300 saw this event,” Blicher said. “We have been actively interviewing people through the night and day, and we continue to seek anybody who might have information.”
Police were trying to determine whether the alarm and the fight were related. About 40 officers from the UConn police and state police major crime squad were working on the case.
Howard and the other student who was stabbed were taken by ambulance to Windham Community Memorial Hospital, where the other victim was treated and released. Howard was later airlifted by helicopter to Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford, where he died from his injuries.