The suspect in the shooting of Colorado woman who attended Wesleyan University was in police custody Thursday night.
Police in Meriden, Connecticut arrested Stephen Morgan in the shooting death of Johanna Justin-Jinich.
Earlier, Boulder police were given a photo of Morgan and told to watch for him.
Morgan, 29, was enrolled as a non-degree student at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007, according to Bronson Hilliard, CU’s director of media relations.
Justin-Jinich, a 21-year-old student from Timnath, near Fort Collins, was shot several times Wednesday inside a bookstore cafe just off campus in Middletown, Conn., by a gunman wearing a wig. Two years ago, she complained to police in New York that Morgan had stalked and threatened her.
University officials said police told them the suspect expressed threats in his personal journals toward Wesleyan and its Jewish students.
The Hartford Courant, citing anonymous law-enforcement sources, said police confiscated Morgan’s car and found a journal in which he spelled out a plan to rape and then kill Justin-Jinich before going on a campus shooting spree.
The Courant said that the car had Colorado license plates and that police think Morgan came to the Middletown area from Boulder.
The newspaper also reported that police stopped Morgan shortly after the shooting, spoke to him and let him go, only to later learn from Justin-Jinich’s family that they suspected him.
Police declined to discuss the report.
Justin-Jinich was from a Jewish family, and her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.
Hilliard said that anybody living in Boulder or the adjacent area can sign up for classes as a “nondegree” student when space is available.
Sarah Huntley, spokeswoman for the Boulder Police Department, said that Connecticut authorities contacted the Colorado Information Analysis Center and that the information center then contacted Boulder police.
Huntley said that there is no record that Boulder police ever had contact with Morgan. Records do show he received a speeding ticket in Denver in December 2006.
Morgan, a Navy veteran once stationed in Hawaii, lived in Boulder from about June 2006 to December 2007. He had lived in Colorado Springs several years prior to that beginning in 2002, records indicate.
Morgan and Justin-Jinich had known each other at least since 2007. Sources told the Courant that the two met in Colorado.
Police records show she filed a harassment complaint against him when they were enrolled in the same six-week program at New York University.
In a complaint filed in July 2007, Justin-Jinich said Morgan called her repeatedly and sent her insulting e-mails.
One of the e-mails warned: “You’re going to have a lot more problems down the road if you can’t take any (expletive) criticism, Johanna.” Both were interviewed by university police, but Justin-Jinich decided not to press charges.
Justin-Jinich would have graduated next year from Wesleyan. She was a 2006 graduate of the Westtown School, a Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia.
Denver Post staff writer Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
