A man who Connecticut police say sparked fear on a university campus by killing a student from Colorado and threatening a campus shooting spree surrendered Thursday night after seeing his photo in a newspaper.
Stephen P. Morgan, 29, was taken into custody about 9:15 p.m. after stopping at a convenience store in Meriden, about 10 miles from the Wesleyan University campus.
Clerk Sonya Rodriguez told WFSB-TV that she didn’t recognize Morgan when he got a drink and scanned the newspapers. She said he asked her to call police, but she wasn’t suspicious.
When police arrived, they told her the man she had been talking to was wanted for Wednesday’s fatal shooting of 21-year-old Johanna Justin-Jinich in Middletown.
“I started crying,” she said. “I was nervous. He killed someone.”
Morgan, a Colorado resident during much of this decade, is being held on $10 million bail and is due in court this morning.
Justin-Jinich, from Timnath, near Fort Collins, was shot several times inside a bookstore cafe by a gunman wearing a wig. Authorities said Morgan and Justin-Jinich have known each other since at least 2007, when Justin-Jinich filed a harassment complaint against him while they were enrolled in a summer class at New York University. Sources told the Hartford Courant that the two first met in Colorado.
Earlier Thursday, Boulder police were given a photo of Morgan and told to watch for him. Morgan was enrolled as a nondegree student at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007, according to Bronson Hilliard, CU’s director of media relations.
The Courant reported that Morgan’s car, which was found after Wednesday’s slaying, had Colorado license plates.
The newspaper, citing anonymous law enforcement sources, said the car contained a journal in which Morgan spelled out a plan to rape and then kill Justin-Jinich before going on a campus shooting spree.
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 earlier, beginning in 2002, records indicate.
Denver Post staff writer Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
