The suspect in the fatal shooting of a Colorado woman who attended Wesleyan University was in police custody Thursday night.
Police in Meriden, Conn., 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 nondegree 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 believed 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.
Justin-Jinich was from a Jewish family, and her grandmother was a Holocaust survivor.
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.
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.
Denver Post staff writer Howard Pankratz contributed to this report.
