Murder of Christian Prince

Who is Murder of Christian Prince?

Christian Haley Prince was a Yale student whose murder in New Haven highlighted racial and class tensions between town and gown.

Prince, the son of Edward and Sally Prince of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was a fourth-generation Yale student, a member of the class of 1993 in his sophomore year, in Pierson College. The evening of February 16, 1991, after having dined at Mory's and attended a party at Sterling-Sheffield-Strathcona Hall, Prince left his friends and began walking to his off-campus apartment on Whitney Avenue to rest for lacrosse practice the next day. Prince was found lying on the steps of St. Mary's Church, New Haven on Hillhouse Avenue, dead of a bullet wound to the heart, at approximately 1:15 am on the morning of February 17. He was the first Yale student killed on campus since the murder of Gary Stein during a robbery near Grove Street Cemetery in 1974.

His death stunned the campus, and more than 1,000 mourners attended his funeral in Washington, D.C., where Prince's brother Ted, also a Yale graduate, gave the eulogy. There was a short term significant decline in applications to Yale which was directly attributed to the murder. Yale's president, Benno Schmidt, resigned the following year after a contentious six-year term filled with myriad problems, including badly deteriorated town-gown relations highlighted by Prince's murder.