Candles and photos at a vigil for Gayle in 2021, following her death. Contributed Photo.
In the days and weeks and months after Camryn “Mooka” Gayle passed away, her mother Elizabeth Robinson made a promise to her baby girl. I got you, Mooka, Robinson said as she laid her child to rest. I got you. It became a refrain, there as she collected signatures, reached out to city officials, and made appeals to safeguard her daughter’s memory. Don’t worry. I will fix it. I got you.
Now, she is getting the closure she has prayed, advocated, and petitioned for for over three years. Monday night, New Haven’s full Board of Alders voted to rename the intersection of Sherman Parkway and Harding Place as “Camryn’s Corner,” after the young and vibrant teenager who lost her life there.
“I can breathe again,” she said in a video call Tuesday, holding up pictures of Gayle as a smiling, bright-eyed toddler. “I’m just so happy. From the day she passed … I would talk to her, I would tell her ‘I got you.’ I wasn’t gonna stop. I was just so happy and I know she’s happy.”
“This is my closure,” she later added. “This is what I was waiting for.”
Her quest—which became a community’s quest, from dance teachers to friends and family members—has taken well over a year. In November 2021, Gayle died in a car accident on a stretch of Sherman Parkway that can feel more like a highway than a city road. At the time, she was a student at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, where she was studying dance.
It was one of multiple accidents that that intersection, which advocacy groups have described as a dangerous and poorly-lit blindspot, has seen in recent years. And for her mother, who did not sleep for weeks afterward, it was the beginning of an attempt to not just rename a corner, but to make New Haven safer for all who drive through its streets.
In the months that followed Gayle’s passing, Robinson began collecting signatures to rename the corner, with dozens of people who signed on (one close friend, Co-Op senior Jordyn Thomas, remembered helping her collect signatures in an interview last year). In that time, she and Gayle’s friends also worked to keep her memory alive, holding birthday parties, remembrances and balloon releases at the place where she had lost her life.
From those who remember her vivid presence, it’s easy to see why. Gayle, beloved across her social circles, was a jokester whose big personality and love for dance were matched only by her fierce, sharp wit and devotion to the people she loved. At school and at church, she was a dynamo, who soared as a dancer and also made time for cheerleading and drill.
Tuesday, Robinson remembered attending her first praise dance recital in 2016, while recovering from a stroke. She was awed by the grace and strength with which her daughter moved. “I was there with a walker, but I was there,” she remembered. “It was beautiful.”
When Robinson turned the petition in to the city in November 2023, a single $250 fee—she asked the city to waive it, and the city refused—held it up for over a year (read more about that in previous Arts Paper coverage here). During that time, representatives from the Board of Alders stopped reaching out to her. At the end of last year, no one from the city let her know that the item had resurfaced in the Alders’ City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) committee, where she would have had a chance to testify in favor of it.
At that meeting, CSEP members voted to hold the item until the next meeting, and Co-Op’s dance department came forward to pay the fee (while Robinson is grateful, she said, she maintains that the city should have waived the fee). In early March, CSEP members—none of who reached out to let her know the meeting was taking place—passed the item forward to the full Board of Alders.
At Monday’s meeting, Robinson said, she was able to hold it together until the item had passed unanimously. From a seat in the aldermanic chambers, she listened as CSEP Chair Anna Festa and Newhallville Alder Troy Streater both gave testimony in support of the renaming. Then as they voted, the totality of the motion—and the enormity of her loss—came through. From where she sat with Gayle’s friends and fellow family members, she told her daughter: We did it.
“Once everyone said ‘Aye, aye, aye,’ I just broke down in tears,” she remembered. “I’m so happy.”
She added that the renaming is not a final answer for her: she and members of Gayle’s family still want to see speedbumps, improved lighting, and stop signs added to that stretch of Sherman Parkway, to improve safety for the hundreds of drivers who travel through that section of New Haven every day. “It has to be done,” she said.
Arts educator Lindsey Bauer, who was teaching Gayle at the time she passed away, said she’s thrilled that the full Board of Alders voted favorably on the renaming. But she doesn’t understand why it ever took as long as it did.
In the days after Gayle died, she remembered, Mayor Justin Elicker came to Co-Op, and said that the city would be there for students and teachers who were overcome by their grief. So it was frustrating to her that the city didn’t waive the fee, or keep Robinson in the loop.
“She [Gayle] was such a bright light and a great spirit,” Bauer said in a phone call Tuesday afternoon. “This is what we need to be doing for the people in our city and it shouldn’t be this hard.”
Back inside her home Tuesday, Robinson walked around with the phone camera, pausing on pictures of Gayle as a young child, a poster from a memorial service that remains taped to the front door. As she spoke, she held a striped shirt in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag that still smells like her daughter. “My house is a shrine,” she said, adding that she still holds Gayle’s memory close, from her cheerleading sneakers to her CashApp transactions and old videos.
At one point, Robinson’s young grandson Amir—Gayle’s nephew—traipsed through the room in a paper crown, turning briefly towards the video call with a big smile. Robinson turned toward him, cracking a sly smile—with a gentle chiding—when he found an Easter basket intended for the celebration later this month.
“You know Auntie Mooka?” she said to him, and he nodded. “They’re gonna have her street sign put up.”
Reached Tuesday afternoon, Prospect Hill/Newhallville alder Troy Streater said that he does not yet have an exact timeline for the corner renaming, but is excited that it is at last moving forward. Robinson, in turn, said that she would like to hold it on or before her daughter’s birthday, August 11.
“I definitely wanted to see it through,” Streater said. “It was an untimely accident, a tragic accident, a young girl lost her life. I felt that it would give her mother a little comfort to have the street name. I just felt that it was my duty to help see it through.”