Jasper Howard Was On Track For Success

 

- Jasper Howard was hundreds of miles from his Miami home, but he grew to love it up here.

UConn, the big school in a tiny town, was giving him an opportunity to escape the tough area he grew up in and get in position to make a much better living for his mom and two sisters.

But that opportunity was taken away early Sunday morning.

Howard, known as "Jazz," was killed in a stabbing near the Student Union on campus after a school-sanctioned party.

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The Miami Edison High graduate was 20 years old, and his girlfriend, also from Miami, was pregnant with their child.

Howard, a 5-foot-9, 174-pound cornerback who had 96 tackles and four interceptions in his career, was on his way. He was known as one of the Big East Conference's better one-on-one cornerbacks.

He had a career day on Saturday, when he made 11 tackles and forced a fumble that he recovered in the Huskies' 38-25 win over Louisville at Rentschler Field in East Hartford.

Pictures: Jasper Howard's Career At UConn

Howard was a standout in high school, too. He was an All-Dade County selection as a senior at Edison and was named MVP of the Nike Dade-Broward All-Star Game, which has the best players from south Florida, fertile recruiting ground for major colleges. In that game, foreshadowing what was to come, he returned a punt 70 yards for a touchdown and had a 45-yard TD reception. Last season, Howard led the Big East in punt return average (11.8 yards).

"I'm real close to all my guys, but Jazz and I were real close," Corey Bell, Howard's coach at Edison and now the director of football operations at the University of Miami, told the Miami Herald. "We spoke at least once every week. He's a great kid, coachable, dependable, real tough mentally and talented. He's like most of the kids from that area in Little Haiti. He had dreams of getting to the next level and making it and taking care of his mom and his sister."

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