A 17-year-old is dead after a shooting on Shelton Avenue in New Haven Tuesday night.

The police department said the shooting happened near Huntington Street just before 7 p.m.

Police Chief Karl Jacobson said the teen was shot in the road. He was taken to the hospital where he later died.

The 17-year-old’s identity is unknown at this time. Jacobson said the teen killed tonight knew 16-year-old Uzziah Shell, who died in a broad daylight shooting two weeks ago.

It follows another deadly shooting that happened in a parking lot on George Street Monday afternoon.

The police chief said the 17-year-old went to Riverside Academy in New Haven. The school superintendent has been notified and police say there will be grief counseling available to students.

The investigation remains ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 203-946-6304.

A lone bagpiper played an ancient Irish tune, The Minstrel Boy, as a hearse bearing the body of Connecticut’s 87th governor, M. Jodi Rell, glided to a stop by the broad brick walk leading to the north portico of the state Capitol.

On a summer’s day 20 years ago, Rell marched to the same spot to take the oath of office, succeeding a governor who had resigned in the face of an impeachment inquiry. She then welcomed the public in a receiving line.

There was one last receiving line Tuesday in the east atrium of the Capitol, hard by the statue of Nathan Hale. Rell would lie in state for four hours before her funeral, her coffin draped by the blue flag of the state she served as a state representative, lieutenant governor and governor from 1985 to 2011.

As Lawrence F. Cafero, a former House Republican leader and one of the mourners in line Tuesday, recalled of her inaugural: It was cloudy at the start, but the sun eventually shone on the new governor.

Rell, who finished the last six months of her predecessor’s third term and was elected in 2006 to a four-year term of her own, died in Florida on Nov. 20 after a brief illness.

She had a plane ticket and plans to come back for Thanksgiving to Connecticut, where her daughter and son, Meredith and Michael, and their spouses and Rell’s grandchildren live. Her usual routine was to stay through Christmas, then head south before the new year.

Lying in state denotes a certain formality, and there was that on Tuesday. 

A police and military honor guard awaited the hearse, which arrived as scheduled — a half hour before the 10 a.m. start, when her family would receive mourners. Six military men bore the coffin, climbing the steps to a called cadence.

“Ready! Step.”

They carried the coffin to a bier of cherry wood, on loan from a local funeral director, John C. Carmon. A legislative facilities manager said it was the same model the Reagan and Bush families chose when the former presidents lied in state at the U.S. Capitol.

A rotating honor guard, one Capitol police officer and one member of the military, stood at attention on either side. Her official portrait, borrowed from the Museum of Connecticut History on the other side of Capitol Avenue, faced the casket.

The family retired to a borrowed caucus room, where M. Lisa Moody, who served Rell as chief of staff for nearly all her 16 years as lieutenant and governor, waited to greet them. Moody was hobbled by recent foot surgery.

Paddi LeShane and Jackie Bernstein were there. Like Moody and Rell, they all were active in the Connecticut Women’s Council, a professional and social networking group.

The family held a private wake the previous day in Brookfield, the community Rell represented in the House. The home where Rell and her husband, Lou, raised their children is now owned by her daughter. 

The former governor had kept a condo in town, though she was a snow bird, a retiree with a legal residence in Florida. Lou Rell died a decade ago at 73. Their daughter looks and sounds like the mother. The son favors the father.

The formality of a governor lying in state didn’t last long, as a line formed, nearly all of the early arrivals with some connection to Connecticut politics and its 87th governor.

“I had to sneak over and see my friend,” Paul Doyle said.

Doyle is a Superior Court judge who sits in criminal court, two blocks south of the Capitol. He was a House member during Rell’s 10 years in the House and later was elected to the Senate.

Peter Nystrom, the mayor of Norwich and a former House member, was already there. Soon, others followed: James A. Amann, who became House speaker in 2005, sometimes clashing with Rell over issues — once drawing the ire of his wife, who admonished him to be nicer.

Thomas D. Ritter, one of Amann’s predecessors as speaker, chatted with Jack Betkoski and Michael Caron, two former lawmakers now serving on the Public Utilities Regulatory Authority. Herb Shepardson, the Republican chair when Rell was governor, was behind them.

At 10 a.m., the family emerged to greet Gov. Ned Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz, the latter of whom had served in the House with Rell. Lamont and Bysiewicz were the first to pause by the casket, then chat with the family. Lying in state had become a wake.

House Speaker Matt Ritter, a Democrat, and House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, a Republican, arrived together. Senate Minority Leader Stephen Harding, R-Brookfield, left the line to join them. Then he returned to his place in line, explaining that Rell, who held the House seat that Harding would occupy before going to the Senate, had a thing about not jumping lines.

Cafero, a Republican, stood in line in front of Tom Swan, the director of the Connecticut Citizen Action Group, a liberal activist in Democratic causes.

Swan was one of organizers behind an effort to pass campaign finance reform the year after Rell took office. Rell wanted bans on contributions from contractors and lobbyists, but not the public financing of campaigns sought by Swan and others.

Ultimately, Rell accepted a version with public financing. On Tuesday, Swan said her initial reluctance was immaterial.

“She signed it,” Swan said.

There were other things about Rell that Swan admired, including signing a law that gave early marriage rights to same-sex couples under a civil unions law. She later signed a gay marriage bill enacting a court order. Medicaid expanded under Rell, and the tax code got more progressive, even if it was through a budget Rell allowed to take effect without her signature.

“She was a good governor,” Swan said, his voice low as he approached the casket and Rell’s family. 

An initial rush subsided after 45 minutes, but a stream of others continued into the afternoon. Liz Kurantowicz, a former Rell aide, wore a scarf, a tribute to her former boss’s fashion signature.

“This is a Rell scarf,” Kurantowicz, pointing to a state seal.

Donald E. Williams Jr., the former Senate president pro tem, is a Democrat who led the opposition to the Republican governor but noted it was an opposition without rancor. 

Williams moved up the pecking order at the Capitol the same time as Rell. When Gov. John G. Rowland resigned and Rell became governor, William’s predecessor as Senate leader, Kevin B. Sullivan, automatically succeeded Rell as lieutenant governor. Williams was then chosen as the new Senate leader. 

After greeting the family, the mourners paused to sign a guest book that sat on a lectern by three easels hold photos.

The National Guard had brought pictures of Rell at events for Operation ELF, the guard’s annual toy drive. It was a pet cause of Rell’s. The photos were displayed on easels off to the side, near an illuminated Christmas tree.

Gov. Ned Lamont and the state’s two elected fiscal officers, the treasurer and comptroller, reported Monday that Connecticut’s once-neglected state-employee pension system is now 55% funded — up from 38% eight years ago, but still a national laggard.

Additional contributions and better investment returns produced gains of $2.7 billion in the state employees retirement system and a similar gain in the separate teachers’ system, which is now 62.3% funded. But the officials warned the state needs to continue the progress.

“It means we’ve gone from being the third-worst-funded pension in the country to the sixth-worst,” Lamont said. “We have a long way to go, and the rest of the country is watching.”

Connecticut is one of six states with a state employees pension fund less than 60% funded, a consequence of decades of neglect: No state contributions were made to the fund from its creation in 1939 to 1971, then inadequate support until Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took office in 2011.

Lamont, Treasurer Erick Russell and Comptroller Sean Scanlon, all Democrats, said the latest pension fund valuations demonstrate that various reforms begun during the Malloy administration and accelerated by Lamont are paying off, but true stability is years away. 

“It takes a long time to dig out of this hole,” Russell said.

For the past 13 years, the state has met the basic standard of making actuarially determined contributions. More recently, it also has seen far better returns on the investment of pension funds, and it’s used six straight years of budget surpluses to reduce the unfunded liability.

“I think we have made incredible progress as a state,” Scanlon said.

“I think we’ve shown we can manage our house,” Lamont said. 

The celebration by Lamont, Russell and Scanlon comes a month before the General Assembly is scheduled to open its annual session and begin a debate on whether the state can afford to loosen the spending controls collectively known as the “fiscal guardrails.”

A volatility cap and other restrictions imposed in 2017 and unanimously renewed last year have required setting aside $4 billion as a budget reserve and using another $8.5 billion in surplus funds to reduce the unfunded pension liability, frustrating advocates who see mounting unmet needs in a time of relative plenty. 

Paying down the unfunded liability has immediate and longterm benefits: Without the added investment over the last few years, the required pension contributions in the next fiscal year would have been about $737 million higher, and the projected savings to taxpayers over the next 25 years are about $18 billion, Scanlon said.

Leaders of the Democratic majorities in the General Assembly, as well as a wide range of advocacy groups, are expected to urge Lamont to recalibrate the volatility cap to allow some surplus funds to be spent. On Monday, Lamont offered them little encouragement.

Lamont pronounced himself “strict” on the question of maintaining the guardrails, while repeatedly refusing to say if he already has decided to propose a budget that will maintain the caps as currently written. Lamont will make a “State of the State” address on Jan. 8 then make his budget proposal a month later.

His only promise was to propose “an honestly balanced budget.”

“We haven’t done that for 30 years in the state, until the last six or seven years. I don’t want a lot of assumptions that just create a hole in the out years. I want to make sure that we have a balanced budget for our kids going forward as well,” Lamont said. “I’m a little surprised — sometimes people say we’ll spend a lot more now and we’ll figure out how to pay for it later. I think that’s the type of credit card mentality that got the state with big problems over the last 30 years. I’m not gonna let it happen again.”

Democrats won majorities of 25-11 in the Senate and 102-49 in the House last month, each veto-proof margins. But there are moderate Democrats who could join minority Republicans in upholding any Lamont veto of changes to the guardrails. Senate Republicans immediately issued a statement urging Lamont to be resolute.

Connecticut for All, a coalition of 60 community, faith, labor and nonprofit groups, said Lamont and the lawmakers have to balance fiscal responsibility against social needs.

“The last several budget cycles have been irresponsibly unbalanced, leaving working families unnecessarily burdened and blocking needed investments in our communities’ futures,” said Norma Martinez-HoSang, the group’s director. “You don’t make extra car payments when your vehicle is missing an engine. It’s time to get Connecticut back on the road with fiscal policies that are responsive to our current financial state and the needs of our state.”

Management of the pension is somewhat separate from the question of adjusting the guardrails. While the requirements of the volatility cap have accelerated paying down the unfunded liability, the pension funds’ fiscal stability has benefitted from other unrelated reforms that Russell and Scanlon say must be preserved.

They included the basic one of making the annual actuarially required contributions, as well as eschewing a gimmick that lawmakers once used to artificially lower those  required contributions — assuming an artificially high rate of return on investments.

“We have to make sure we protect this culture and never allow ourselves to return to habits of ignoring our obligations,” Russell said.

The state once assumed a rate of return of 8.5%, far beyond the actual returns. In 2019, it lowered the assumed returns to 6.9%. The lower the assumed returns, the higher the annual required contribution to make up the difference.

Over the past two years, changes in investment strategies have yielded better returns.

“We’ve gone from being one of the worst performing pension funds over the last 30 years to being in the top quartile, and that makes an enormous difference,” Lamont said.