Hours after an 18-year old student at Barnard College was found stabbed and dying just outside Morningside Park in Manhattan, the police commissioner and two top chiefs gathered with detectives near the steep flights of stone steps where she had been attacked.

It was already clear that the killing of the student, Tessa Majors, in her first semester of college and new to New York City, was a heinous, high-profile crime that would demand the full resources of the police department.

And it was just as plain to the police officials at the scene that the inquiry would be handled in the shadow of an investigation from a different time: the Central Park Five case, also known as the Central Park jogger case, from April 1989. Both concerned a young white woman attacked in a park and even younger teenage suspects who are black and Latino.

“The discussion was, we have to be very careful, not rush to judgment, because it’s absolutely going to be compared to the Central Park Five,” said a senior police official briefed on the investigation.