USA > History > 2010 > Violence (I)

A Woman. A Prostitute. A Slave.

November 27, 2010
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Americans tend to associate “modern slavery” with illiterate girls in India or Cambodia. Yet there I was the other day, interviewing a college graduate who says she spent three years terrorized by pimps in a brothel in Midtown Manhattan.

Those who think that commercial sex in this country is invariably voluntary — and especially men who pay for sex — should listen to her story. The men buying her services all mistakenly assumed that she was working of her own volition, she says.

Yumi Li (a nickname) grew up in a Korean area of northeastern China. After university, she became an accountant, but, restless and ambitious, she yearned to go abroad.

So she accepted an offer from a female jobs agent to be smuggled to New York and take up a job using her accounting skills and paying $5,000 a month. Yumi’s relatives had to sign documents pledging their homes as collateral if she did not pay back the $50,000 smugglers’ fee from her earnings.

Yumi set off for America with a fake South Korean passport. On arrival in New York, however, Yumi was ordered to work in a brothel.

“When they first mentioned prostitution, I thought I would go crazy,” Yumi told me. “I was thinking, ‘how can this happen to someone like me who is college-educated?’ ” Her voice trailed off, and she added: “I wanted to die.”

She says that the four men who ran the smuggling operation — all Chinese or South Koreans — took her into their office on 36th Street in Midtown Manhattan. They beat her with their fists (but did not hit her in the face, for that might damage her commercial value), gang-raped her and videotaped her naked in humiliating poses. For extra intimidation, they held a gun to her head.

If she continued to resist working as a prostitute, she says they told her, the video would be sent to her relatives and acquaintances back home. Relatives would be told that Yumi was a prostitute, and several of them would lose their homes as well.

Yumi caved. For the next three years, she says, she was one of about 20 Asian prostitutes working out of the office on 36th Street. Some of them worked voluntarily, she says, but others were forced and received no share in the money.

Yumi played her role robotically. On one occasion, Yumi was arrested for prostitution, and she says the police asked her if she had been trafficked.

“I said no,” she recalled. “I was really afraid that if I hinted that I was a victim, the gang would send the video to my family.”

Then one day Yumi’s closest friend in the brothel was handcuffed by a customer, abused and strangled almost to death. Yumi rescued her and took her to the hospital. She said that in her rage, she then confronted the pimps and threatened to go public.

At that point, the gang hurriedly moved offices and changed phone numbers. The pimps never mailed the video or claimed the homes in China; those may have been bluffs all along. As for Yumi and her friend, they found help with Restore NYC, a nonprofit that helps human trafficking victims in the city.

I can’t be sure of elements of Yumi’s story, but it mostly rings true to me and to the social workers who have worked with her. There’s no doubt that while some women come to the United States voluntarily to seek their fortunes in the sex trade, many others are coerced — and still others start out forced but eventually continue voluntarily. And it’s not just foreign women. The worst cases of forced prostitution, especially of children, often involve home-grown teenage runaways.

No one has a clear idea of the scale of the problem, and estimates vary hugely. Some think the problem is getting worse; others believe that Internet services reduce the role of pimps and lead to commercial sex that is more consensual. What is clear is that forced prostitution should be a national scandal. Just this month, authorities indicted 29 people, mostly people of Somali origin from the Minneapolis area, on charges of running a human trafficking ring that allegedly sold many girls into prostitution — one at the age of 12.

There are no silver bullets, but the critical step is for the police and prosecutors to focus more on customers (to reduce demand) and, above all, on pimps. Prostitutes tend to be arrested because they are easy to catch, while pimping is a far harder crime to prosecute. That’s one reason thugs become pimps: It’s hugely profitable and carries less risk than selling drugs or stealing cars. But that can change as state and federal authorities target traffickers rather than their victims.

Nearly 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it’s time to wipe out the remnants of slavery in this country.

    A Woman. A Prostitute. A Slave., NYT, 27.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28kristof.html

New York City Crime Dips

but Violent Crime Is Up

November 25, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and JANET ROBERTS

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, within six weeks of the year’s end, faced questions about the state of crime in New York City with what has become a familiar and welcome answer: Overall crime in the city is down again in 2010.

“Crime is down this year,” Mr. Kelly told reporters on Tuesday after a promotion ceremony in Lower Manhattan. “Down about a percent and a half, citywide, the index crimes.”

But the reason the Police Department can make that claim is not that murders are down. Or rapes. Or robberies. All of those crimes are up, as are shootings, driving an overall 3.5 percent increase in violent crime through mid-November, compared with last year.

Rather, because of the way major crimes are counted in New York — lumping violent crimes in with far larger numbers of property theft complaints, including the largest category, grand larceny — police officials could say that overall crime was down 1.3 percent. Without a substantial decrease in grand larcenies this year, however, the city would show an increase in overall crime.

When pressed, Mr. Kelly, to be fair, does not dodge the truth of the more disturbing numbers. “We have seen a spike in murders, rapes and robberies,” he acknowledged.

But he cautioned against compartmentalizing crimes or analyzing data from too short a period, seeking to put those spikes in historical context. Homicides are up, he said, but only over the record low last year, 471. They are still on track to be “probably the third-lowest year for murders that we’ve had since we started to record them accurately,” Mr. Kelly noted.

He added: “Every year of the Bloomberg administration, we’ve had murders below the 600 level. It never happened before. Prior to 2002, we’ve never had a year where we had less than 600 murders.”

But murder counts have not been the issue talked about the most in connection with New York crime statistics this year. Instead, much debate has centered on a fresh set of concerns over the integrity of the crime statistics and suspicions about whether crime complaints were being manipulated.

A first note sounded in February when, in an academic survey, retired police captains and higher-ranking officers said pressure to reduce crime had led some managers to alter crime data to show annual decreases in the index crimes measured in the department’s CompStat program.

Police officials disputed the methodology of the survey.

Later, a whistleblower officer made public his allegations that crime complaints in the 81st Precinct in Brooklyn were manipulated. In October the department brought internal charges against the precinct’s former commander and four others, accusing them of failing to record a grand-larceny auto theft and a robbery complaint.

Notably, grand larceny is one crime category that draws scrutiny from those who suspect numbers-fudging. In their survey of retired captains and others, the two academic researchers said some respondents told them that commanders and supervisors had combed Web sites to find lower values for items stolen from victims, enabling them to downgrade reported grand larcenies to misdemeanors from felonies.

Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, which monitors crime and police policies, said it was “hard to know” if the crime numbers, particularly on grand larceny, were being manipulated. But he said, “There are certainly serious questions out there that need to be resolved about the police data.”

An analysis by The New York Times of crime tallies through Nov. 14, downloaded from the Web site of the Police Department, provided no clear confirmation or rebuttal of statistical manipulations.

Robbery is driving the citywide rise in violence. On a precinct level, the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn, was one of three in the city showing the highest increases in robberies. The others were the 103rd in Jamaica, Queens, and the 79th in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Citywide, robbery was up in four of the five boroughs, and in pockets of all of them.

The police say teenager-on-teenager robbery is up in many places. It is hitting hardest in the Bronx, where an increase of 383 robberies, compared with the same period in 2009, accounted for almost half the citywide jump.

Rapes were up 15 percent citywide and rose in every borough but Queens. Already, with 1,207 rapes on the books through mid-November, there have been more rapes recorded than in all of 2009. If the pace continues, the city will log more than 1,300 rapes this year, a higher number than for any year since 2006.

The highest rape rates — those double or more the citywide per capita rate — cut two distinct swaths through the city, one across Harlem and into the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, and the other running southeast in Brooklyn from Bedford-Stuyvesant into East New York.

Homicides hit 470 by Nov. 14, which was 67 more than in the same period last year. Their numbers increased the most in traditional danger zones, in the Bronx and northern Brooklyn, and new concentrations appeared in eastern Queens, where two precincts accounted for 20 percent of the city’s overall increase.

A look at homicides per precinct shows that the 75th led the way, with 29. Next door in Brooklyn, the 73rd Precinct was on pace to log the highest rate of homicides per capita, for the fourth year running, with 2.6 homicides per 10,000 residents. The 25th Precinct, in East Harlem, saw the biggest raw number increase, to 10 from 2 last year. By contrast, eight precincts made it through mid-November with no homicides.

Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said each category had to be seen in context. Robberies were still 13 percent lower than two years ago. More than 90 percent of rapes this year involved acquaintances or relatives, which “would seem to indicate that the past reluctance of victims to report relatives or date rapes is giving way to willingness of victims to report,” he said.

Violent assault was fairly flat, because there were 111 fewer assaults on police officers, traffic agents and other peace officers than in 2009. With murders, Mr. Browne said, the police are simply “fighting our own success.”

On the flip side, major property crimes, and most notably grand larcenies, which are defined as felony thefts with losses valued at more than $1,000, declined by a combined 4 percent. Property crimes were down by 2,348, to 57,737 cases from 60,085 in the first 10 1/2 months of last year. Burglary dropped to 16,113 from 16,508, and auto thefts dropped to 9,096 from 9,276, the police statistics show. The drop in grand larcenies, to 32,528 from 34,301, represented 76 percent of the net decrease.

And the biggest drop in grand larcenies happened in the geographically confined area of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which logged 560 fewer larcenies through Nov. 14, representing nearly a third of the total citywide decrease in that category. Statistics from the two Midtown precincts were responsible for most of that decline, combining for 318 fewer larcenies.

Mr. Browne said southern Manhattan always dwarfs other areas of the city in generating complaints of grand larceny, “so it should not come as a surprise that a decrease there would have a major effect, as would an increase.” He said Deputy Chief Michael J. McEnroy led several initiatives this year to reduce grand larcenies and property crimes in southern Manhattan, including running burglary and larceny apprehension and surveillance teams.

In the end, Mr. Aborn of the Citizens Crime Commission said, the story of crime this year is complicated. “New York remains an incredibly safe city,” said Mr. Aborn, who ran unsuccessfully last year for Manhattan district attorney. “The one thing cutting against that is this is the first year where we have seen a steady uptick in violent crime. And that is something that we really need to keep our eye on.”

    New York City Crime Dips but Violent Crime Is Up, NYT, 25.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/26/nyregion/26crime.html

Lawrencia Bembenek, ‘Bambi’ in Murder Case, Dies at 52

November 21, 2010
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Lawrencia Bembenek, a former Playboy bunny and Milwaukee police officer whose conviction for the murder of her husband’s ex-wife and audacious escape from prison became tabloid and TV-movie fodder and a cause célèbre for supporters who insisted on her innocence — as she always did — died Saturday in a hospice in Portland, Ore. She was 52.

The cause was liver failure, said Ms. Bembenek’s lawyer, Mary Woehrer.

Known as Bambi, Ms. Bembenek (pronounced bem-BENN-eck) joined the Milwaukee Police Department in March 1980 after a stint as a waitress at a Playboy Club. Within a year she was married to Elfred Schultz, a Milwaukee police detective.

Then, on May 28, 1981, Detective Schultz’s former wife, Christine, was found dead in her bedroom, bound, gagged and shot in the back at point-blank range. Three months later Ms. Bembenek was arrested, and the case immediately became a media sensation.

Ms. Bembenek contended that vindictive colleagues had framed her because she was assisting a federal investigation into corruption and sex discrimination in the Police Department. She had also caused a storm by giving supervisors photographs of off-duty officers (including her future husband) posing naked at a party.

During her two-week trial, some of the most damaging testimony showed that Ms. Bembenek, who married Detective Schultz four months before the killing (they later divorced), had bitterly complained about the $700-a-month alimony he was paying his former wife. Ms. Bembenek was sentenced to life in prison, and her appeals were rejected by appellate courts and the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Eight years later, Ms. Bembenek squeezed through a laundry room window, climbed a seven-foot barbed-wire fence and fled from the Taycheedah Correctional Institution, about 60 miles north of Milwaukee. Aiding her escape was her fiancé, Dominic Gugliatto, whom she had met while he was visiting his sister, an inmate at the prison.

Again Milwaukee was electrified by the case. A rally celebrating her escape attracted 300 people. Bars and restaurants named menu items after her, including a Bembenek Burger. T-shirts reading “Run, Bambi, Run” proliferated. Television stations conducted call-in polls asking viewers if they believed she was innocent.

On Oct. 17, 1990, three months after the escape, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Ms. Bembenek and Mr. Gugliatto in Ontario after she was recognized by a restaurant patron who had seen her on the Fox television show “America’s Most Wanted.”

Within a year, supporters produced a low-budget documentary, “Used Innocence.” And in a three-hour television movie, “Woman on Trial: The Lawrencia Bembenek Story,” Tatum O’Neal played the title role.

Another television movie about Ms. Bembenek, starring Lindsay Frost, was called “Calendar Girl, Cop, Killer?” And a 1992 book by Kris Radish titled “Run, Bambi, Run” was subtitled “The Beautiful Ex-Cop and Convicted Murderer Who Escaped to Freedom and Won America’s Heart.”

A reinvestigation of the case followed, and in December 1992 a judge reduced Ms. Bembenek’s life sentence to 20 years after she struck a deal with prosecutors in which she pleaded no contest to second-degree murder. She was immediately released for time served.

Lawrencia Bembenek was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 15, 1958. She is survived by two sisters, Melanie and Colette.

On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Pardon Advisory Board declined to consider Ms. Bembenek’s petition for a pardon. It remained unclear whether the board, which meets twice in December, will reconsider her petition before Gov. James E. Doyle leaves office. The final decision is up to the governor.

Ms. Woehrer, her lawyer, said that she would continue to seek a pardon, and that she believed newly uncovered ballistic and DNA evidence would exonerate Ms. Bembenek.

Last month Mike Jacobs, a news anchor at WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee, interviewed Ms. Bembenek at her home in Vancouver, Wash.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Jacobs said: “I asked, ‘If you are innocent, why did you plead no contest to second-degree murder in 1992?’ And her response was that her parents were in failing health and the only way that she could be guaranteed that she would be able to spend time with them was to plead no contest. Her father’s dying wish was that she get the family name cleared.”

In the televised interview, Mr. Jacobs asked Ms. Bembenek whether her attractiveness had hurt her credibility during her murder trial. “All they did was talk about what kind of blouse I wore,” she said, referring to the news media. “I would do it a lot differently now.”

    Lawrencia Bembenek, ‘Bambi’ in Murder Case, Dies at 52, NYT, 21.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/us/22bembenek.html

Data Elusive on Low-Level Crime in New York City

November 1, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA and AL BAKER

Year in and year out, the New York Police Department proudly broadcasts its statistics for major crimes. And each year for more than a decade, its numbers have showed how reports of murder, rape, robbery, serious assault and theft have hit historic lows.

But since the end of 2002, the department, the nation’s largest, has not made public its statistics on reports of lower-level crimes: a vast trove of complaints about matters like misdemeanor thefts and assaults, marijuana possession and sex offenses other than rape.

As a result, residents across New York have gone without a full understanding of the quality of life in their corners of the city. It has also complicated the efforts of some to examine fully the department’s reductions in major crimes.

Major crimes are called “index crimes” because they are an indicator of all crime, according to experts. If major crimes are falling, so, typically, should lower-level crimes. Having both sets of data, some criminologists assert, would allow for a sort of truth testing.

Of the more than 500 police agencies in the state, the city’s Police Department is one of only two that do not voluntarily disclose data on lower-level crimes to the state.

In several other major cities, like Los Angeles and Phoenix, such information is easily accessible on police department Web sites or via routine requests.

Since 1978, long before data analysis was so heavy a staple of crime fighting, the city’s Police Department reported lesser crime data to the State Division of Criminal Justice Services. Journalists used them. So did policy makers, neighborhood leaders, academics and others.

But not long after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed Raymond W. Kelly as the police commissioner in 2002, the department stopped providing the information to the state.

Police officials, who often boast of the department’s technological capabilities in programs like its Real Time Crime Center, blame computer problems. They say that when the department introduced its new OmniForm records management system in 2002, the priority was to make sure it could accurately track and extract major felonies. Those crimes are used in the department’s CompStat system to deploy officers and are also reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, said that the department also had other things to add to OmniForm first, including the automated reporting of summons data, and had setbacks fixing errors in its nonindex crime reporting system.

“I.B.M. thought they had a solution, and it did not work,” Mr. Browne said last week. “And now they’re back to the drawing board.”

The integrity of the department’s crime statistics has been questioned recently. In an academic survey released this year, more than 100 retired captains and higher-ranking officers indicated they were aware of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to crime complaints in the seven major felony categories measured by the department.

The survey was conducted by the criminologists Eli B. Silverman, of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and John A. Eterno, a former New York police captain, now at Molloy College. One of the issues being investigated was whether pressure to reduce major crime further had led some precinct commanders and supervisors to reclassify serious crimes into the lesser categories that are now difficult to analyze.

Their research has examined whether a system of incentives, as well as a desire to avoid being excoriated by department leaders in weekly CompStat meetings, have led some precinct commanders to downgrade crime reports. Crime reduction is a key to promotion and more desirable assignments, and some current and former officers say that pressure sometimes trickles down to frontline supervisors and officers on the street.

The department has issued penalties in a dozen cases of officers manipulating crime reports since 2002, Mr. Browne said. Last month, in the 81st Precinct, in Brooklyn, a whistle-blower officer’s claims of complaints being downgraded led to internal charges against five officers, including the former commander.

Department leaders say they have rigid quality controls, including semiannual audits of every precinct, to prevent widespread manipulation of crime statistics, and that any episodes of tampering have been isolated. Two researchers, Dennis C. Smith of New York University and Robert Purtell of the State University of New York at Albany, concluded in a 2006 study that these controls were among the best in the country, and looking at raw data on grand larcenies and petty larcenies, found no statistical evidence of downgrading.

But frustration over reporting crime statistics is not the only source of concern about how forthcoming the department has been with information.

For instance, this year, Jessica S. Lappin, a City Council member, pushed a bill to require the Police Department to post weekly on its Web site numbers, broken down by precinct, on traffic deaths, injuries and summonses.

James Tuller, the department’s chief of transportation, said it would take up to an additional 23 workers to post the data, “which, at best, would serve no purpose and, at worst, would mislead the public.” But the department’s longtime chief of transportation, Michael J. Scagnelli, who retired in 2009, told the Council in written testimony in April that the information “already exists” and could easily be made public. Nonetheless, without the department’s support, the proposed bill died.

“They basically said the public can’t handle this information,” said Ms. Lappin, who has since re-introduced the bill, this time requiring the Transportation Department to provide the data.

As well, the department for years failed to abide by a city law requiring it to turn over quarterly data on its controversial “stop, question and frisk” policy. From 2003 to 2007, the department provided street-stop data to the Council only sporadically and often in incomplete chunks. Not until February 2007 did it begin to comply on a steady basis — but it still did not turn over the raw data, which social scientists and others said was necessary to understand trends.

“I do think that the N.Y.P.D. is a very strong department, and they’ve done an incredible job over the years of driving down crime,” said Richard M. Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission, which monitors crime and police policies. “But I think they would benefit themselves by being more transparent, because transparency builds confidence in policing.”

Mr. Browne said the department “does far more than any other” to inform the public, and the Bloomberg administration apparently agrees. The department and the administration point to a range of online data the department makes available, including domestic violence statistics and incident response times.

The department’s policy on lower-level crime statistics is among the most vexing issues for scholars, legislators and others seeking clarity on the true state of life in the city. Janine A. Kava, a spokeswoman for the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, said of the statistics the city once provided: “The purpose is really to identify trends and inform public policy.”

Ms. Kava said she was unsure why the department had ceased providing the data.

Today, among the state’s law-enforcement agencies, only New York City and Newburgh do not report such data, Ms. Kava said.

Professors Eterno and Silverman, whose studies have raised questions about the integrity of New York City crime statistics, said the failure to report low-level crime to the state had implications for more than just academics.

“These statistics are used to make policy decisions,” Professor Eterno said. “And shouldn’t we in the public know these statistics in order to make decisions? Hiring officers, for example; countless studies rely on them as well, so these are not just esoteric statistics.”

Peter F. Vallone Jr., the chairman of the Council’s public safety committee, said last week that getting information from the police was “one of the biggest problems, consistently,” he had faced. He said part of the problem was that the department, though one of the most technologically advanced police agencies in fighting terrorism, was still backward when it came to filling basic data requests.

“No one can get a straight answer on how many cops are patrolling the streets,” Mr. Vallone said.

In other cases, he added: “They just don’t want to provide the statistics. I don’t understand why, because when they do, it always shows the N.Y.P.D. is doing what they are supposed to do.”

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

    Data Elusive on Low-Level Crime in New York City, NYT, 1.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/nyregion/02secrecy.html

Killing for the Mob, Then Decimating It in Court

October 28, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Of all the life lessons that Salvatore Vitale took from a boyhood friend he idolized, two of them became practically second nature: as a child, he was taught how to swim; as an adult, he was instructed how to kill.

The latter skill, he would later admit, was one he practiced regularly on behalf of the friend, Joseph C. Massino, who would marry Mr. Vitale’s sister, become the boss of the Bonanno crime family and eventually elevate Mr. Vitale to serve as the underboss.

Mr. Vitale’s criminal life story is laid out in sharp relief in a remarkable document that federal prosecutors in Brooklyn filed under seal last month. An inch thick, it contains a story that spans more than three decades and touches on 23 murders, 11 of which Mr. Vitale directly participated in, and many other crimes that he and other mob figures committed.

But the document, which was unsealed this week, also tells another story: how the Bonannos were decimated, in some measure through Mr. Vitale’s betrayal in 2003 of the crime family and his own extended family, as he became a star government witness. Using his testimony, federal prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have been able to imprison 51 mob figures, including Mr. Massino and the last four acting bosses of the Bonanno family.

Mr. Vitale, 62, is to be sentenced on Friday. Prosecutors have called his cooperation “groundbreaking by any measure,” and filed the 122-page document to seek a more lenient sentence than the mandatory life term set forth in the advisory sentencing guidelines.

In a 10-year assault on the Bonanno family, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecutors have convicted a total of 135 members and associates, making Mr. Vitale perhaps the most prolific mob turncoat since Salvatore Gravano, who testified against the Gambino boss John J. Gotti.

Prosecutors say Mr. Vitale has identified more than 500 organized crime members and associates in the United States and abroad, and information he has provided has led to prosecutions of high-ranking members of the Colombo, Gambino and Genovese families, in addition to Bonanno family figures.

He has also provided information that led investigators to uncover murder victims buried decades earlier, including in a mob graveyard in a swamp on the Brooklyn-Queens border where two men killed in 1981 were interred. But some see his cooperation, and the government’s effort to secure a more lenient prison sentence for him, possibly even one that would release him into the witness protection program, in a very different light.

David Breitbart, who defended Mr. Massino at his 2005 murder and racketeering trial, criticized the government’s handling of Mr. Vitale and its use of cooperating witnesses in general, noting that a half dozen admitted killers who testified against his client have been released into “the population at large.”

“I don’t want them living next door to me, and I don’t see how the government justifies that,” Mr. Breitbart said. “They take someone on and they use him and they file a 120-page motion in order that the individual can go home.”

Until 2002, the Bonanno family stood out among New York’s five Mafia clans in that it had never had a “made” member cooperate with the government and testify in court. That distinction was due in part to the obsessive fear of informants and infiltrators, borne of an undercover F.B.I. agent’s years-long penetration of the family in the 1980s, which cost two Bonanno figures their lives. (The case became the basis for the 1997 movie “Donnie Brasco.”)

But Mr. Vitale’s cooperation helped break the Bonanno family, leading to a historic event in organized crime in the United States: Mr. Massino’s own betrayal, nearly two years later, of the crime family he headed. An unprecedented act, it made Mr. Massino, an Old World stalwart known as the Last Don, the first Mafia boss in this country to cooperate with the F.B.I. and prosecutors.

Mr. Vitale thus helped create such an embarrassment of riches for investigators that it prompted one F.B.I. official to complain jokingly at the time that there were more insiders providing information on the crime family than agents on the squad assigned to investigate it.

Slender, soft-spoken and polished, Mr. Vitale, who grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and attended City College for a year, made an effective witness. Often, when he answered questions, he said “True,” rather than yes, giving his responses an air of authority.

He served in the Army as a paratrooper for two years, stationed in Mainz, Germany, and worked as a U.P.S. truck driver and a New York State correction officer before he began working for his childhood friend, Mr. Massino, driving a catering truck to sell coffee and pastries at factories and car dealerships on Long Island.

Mr. Vitale, whose silver hair always appeared carefully combed (he was known as Good Looking Sal), came to idolize Mr. Massino, who was nearly five years his senior.

During the course of his three decades with the crime family, his portfolio of crime was substantial and varied. He told agents and prosecutors of committing arson, burglary, hijacking, loan sharking, extortion, insurance fraud, illegal gambling, money laundering, obstruction of justice and securities fraud.

And then there were the murders. Mr. Vitale pleaded guilty in April 2003 to racketeering conspiracy and murder-in-aid of racketeering, admitting to 11 killings between 1976 and 1999.

The document methodically maps out the various aspects of Mr. Vitale’s work with the government. It is known as a 5K motion, for section 5K1.1 of the sentencing guidelines, under which prosecutors can argue for a term shorter than that set out under the advisory guidelines if a defendant has provided “extraordinary cooperation.”

In some ways, the lengthy document adds little new information to what the government has already said in court papers and what Mr. Vitale has said from the witness stand at six trials in United States District Court in Brooklyn, where he will appear before Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis in his own case on Friday afternoon. But it weaves together the various narrative strands, trials and cases that were brought, in part, on information Mr. Vitale provided.

Two of the prosecutors who led the assault against the Bonannos, Greg D. Andres and John Buretta, prepared the 5K motion, and, with other submissions, argue for a sentence far shorter than the mandatory life term he faces.

Judge Garaufis, who has presided over cases against scores of Bonanno figures, including four of the trials at which Mr. Vitale testified, will consider the motion, along with a companion document that remains sealed.

    Killing for the Mob, Then Decimating It in Court, NYT, 28.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/nyregion/29vitale.html

When the Tormentors Live Just Outside Your Front Door

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SUSAN DOMINUS

William Cruz, a shy homebody who moved to the Bronx in 2006, always kept his private life just that — private, for reasons of self-protection. “I hear the news, about gay people getting stabbed, beat up,” Mr. Cruz, now 47, said. “You never know. It could be things like that that happen to you, you could bump into the wrong person.”

He said those words two days before news broke of a brutal attack in which a 30-year-old gay man, and two 17-year-olds thought to have had sex with him, were tortured by members of a street gang, about two miles from the neighborhood near the Grand Concourse where Mr. Cruz once lived. Mr. Cruz, who survives on disability payments after having been severely injured in a 1981 fire, was never physically attacked while he lived in the Bronx, but he lived in fear of it, because of harassment he experienced in the most vulnerable of all places: his own home. His is a offstage story offering fresh insight into bullying when the target is an adult.

Mr. Cruz’s troubles began, he said, in June 2007. There was a minor dispute with the five-story building’s superintendent, Miguel Nieves, over some work Mr. Cruz requested be done in his one-bedroom apartment, whose $1,031 rent he paid mostly with a Section 8 housing voucher.

Not long after, Mr. Cruz said, Mr. Nieves started using a variety of antigay slurs about him and talking about him to the neighbors, telling one she should watch out lest Mr. Cruz rape her husband. Mr. Cruz’s cousin signed an affidavit saying that he saw the super’s wife drawing a penis and a gay epithet on Mr. Cruz’s mailbox; someone also drew an image of a penis on his door and that same offensive word, along with “bitch,” in permanent marker.

The words, on the threshold of his safe haven, were an assault, there for every child walking up the stairs to see, there to incite any possible homophobic thug with a baseball bat. “I imagine there’s more people out there like himself,” Mr. Cruz said of his old superintendent. “When they find out I’m gay? How will they react?”

When Mr. Cruz had a birthday party for himself, he painstakingly covered up the ugly words with a blue tablecloth and a sparkly “Happy Birthday” sign, so that the relatives who knew his sexual orientation would not feel hurt and the friends who did not know would not wonder. As the months wore on, and the insults escalated, Mr. Cruz’s life — already somewhat circumscribed by a disability in his hands — grew smaller and smaller: He feared leaving the house, worried the threats would graduate from the verbal to the physical.

If last week’s brutal attack represents the worst of what gay men might expect to endure, Mr. Cruz’s experience speaks more to the day-to-day, low-grade humiliations that are par for the course in so many corners of even New York City. And those neighborhoods extend far beyond the Bronx to ones in Manhattan like the East 50s, where Townhouse Management, which owns Mr. Cruz’s building, seemed incapable of putting an end to the harassment. His lawsuit against the company is scheduled to be heard in Bronx Supreme Court on Oct. 27.

“They treated it like a complaint about an overflowing toilet,” said Katie Rosenfeld, a lawyer representing Mr. Cruz. “They could have moved Nieves to another building, they could have installed cameras, they could have had housing-discrimination training.”

Mr. Nieves, who no longer works for Townhouse and could not be located for comment, denied all the accusations in a deposition.

Stuart Jackson, a lawyer representing Townhouse Management, said in an interview that the company sent supervisors to spot-check Mr. Nieves’s performance more often than usual, repeatedly spoke to Mr. Nieves and made some inquiries of the neighbors, but did not find sufficient evidence of his having done anything wrong. Mr. Jackson also said Townhouse, which owns or manages 2,000 apartments citywide, offered to move Mr. Cruz to another building; Mr. Cruz said no such offer was made until he sued.

“But even if it was,” his lawyer said, “William shouldn’t have to move out of the home he chose to feel safe.”

Since the spring of 2008, Mr. Cruz has lived in Brooklyn, and he now is content in a one-bedroom apartment decorated with his elaborate collection of Marilyn Monroe posters and calendars. When news broke of the attack in the Bronx, some sense of that newfound security eroded. He did not want to be photographed in a way that he could be recognized; he did not want to reveal the neighborhood where he now lives.

“This guy is a very sensitive man,” said Mr. Jackson, the landlord’s lawyer.

Can anyone blame him?

    When the Tormentors Live Just Outside Your Front Door, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16BIGCITY.html

Openly Gay in the Bronx, but Constantly on Guard

October 15, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

Keith Mitchell, a 24-year-old who likes to be called Sparkles, strolled down East Tremont Avenue in the Bronx, discussing what he would wear on a date that night. As he rounded a corner, a stocky man with baggy pants and arms covered in tattoos locked eyes on him.

The news had been filled with details of the vicious antigay attacks two weeks earlier and just two miles to the west, but Mr. Mitchell, breezy as ever, did not notice the stare until the tattooed man called out.

“What’s up, mama?” the man asked with a smile. “How you been?”

In West Farms, the neighborhood where Mr. Mitchell lives, nearly everyone — the bodega cashiers, the basketball players, even the gang members — knows he is gay, and he has rarely felt threatened.

Yet the torture of three men thought to be gay has shaken him, as it has people across the city, and especially in the Bronx, the borough with the city’s highest rates of poverty and some of its most violent crime.

In the toughest neighborhoods, gay residents say, it is possible to live openly much of the time — and then to suddenly pay for it.

“There is a constant threat of violence that we live with,” said Charles Rice-Gonzalez, 46, a writer and gay rights advocate who has been working in the South Bronx for two decades. “I was horrified, disgusted and angered by the attacks. I wouldn’t say I was surprised or shocked.”

In the week since the police announced the first arrests of several gang members in the assaults, Mr. Rice-Gonzalez and Arthur Aviles, co-founders of the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, have begun planning a self-defense class at their theater in Hunts Point. David Matthews, 43, another gay rights advocate who works in the South Bronx, said he was looking over his shoulder with a new vigilance.

And Mr. Mitchell, who said he can be himself in his neighborhood because people there watched him grow up, is taking care when straying beyond its borders. He has been beaten up before, he said, and the recent attacks are never far from his mind. “That could have been me,” he said. “You never know when someone is going to turn on you.”

In many respects, gay people in the lowest-income neighborhoods face the same challenges and threats as other gay New Yorkers.

The Department of Education reported 862 incidents of harassment based on sexual orientation in the 2008-9 school year. More than 40 percent of the 1,700 homeless youths in the Safe Horizon Streetwork Project, a citywide victims’ assistance program, identify themselves as gay or transgender.

But in dozens of interviews this week, gay and lesbian residents said it could be especially difficult to be gay in the Bronx, given the macho culture of the street, the local gang codes and the storefront churches that call homosexuality a sin.

“If I walk around wearing tight jeans and looking non-hood, I feel the tension,” said Ruben Porras, 29, who grew up in Morris Heights, where the attacks occurred. “If I’m walking by some Bloods, I’ll walk tougher.

“But if I’m in Chelsea,” he said with a laugh, “I’ll act very differently.”

If the Bronx has no Chelsea, a Manhattan neighborhood that wears its gay identity proudly, it does have its public gay life. Some bars sponsor gay nights — Tuesdays at Mi Gente Café on Unionport Road are popular — but the scene is scattered, without the security that an enclave like Chelsea or the West Village provides.

“It’s loose and it’s not centralized, but there is a gay community in the Bronx,” said Mr. Rice-Gonzalez, whose theater acts as something of a clearinghouse for gay culture in the borough.

When Mr. Rice-Gonzalez was growing up in the Soundview neighborhood in the 1970s and ’80s, there were few gay organizations, making for “a very clear sense of isolation,” he said.

“There wasn’t a queer voice in the Bronx,” Mr. Rice-Gonzalez said. “There was no way for gay men to meet each other unless you ran into someone downtown.”

Today, several groups offer services and counseling to gay people, including the Bronx Community Pride Center, Bronx AIDS Services and the Hispanic AIDS Forum. Harassment and even violence against gays are not uncommon, but the Oct. 3 attacks in Morris Heights have struck a nerve because of their brutality and extent — 11 suspects; 4 victims, including the brother of one of the men who were tortured; and a 20-hour rampage involving cigarette burns, sodomy and beatings with baseball bats.

Mr. Porras, who said he knew some of the men arrested, offered an explanation of the attacks informed by life on those same streets. He said the men, who belonged to the Latin King Goonies, a subset of the Latin Kings, were not overtly hostile to gays. He compared the gang to a father who tolerated gay people — as long as they were not in his family.

“People will embrace it so long as it’s not someone they are claiming as their own,” he said.

The trouble began, the authorities said, after one gang member saw a 30-year-old man, who was suspected of being gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the group. Gang members assumed the men had slept together; they punished them, another teenager and the older man’s brother.

Morris Heights is a tight-knit community where neighbors know one another by nicknames. Old men stand in bodegas discussing the day’s headlines. On a recent afternoon, young men on Burnside Avenue argued about the price a chop shop would pay for a Toyota.

A 29-year-old mother stood outside a bodega, two blocks from the house where the attacks occurred, reading newspaper accounts of the arrests. She said she was horrified by the violence, but she acknowledged that gay people, including a man in her building, made her uncomfortable.

“It’s hard for me to handle,” said the woman, who declined to give her name for fear of gang reprisals. “It’s something that’s not normal in a household.”

Yet her feelings about homosexuality are conflicted, which gay advocates say is not unusual. “I watch a lot of gay porn,” she said. “It’s very intriguing to me. Why are they so interested? What pleasure do they get?”

In neighborhoods where gangs are common, some churches offer a message of tolerance. But several gay residents said a growing number of congregations made them feel attacked from two sides.

“I feel assaulted every weekend because of the hate speech from sidewalk preachers,” Mr. Rice-Gonzalez said. “They say gay people need to repent, they’re going to hell.”

State Senator Rubén Díaz Sr., a Pentecostal minister who represents the South Bronx, is a vocal opponent of gay marriage. Many gay leaders noted that the statement he released condemning the recent attacks made no mention of homosexuality.

In an interview, Mr. Díaz, a Democrat, said: “I don’t support violence against anybody. I would ask for the maximum penalty to anyone that abuses another human being.” But he added, “I’m against gay marriage, and I always will be.”

New York has long been a refuge for gay people. But many have been dismayed by an assault this month on a gay man at the landmark Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, followed by the Bronx attacks and remarks this week by the Republican nominee for governor, Carl P. Paladino, who said gay pride parades were “disgusting.”

“If this is the oasis in our country,” Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said, “it doesn’t feel that great right now.”

    Openly Gay in the Bronx, but Constantly on Guard, NYT, 15.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/nyregion/16gays.html

Bronx Attacker’s Ultimatum: Be Hit With a Bat, or a Pipe

October 11, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK and COLIN MOYNIHAN

After he had been punched, kicked and stripped of his clothes and jewelry, the 17-year-old man was given a choice: the bat or the pipe.

His attackers, part of a gang of nine young men, were in the midst of a night of savage assaults against three men they suspected of being gay, according to a criminal complaint released on Sunday.

Before the night was out, the victims would be tortured with burning cigarettes, box cutter blades, plunger handles and more, prosecutors charged. But first, the 17-year-old had to make his selection.

“I guess the bat,” he said.

Idelfonso Mendez, 23, the accused ringleader and chief interrogator, proceeded to beat the teenager with a bat, the authorities say; the beating may have been blunted by the bat’s composition: plastic.

Fresh details of last weekend’s attack against three men emerged Sunday in Bronx Criminal Court during the arraignment of eight men charged with crimes including gang assault, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment, all as hate crimes. The police were still searching on Sunday for the ninth suspect, Rudy Vargas-Perez, 22, who was said to have reneged on a promise made through a lawyer to turn himself in.

The men were part of a Morris Heights street gang who called themselves Latin King Goonies.

Prosecutors say the men lured a gay 30-year-old man and two 17-year-olds to an empty apartment in a four-story house on Osborne Place and tortured and beat them, in what city officials have called the worst antigay attack in recent memory.

Six of the men, including Mr. Mendez, were being held without bail, while Judge Harold Adler set bail of $50,000 cash or $100,000 bond for both Steven Carabello and Denis Peitars, both 17 and neither charged in the attack on the 30-year-old man, which was probably the most vicious.

Mr. Peitars will testify before a grand jury, according to his court-appointed lawyer, Fred Bittlingmeyer, who said his client had not participated in the sexual abuse and had been only tangentially involved in the attacks.

“This was not part of some gang scene,” he said in court. He described the night as a group of people who were drinking together until “one individual let it get out of hand.”

“The 17-year-olds, in particular, Judge, were just there,” Mr. Bittlingmeyer said.

Mr. Carabello’s lawyer, Paul Horowitz, said, “It’s very dangerous to paint all of them with a broad brush.”

After the arraignment, the mother of Nelson Falu, 17, another of the accused, maintained her son’s innocence.

“He goes to school,” said the woman, who identified herself only as Caroline. “He’s doing everything good. He has a baby on the way. I raised a good boy. I know my son has nothing to do with this.”

The attacks have stirred outrage across the city. Gay-rights advocates passed out leaflets in the Morris Heights neighborhood calling for tolerance, while elected officials denounced the attack.

“How can one human being be so inhuman to another simply on the basis of who they are?” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg asked from the pulpit of the East Ward Missionary Baptist Church in East Harlem on Sunday.

“What kind of twisted logic spurs a large group of men to show off their toughness by ganging up on helpless individuals? That’s not showing you’re tough, that’s just showing that you’re weak and despicable."

A Bronx assistant district attorney, Theresa Gottlieb, laid out a harrowing narrative describing the attacks as something of a ritualized interrogation, led by Mr. Mendez, followed by a group beating.

The victims were all seated in a chair marked with a red bandanna and attacked with whatever was at hand — a plastic bat, a box cutter, even a shaving cream can.

As the charges were outlined in court on Sunday, the men, dressed in sweatshirts, sneakers and jeans, betrayed little emotion. They all were arrested Thursday and Friday, except for Elmer Confresi, who turned himself in on Saturday.

The first attack took place on Oct. 3, early Sunday morning, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang.

They brought the teenager to the nondescript brick building that they had used all summer as a party house.

Mr. Falu, according to the criminal complaint, cut the victim in the thigh, foot and back with a box cutter, saying: “You crazy. You lost your mind.”

The complaint offered other specifics: that Mr. Mendez and David Rivera, 21, punched and kicked the victim, while Mr. Mendez asked him if he was gay; that Mr. Rivera hit him in the forehead so hard with can of a shaving cream that it left a bruise that lasted four days.

“If you snitch, your family is gonna get it,” he said, according to the complaint.

Then, it said, Mr. Mendez inserted a wooden stick into the victim’s rectum, and asked, “Do you like this?”

Later , while the victim who was beaten with a bat was still in the house, the men lured the 30-year-old to the house with the promise of a party.

“You like to have sex with the young ones,” Mr. Mendez said to the man, the complaint stated, adding that Mr. Rivera blindfolded him and chained his hands behind his back. He was punched, burned with cigarettes and sodomized with a wooden object, prosecutors said.

The men took the man’s keys and went to his home, where the authorities said they tied up his brother and stole three cellular phones, $1,000 in cash and a 52-inch television.

The other defendants are Bryan Almonte, 17, and Brian Cepeda, 17. The next court hearing is set for Thursday.


Elizabeth A. Harris and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.

    Bronx Attacker’s Ultimatum: Be Hit With a Bat, or a Pipe, NYT, 11.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/nyregion/11bias.html

Two Worlds Collide in a Gritty Bronx Neighborhood

October 9, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and SAM DOLNICK

The most severely brutalized victim was a gay 30-year-old Hispanic immigrant known in his Bronx neighborhood as “la Reina,” Spanish for “the Queen.” He was playful, flirty and always ready for a party, neighbors said. At the bodega below the apartment he shared with his brother, he often bought sodas for teenagers.

The ringleader of the street crew was known on his block as a stocky 23-year-old thug with tattoos all over his arms and a pit bull at his side, a marijuana dealer who would hang out on a fire escape and would put teenagers to work selling drugs. He had previous arrests for gun possession and robbery and, as a neighbor put it, “looked like trouble.”

“He acted like he was a big shot,” said the neighbor, Michael Perez, 20, of the ringleader, Idelfonso Mendez, 23. “It was just a matter of time.”

Their lives intersected last weekend in what city officials described on Saturday as the worst antigay attack in recent memory. It happened in an abandoned building in the Morris Heights section that neighbors said had been virtually taken over in recent months by youths who used it for wild parties and sex.

The authorities say nine young men who called themselves the Latin King Goonies lured the gay man to the building with the promise of a party and tortured him and the two 17-year-olds they suspected of having sex with him, subjecting them to beatings that went on for hours, gruesome sexual attacks with a small baseball bat and the wooden handle of a toilet plunger, and cigarette burns on the genitals of the older man.

The attacks unfolded inside 1910 Osborne Place, a four-story brick building with a lime-green door on a third-floor porch. The building is across the street from an elementary school on a quiet block in Morris Heights, a largely Hispanic neighborhood. But neighbors said that, lately, it had become a magnet for trouble, with music blasting in the small hours of the morning, young men and boys drinking on the stoop, and, on several occasions, police officers breaking up the crowds but making no arrests.

Officials said Saturday that the building’s owner had paid fines on two Buildings Department violations — one for doing work without a permit, another for having too many tenants — since 2005. Both had followed complaints to the city’s 311 line.

A makeshift tribute appeared on the steps Saturday: pink roses with a card calling for “Prayers for healing — for our community.” Gov. David A. Paterson, five members of the City Council, and a coterie of other politicians and ministers marched down a block to show solidarity with the victims.

The 30-year-old gay man and his 40-year-old brother, who neighbors said were from Ecuador, lived two blocks away, in a fifth-floor apartment at the corner of Loring Place South and West Burnside Avenue. During the attacks, investigators said, some members of the group went to the apartment, beat the older brother and stole $1,000, debit cards and a 52-inch television set.

On Saturday, the brothers’ neighbors gave a harrowing account of having heard banging at their door early Monday, and opening it to find the older brother, his face and head covered with blue and white masking tape, his hands tied behind him with white string. Behind the gag, they said, they heard him cry, “Ayúdame!” (“Help me!”). They took him in, cut the bindings and called the police, spawning a weeklong investigation that led to the arrest of seven of the gang members late Thursday and early Friday.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Saturday that those suspects had “made statements implicating themselves in this crime.” An eighth suspect, Elmer Confresi, 23, turned himself in on Saturday, while the ninth, Rudy Vargas-Perez, 22, reneged on a promise made through a lawyer to turn himself and remained at large, Mr. Kelly said.

Besides Mr. Mendez and Mr. Confresi, the suspects are David Rivera, 21, who had prior arrests for weapons possession and robbery; Bryan Almonte, 17; Steven Caraballo, 17; Elin Brayon Cepeda, 16; Nelson Falu, 17; and Denis Peitars, 17, all of the Bronx. They were still awaiting arraignment on Saturday night; officials said that the charges included kidnapping and sodomy, and that all would be charged as adults and with hate crimes.

“Like many New Yorkers, I was sickened by these antigay crimes,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Saturday afternoon. “The heartless men who committed these crimes should know that New Yorkers will not tolerate them.”

Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who is gay, added: “These crimes are not jokes. They are not games. They are things that eat away at the fabric of our city.”

Mr. Mendez, who the police said was the ringleader and was known by the street name “Cheto,” lived several miles away from the crime scene, in Bedford Park. Neighbors on his block, marred by graffiti and the scene of open drug markets, said that he had a crew of younger friends who were often with him but that he spent most of his time elsewhere. “He tried to look gangster,” Mr. Perez said. “He walked around like he was one of the neighborhood thugs.”

Several other suspects lived in the blocks surrounding Osborne Place, near the man known as “la Reina,” who worked at an optometrist’s store in the Parkchester section. Every day, he stopped by El Tio grocery, the bodega on the ground floor of his building, for juices, sandwiches and small talk, according to the manager, Xavier Peña. “He was a good friend,” Mr. Peña said. “He’s a very, very nice guy. He called me Papi, Papi.”

Many in the neighborhood used female pronouns to refer to the man, though they said he dressed in men’s clothes. “She’s gay, she’s like a woman, we think of her like a woman,” explained one neighbor, speaking on the condition that he not be named for fear of reprisals.

“She’s a very good person,” he added. “If you were ever hungry or thirsty, you could go to Reina, and she would help you.”

The police said the violence began about 3:30 a.m. Sunday, when, investigators said, the 17-year-old gang recruit was taken to the Osborne Place building, beaten, stripped, slashed with a box cutter and sodomized with a plunger handle after admitting that he had had a sexual encounter with the 30-year-old.

On Sunday night, the police said, gang members abducted a second 17-year-old, who was robbed of jewelry and beaten after telling them of having also had a liaison with the 30-year-old. The older man, told to bring 10 tall cans of a malt liquor called Four Loko to Osborne Place for a party, was then stripped, tied up, beaten, made to drink all 10 cans of the liquor, burned and sodomized with a small baseball bat, the police said.

Relatives of some of the suspects expressed shock at the charges on Saturday, describing them as young men who went to school and steered clear of trouble.

Carmen Almonte, 54, Bryan’s stepmother, said Bryan’s father had died three months ago, and that Bryan was admitted on Friday night to Montefiore Medical Center after going into diabetic shock during his arrest. “Bryan is not a bad kid,” she said. “If he was there, he didn’t do anything.”

Steven Caraballo’s parents said that he had enrolled in a G.E.D. program, lifted weights and played basketball with his three brothers. “He told me nothing is going on in the streets,” said his father, Jose. “He’s in school. He never got involved in this kind of thing.”

Genesis Suarez, who is 15, pregnant and referred to herself as Steven Caraballo’s wife, said Bryan Almonte was her sister’s boyfriend. “If you bother him he gets mad, like everybody,” she said of Bryan. “But he’s a good guy.”

Ada Cepeda said her son, Elin, had joined her from Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, three years ago; attended classes at Bronx International High School; and recently had expressed interest in becoming a police officer. He was in his room playing video games when the police arrested him on Thursday.

“I’m a realist,” Ms. Cepeda, 52, said. “It’s not that my son is a saint. But I doubt he would do that.”


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Jack Begg, Elizabeth A. Harris, Colin Moynihan, Joel Stonington and Karen Zraick.

        Two Worlds Collide in a Gritty Bronx Neighborhood, NYT, 9.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/nyregion/10bias.html

Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay

October 8, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON and AL BAKER

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.

All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.

There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said — until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.

The beatings and robberies went on for hours. They were followed by a remarkably thorough attempt to sanitize the house — including pouring bleach down drains, the police said, as little by little word of the attacks trickled to the police. A crucial clue to the attackers was provided by someone who slipped a note to a police officer outside the crime scene, at 1910 Osborne Place in Morris Heights, near Bronx Community College.

Seven suspects were arrested on Thursday and Friday, and two were still being sought in a crime that the leader of the City Council called among the worst hate crimes she had ever heard of. “It makes you sick,” said the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, the city’s highest ranking openly gay official.

The charges included abduction, unlawful imprisonment and sodomy, all as hate crimes.

“These suspects deployed terrible, wolf-pack odds of nine against one, which revealed them as predators whose crimes were as cowardly as they were despicable,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said at a news conference.

The assaults are the latest in a string of recent episodes of bullying and attacks against gays. A Rutgers University student jumped to his death off the George Washington Bridge last month, prosecutors said, after his roommate had secretly set up a webcam in their room and streamed over the Internet his sexual encounter with another man. Two men were accused of robbing and beating a man in the Stonewall Inn, a landmark gay bar in Greenwich Village, last weekend while shouting slurs.

Neighbors on Osborne Place said the house, nondescript but for its door painted a bright lime green, had been vacant for some time. A group of teenagers and young men had moved in as squatters, neighbors said, and hosted loud parties.

“You could smell it from them,” said a neighbor who gave only his last name, Gomez. “From the start, you could tell they were trouble.” Mr. Gomez said he and other neighbors had discussed whether anything could be done about the squatters, but nothing came of it.

The nine suspects — the group seemed not so much part of an established gang as a loose group of friends who adopted a nickname — knew some or all three victims. The idea for the attacks seemed to have been hatched last Saturday, after one member of the group saw the 30-year-old man, who he knew was gay, with a 17-year-old who wanted to join the gang, the police said.

Hours later, at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, the group grabbed the 17-year-old, took him to the house and slammed him into a wall, the police said.

He was beaten, made to strip naked, slashed with a box cutter, hit on the head with a can of beer and sodomized with the wooden handle of a plunger, the police said. And he was interrogated about the 30-year-old and asked if they had had sex.

The teenager said that they had. The gang members set him loose, warning him to keep quiet or they would hurt his friends and family. The teenager walked into a nearby hospital and said he had been jumped by strangers on the street and robbed.

At 8:30 p.m. on Sunday, the police said, the group members grabbed a second 17-year-old, beating and likewise interrogating him about his contact with the 30-year-old. He, too, said he had had sex with the man. They took his jewelry and held him while the 30-year-old arrived for what he thought was a party, his arms filled with 10 tall cans of Four Loko, a caffeine-infused malt liquor. He had cleaned out a store of its entire stock.

He was immediately set upon and tied up. Then the assailants ordered the second teenager to attack the 30-year-old, and they joined in the beating. The beating lasted hours, the police said. The attackers forced the man to drink all 10 cans of liquor — each about twice the size of a can of beer, with a higher alcohol content, 10 percent to 12 percent, according to Four Loko’s Web site.

While the man was held captive and attacked, five of the Latin King Goonies went to his house, which he shared with his 40-year-old brother. Using a key taken from the 30-year-old to get inside, they found his brother in bed. They pulled a blanket over his head and hit him, demanding money. When he refused, one placed a cellphone to the brother’s ear, and he heard the voice of his younger brother, who said he had been kidnapped and who pleaded, “Give them the money.”

The brother complied. The men took $1,000 in cash, two debit cards and a 52-inch television.

The brother managed to free himself about three hours later, and he called the police, leaving out the fact that his brother was being held. By then it was Monday morning. Detectives went to the brothers’ home and, upon leaving, saw the 30-year-old, passed out on the landing from the alcohol he had consumed. But having no reason to believe he had been a victim of a crime, they did not question him.

Detectives returned later that day, suspicious of how the robbers had entered the brothers’ home without using force, and the 30-year-old told them he had been picked up in a van by strangers and forced to give them his keys and address, the police said.

Officers still had no idea about the first teen who had visited the hospital, because he had not called the police, and hospitals are not required to inform the authorities about assaults, the police said. The man had said he was robbed near 1910 Osborne, and police officers tried to obtain a search warrant for the house but were told they did not have enough cause, the police said.

Late on Tuesday the second teenager walked into a Bronx police station house and gave a version of what had happened, the police said. None of the three victims, in their first interviews with the police, were fully forthcoming, fearing reprisal and wanting to keep their lives a secret. But the second teenager gave an address, and a second request for a search warrant was granted.

On Wednesday morning, officers entered 1910 Osborne Place and found a surprising sight: an immaculate house, with fresh coats of paint and the smell of bleach hanging thick in the air. One detective called the house “the cleanest crime scene I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kelly said.

“Lots of bleach and paint were used to cover the blood shed by their tortured prey,” he said. “They even poured bleach down the drains.”

Rugs and linoleum had been ripped out. Detectives were able to scrape evidence, including pubic hair and empty liquor cans, from the house, but not much was found, Mr. Kelly said.

The break in the case came later Wednesday when someone in a crowd of onlookers outside the house quietly slipped an officer his phone number and, when a detective called, gave the name of the man believed to be the ringleader of the group of nine: Ildefonzo Mendez, 23. Officers later learned the name of the first victim from the other teenager.

By Wednesday night, all three victims had given full accounts of the attacks, and for the next 36 hours, officers with the Hate Crimes Task Force, the Gang Division and Special Victims squad worked up a list of nine suspects.

Arrests began Thursday.

The other suspects under arrest were identified as David Rivera, 21; Nelson Falu, 17; Steven Carballo, 17; Denis Peitars, 17; Bryan Almonte, 17; and Brian Cepeda, 16. They were being held by the police in the Bronx on Friday night, with no arraignment scheduled. Still being sought, the police said, are Elmer Confessor, 23, and Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22.

One suspect confessed, a law enforcement official said, others have not given statements.

One suspect was taken to the hospital unconscious Friday night, with an undisclosed medical problem.


Sam Dolnick and Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 9, 2010


An earlier version of this article misstated the age of Nelson Falu.

    Lured Into a Trap, Then Tortured for Being Gay, NYT, 9.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/nyregion/09bias.html

Suicides Put Light on Pressures of Gay Teenagers

October 3, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

FRESNO, Calif. — When Seth Walsh was in the sixth grade, he turned to his mother one day and told her he had something to say.

“I was folding clothes, and he said, ‘Mom, I’m gay,’ ” said Wendy Walsh, a hairstylist and single mother of four. “I said, ‘O.K., sweetheart, I love you no matter what.’ ”

But last month, Seth went into the backyard of his home in the desert town of Tehachapi, Calif., and hanged himself, apparently unable to bear a relentless barrage of taunting, bullying and other abuse at the hands of his peers. After a little more than a week on life support, he died last Tuesday. He was 13.

The case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after a sexual encounter with another man was broadcast online, has shocked many. But his death is just one of several suicides in recent weeks by young gay teenagers who had been harassed by classmates, both in person and online.

The list includes Billy Lucas, a 15-year-old from Greensburg, Ind., who hanged himself on Sept. 9 after what classmates reportedly called a constant stream of invective against him at school.

Less than two weeks later, Asher Brown, a 13-year-old from the Houston suburbs, shot himself after coming out. He, too, had reported being taunted at his middle school, according to The Houston Chronicle. His family has blamed school officials as failing to take action after they complained, something the school district has denied.

The deaths have set off an impassioned — and sometimes angry — response from gay activists and caught the attention of federal officials, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who on Friday called the suicides “unnecessary tragedies” brought on by “the trauma of being bullied.”

“This is a moment where every one of us — parents, teachers, students, elected officials and all people of conscience — needs to stand up and speak out against intolerance in all its forms,” Mr. Duncan said.

And while suicide by gay teenagers has long been a troubling trend, experts say the stress can be even worse in rural places, where a lack of gay support services — or even openly gay people — can cause a sense of isolation to become unbearable.

“If you’re in the small community, the pressure is hard enough,” said Eliza Byard, executive director of the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which is based in New York. “And goodness knows people get enough signals about ‘how wrong it is to be gay’ without anyone in those communities actually having to say so.”

According to a recent survey conducted by Ms. Byard’s group, nearly 9 of 10 gay, lesbian, transgender or bisexual middle and high school students suffered physical or verbal harassment in 2009, ranging from taunts to outright beatings.

In Mr. Clementi’s case, prosecutors in New Jersey have charged two fellow Rutgers freshmen with invasion of privacy and are looking at the death as a possible hate crime. Prosecutors in Cypress, Tex., where Asher Brown died, said Friday that they would investigate what led to his suicide.

In a pair of blog postings last week, Dan Savage, a sex columnist based in Seattle, assigns the blame to negligent teachers and school administrators, bullying classmates and “hate groups that warp some young minds and torment others.”

“There are accomplices out there,” he wrote Saturday.

In an interview, Mr. Savage, who is gay, said he was particularly irate at religious leaders who used “antigay rhetoric.”

“The problem is that kids are being exposed to this rhetoric, and then they go to the school and there’s this gay kid,” he said. “And how are they going to treat this gay kid who they’ve been told is trying to destroy their family? They’re going to abuse him.”

In late September, Mr. Savage began a project on YouTube called “It Gets Better,” featuring gay adults talking about their experiences with harassment as adolescents.

In one video, a gay man named Cyrus tells of his life as a closeted teenager in a small town in upstate New York.

“The main thing I wanted to come across from this video is how different my life is, how great my life is, and how happy I am in general,” he says.

Glennda Testone, the executive director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center in New York City, said their youth programs serve about 50 young people a day, often suffering from “bullying, harassment or even violence.”

“The three main groups of pivotal figures are family, friends and their schoolmates,” she said. “And if they’re feeling isolated and like they can’t tell those people, it’s going to be a very rough ride.”

Here in Fresno, in California’s conservative Central Valley, groups like Equality California have been more active in trying to establish outreach offices, particularly after an election defeat in 2008, when California voters approved Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage.

In Tehachapi, in Kern County south of here, more than 500 mourners attended a memorial on Friday for Seth Walsh. One of those, Jamie Elaine Phillips, a classmate and friend, said Seth had long known he was gay and had been teased for years.

“But this year it got much worse,” Jamie said. “People would say, ‘You should kill yourself,’ ‘You should go away,’ ‘You’re gay, who cares about you?’ ”

Richard L. Swanson, superintendent of the local school district, said his staff had conducted quarterly assemblies on behavior, taught tolerance in the classroom and had “definite discipline procedures that respond to bullying.”

“But these things didn’t prevent Seth’s tragedy,” he said in an e-mail. “Maybe they couldn’t have.”

For her part, Ms. Walsh said she had complained about Seth’s being picked on but did not want to cast blame, though she hoped his death would teach people “not to discriminate, not be prejudiced.”

“I truly hope,” she said, “that people understand that.”


Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Tehachapi, Calif.

    Suicides Put Light on Pressures of Gay Teenagers, NYT, 3.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04suicide.html

Owner Killed After Dog Leashes Are Tangled

September 30, 2010
The New York Times
By COLIN MOYNIHAN

The dispute began early Thursday over two dogs, a miniature pinscher named Rocco and a Shih Tzu, Bugsy, one tied too closely to the other outside a bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

It was the type of minor skirmish common enough on the crowded sidewalks of New York. But as the owners of the dogs separated them, things quickly escalated.

By the time it was over, two employees of the bar, the Branded Saloon, on Vanderbilt Avenue, had been stabbed. One of them, Daniel Hultquist, who had been performing music at the bar, was slashed in the neck and treated at a nearby hospital. The other, Chai Eun Hillmann, an aspiring actor and a martial arts expert, was stabbed twice in the torso and killed.

The police have arrested Daniel Pagan, who had served time for manslaughter, and charged him with murder.

The evening began uneventfully. Anne Joseph, 24, who works at a nearby bar, said Mr. Hillmann, 41, worked as a bartender at the Branded, but was not working when he stopped by with Rocco to see friends and participate in a charity poker game in the basement. Mr. Hultquist was upstairs, she said, playing a guitar and singing songs that he performed under the stage name Francis Brady.

At some point, the dogs became uncomfortably entangled. Mr. Hillmann and Mr. Pagan’s wife both moved to unravel the leashes. Then an argument ensued, with Mr. Pagan confronting Mr. Hillmann and Mr. Hultquist coming to Mr. Hillmann’s aid, along with a chef at the Branded.

“Hillmann put his hand on Mrs. Pagan’s arm, indicating he could handle it,” Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said in a statement. “When Daniel Pagan saw Hillmann touch his wife, a fight between the two men erupted. Pagan produced a knife and stabbed Hillmann and another man.”

Mr. Hillmann and Mr. Hultquist staggered back into the Branded, witnesses said, where friends tried to give them first aid and called 911.

Mr. Pagan fled, Mr. Browne said, but police officers stopped a car that was going in reverse, along Bergen Street. They found Mr. Pagan behind the wheel, soaked in blood. On Thursday afternoon, he was charged with murder, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon.

Mr. Browne said Mr. Pagan was arrested on a murder charge in 1991 and eventually sentenced to 5 to 15 years in prison for manslaughter. He had been released from prison in June 2000, and was on parole until June 2006.

On Thursday, a woman who declined to give her name answered the door to Mr. Pagan’s apartment on Underhill Avenue. “This is too much,” she said. “He’s my husband. I love him, and he’s a good guy.”

Mr. Hillmann was born in Korea but grew up in the United States. He studied martial arts and in the mid-1990s was the sensei of Chai Karate in Ardsley, in Westchester County. In an interview in 1996 in The New York Times, he described martial arts as a means of self defense, saying of its practitioners: “They won’t be victims,” and adding, “They can choose whether to continue confrontation or get out of it and flee.”

Outside the Branded on Thursday afternoon, friends of Mr. Hillmann embraced. They set a bouquet of flowers on the ground near the iron fence along with a tall red candle.

“He was one of the most genuine good-hearted people,” Ms. Joseph said. “He had a great smile, a great laugh, a really stand-up caring, good guy.”

She said Mr. Hillmann’s friends were now caring for Rocco.

    Owner Killed After Dog Leashes Are Tangled, NYT, 30.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/nyregion/01leash.html

Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump

September 29, 2010
The New York Times
By LISA W. FODERARO

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted musician who was sweet and shy.

“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr. Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was very friendly and had very good potential.”

The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.

At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility” campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over our queer bodies!”

It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.

But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”

And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr. Clementi was gay.

A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject of gossip in the dormitory.

Mr. Clementi’s family issued a statement on Wednesday confirming the suicide and pledging cooperation with the criminal investigation. “Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician,” the statement read. “The family is heartbroken beyond words.”

The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Mr. Clementi posted a note on his Facebook page the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Friends and strangers have turned the page into a memorial.

Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump off the bridge just before 9 p.m. on Sept. 22, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s identification, Mr. Browne said.

The police said Wednesday night that they had found the body of a young man in the Hudson north of the bridge and were trying to identify it.

Officials at Ridgewood High School, where Mr. Clementi graduated in June, last week alerted parents of current students that his family had reported him missing and encouraged students to take advantage of counseling at the school.

The timing of the news was almost uncanny, coinciding with the start of “Project Civility” at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Long in the planning, the campaign will involve panel discussions, lectures, workshops and other events to raise awareness about the importance of respect, compassion and courtesy in everyday interactions.

Events scheduled for this fall include a workshop for students and administrators on residential life on campus and a panel discussion titled “Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior.”

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.” At the kickoff event for the civility campaign, Mr. McCormick made an oblique reference to the case, saying, “It is more clear than ever that we need strongly to reassert our call for civility and responsibility for each other.”

Mr. Ravi was freed on $25,000 bail, and Ms. Wei was released on her own recognizance. The lawyer for Mr. Ravi, Steven D. Altman, declined to comment on the accusations. A phone message left at the offices of Ms. Wei’s lawyer was not returned.

Some students on the Busch campus in Piscataway seemed dazed by the turn of events, remembering their last glimpse of Mr. Clementi. Thomas Jung, 19, shared a music stand with Mr. Clementi in the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra.

On Wednesday afternoon, hours before Mr. Clementi’s death, the two rehearsed works by Berlioz and Beethoven. “He loved music,” Mr. Jung said. “He was very dedicated. I couldn’t tell if anything was wrong.”


Reporting was contributed by Al Baker, Barbara Gray, Nate Schweber and Tim Stelloh.

    Private Moment Made Public, Then a Fatal Jump, NYT, 29.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/nyregion/30suicide.html

Man Is Arrested in Death of Brooklyn Boy, 2

September 25, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and ANN FARMER

A 2-year-old Brooklyn boy died on Friday night after his bruised, listless body was discovered in his mother’s apartment, and the death was later ruled a homicide, the authorities said.

Reginald Williams, 31, a companion of the boy’s mother, was arrested Saturday night and charged with second-degree murder. The mother, Teresa Foster, 27, was also arrested, on charges of assault, endangering the welfare of a child and criminal possession of a weapon. Her charges stemmed from an assault with a belt earlier in the month, the police said.

Police officers found the boy, Aiyden Davis, when they went to the apartment, on Kingston Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, after a man in the apartment called 911 and said the boy was “breathing but unresponsive,” a law enforcement official said.

The boy was unconscious when paramedics arrived, an official said, and he was pronounced dead at Interfaith Medical Center.

After an autopsy on Saturday, Ellen S. Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, said the cause of death was “blunt impact injuries of the head, torso and extremities with liver laceration and internal bleeding.”

A spokesman for the Administration for Children’s Services said the agency was looking into the matter, adding that the boy’s family did not appear to have had previous contact with the agency.

The death occurred days after officials at the child welfare agency acknowledged serious lapses in the case of a bruised and emaciated 4-year-old girl who was found dead in her mother’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Sept. 2.

In the case of Aiyden, some neighbors said they had recently heard yelling and crying coming from his home.

Pamela Davis, 44, an aunt of Ms. Foster, wept on Saturday as she recalled last seeing the boy on Sept. 17. Ms. Davis said her niece did weekend security work at a union office in Upper Manhattan and would normally stay with her son at Ms. Davis’s apartment in Harlem from Friday to Sunday.

But on Friday, Ms. Foster called to say that her new boyfriend would watch Aiyden while she was at work, Ms. Davis said. At 4 p.m., Ms. Davis said she called Aiyden because he had not called her, as he normally did.

“Reggie says, ‘Oh, he’s all right,’ ” Ms. Davis said. “ ‘He’s sleeping.’ ”

When she later called the home, Ms. Davis said, Mr. Williams told her: “ ‘I’m sorry, P. I love you. I’m so sorry.’ ”


Sarah Wheaton contributed reporting.

    Man Is Arrested in Death of Brooklyn Boy, 2, NYT, 25.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/nyregion/26child.html

Agency Admits Fault in Death of Child

September 24, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

A supervisor and a caseworker for New York City’s child welfare agency have been suspended without pay for failing to adequately oversee the case of a bruised and emaciated 4-year-old girl who was found dead in her mother’s apartment in Brooklyn this month, the agency said Friday.

Admitting for the first time that there had been internal breakdowns in the case, the agency, the Administration for Children’s Services, said in a brief statement that there had been “lapses in frontline protective practice.”

The suspended workers, who had been assigned to the agency’s Brooklyn field office, came under scrutiny after agency officials investigating the girl’s death found a lack of documentation to show that the workers had made the proper number of contacts with the family.

The agency declined to provide any details about how often the workers had visited the family or what other services they had provided, except to say, in the statement, that they did not follow “standard policies and procedures.” It did not identify the workers, who were suspended last week.

The disciplinary action, which was reported on Thursday night by WNBC, came after the agency initially accused a private service provider of failing to make enough visits to the family, even though the city’s contract with the provider had ended months earlier and the agency had resumed responsibility for the case.

The agency’s missteps in the case of the girl, Marchella Pierce, who died on Sept. 2, have echoes of past failures, even though the agency instituted a series of reforms after the 2006 death of Nixzmary Brown, 7.

Marchella had been in the hospital most of her life and needed the help of a breathing tube when she returned home in February. She weighed 18 pounds, less than many 1-year-olds, when the police found her dead inside her family’s apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

Prosecutors have charged the girl’s mother with second-degree assault, endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful imprisonment and reckless endangerment. Ms. Brett-Pierce struck the girl with a belt and a video cassette case, according to prosecutors, and told investigators that she had tied her to a bed at night to keep her from taking food from the refrigerator and making a mess.

Investigators are awaiting further tests by the medical examiner’s office to determine the cause of the girl’s death.

The case has raised concerns among child protection advocates over the sharp decline in families’ receiving preventive services through the agency. The programs, usually assigned to outside contractors, provide counseling, drug treatment and other help to families in crisis, in an effort to keep children at home and out of the foster care system.

Marchella and her family had been assigned to one such provider in January, more than a month after the girl’s mother had given birth to a son who was found to have drugs in his system. Immediately after the girl’s death, the city’s child welfare agency said the provider, Child Development Support Corporation, had made “far less” than the two to three weekly visits that were required, which the organization disputed.

In fact, the corporation’s contract with the city had ended in June, and the agency had taken over the case rather than assign it to another provider. In a statement on Sept. 3, the agency said its workers “visited the family throughout the summer,” an assertion that now appears to be in doubt.

The number of cases receiving preventive services has fallen nearly 20 percent in the last year, a drop of about 2,000 families and 5,000 children, according to agency figures. The agency said one reason the caseload had fallen was its provision of shorter, more-intensive programs.

But the caseload also declined as a result of a contract renewal process that was plagued with problems this spring, as the agency was planning to reduce its preventive services caseload by 3,000 families, due, in part, to budget cuts.

The City Council in June restored the financing for most of those slots, but not before many of the outside providers laid off workers or eliminated programs altogether. The agency said it had closely monitored the caseloads to ensure that families who needed services continued to get them, but several child advocacy groups across the city said otherwise.

“This was a major screw-up,” said Michael Arsham, executive director of the Child Welfare Organizing Project, an advocacy group. “It was inevitable that families were going to get lost in the shuffle.”

The city’s public advocate, Bill deBlasio, who has begun an inquiry in the case, called the drop in caseloads “startling.”

“The suspension of these workers reinforces concerns about whether A.C.S.’s handling of cases and lack of resources have left thousands of children in jeopardy,” Mr. deBlasio said Friday.

He added that the agency, responding to his inquiry, had promised to provide detailed information about the case next week.

“I hope their response will shed a lot more light on what went wrong and how many more kids could be at risk,” he said.


Al Baker contributed reporting.

    Agency Admits Fault in Death of Child, NYT, 24.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/nyregion/25acs.html

Brooklyn Malls Try to Limit Youth Loitering

September 17, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and KAREN ZRAICK

It is afternoon in Brooklyn, and school has just let out. Swarms of teenagers crowd the sidewalks, looking for a place to socialize. But near Downtown Brooklyn, at the entrances to the Atlantic Terminal mall, there is no hanging out at one popular meeting spot. Students are met by security guards, who block their path, ask questions and check IDs.

The guards are enforcing the mall’s policy: Groups of four or more people under 21 years old and unaccompanied by a parent are not allowed to linger, lest they become a large unruly group or even an impromptu gathering known as a flash mob.

Students said they had noticed a zestful enforcement of the policy since the school year began.

Such a sweeping restriction is rare. Mall operators are increasingly writing plans known as “parental escort policies” to rein in teenagers at specific times, usually on weekend nights. Of the 1,418 malls in the United States, 66 now practice some form of constraining youthful visitors, up from 39 in 2007, said Jesse Tron of the International Council of Shopping Centers.

In Brooklyn, the policy is unusual: it technically restricts access at all times, though, as a practical matter, the enforcement is heavier at some hours.

Mr. Tron said the policy of the mall’s operator, Forest City Ratner Companies, was “more all-encompassing” than others around the country, but “more restrictive” of the young shoppers it sought to control.

Atlantic Terminal and Atlantic Center, an adjacent mall owned by the same company, make up 900,000 square feet of stores erected over an underground rail hub. The problems with teenagers are in Atlantic Terminal, built in 2004, which has the kind of public spaces where people like to linger.

“When kids gather in groups, they can get kind of rowdy; they can cause trouble,” said Michael Rapfogel, a spokesman for the mall’s operator. “It’s no secret. It happens all over the place.”

The restrictions have been in place in Brooklyn since Atlantic Terminal opened, a Forest City Ratner spokesman said. But students say the policy has been enforced erratically.

The problem of milling youths got out of hand last November, when an unauthorized flier on a social networking site prompted thousands of teenagers to flock to the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant in the mall, said Deputy Inspector Anthony M. Tasso, the commander of the 88th Precinct. Officers were there to meet them and turn them away, but a stabbing and two shootings ensued on the nearby streets, he said.

Inspector Tasso called the event an anomaly. But he acknowledged the policing challenges the mall represents, saying that one of his first moves upon taking over the precinct in June 2008 was assigning four officers to work there in shifts around the clock. He also established links with business and community leaders.

Several workers at the roughly 30 stores at the mall — two buildings, at 139 Flatbush Avenue and 625 Atlantic Avenue, connected by a sky bridge — said they embraced its efforts to control the chaos, describing scenes at the Atlantic Terminal of teenagers loitering, littering and shoplifting.

Candice Escarpeta, 25, said the first-floor shop she manages, which sells bath and beauty products, had no roof and was under the escalators, making it a target for things dropped from above, like papers, liquids and, once, a book bag that hit someone in the face.

“I understand they want to go somewhere,” Ms. Escarpeta said, “but I feel like it scares away adult customers.”

Joe DePlasco, another spokesman for the mall’s operator, said the mall wanted young people to shop there. But in an effort to keep things safe and pleasant, the mall employs about 20 guards who approach young groups of four or more when they enter. The guards give them the option of splitting into smaller groups or leaving. The guards are “not instructed” to ask for ID, Mr. DePlasco said.

The security is in full effect when school years are beginning and ending, and at the end of each school day, he said. The policy is also enforced more vigorously around holidays, he said.

On Thursday, however, just after 3 p.m., some guards at the Atlantic Terminal entrances asked for ID and then turned teenagers away, even some in groups of less than four. Stephanie Cineus, 15, a junior at a nearby high school, tried to get in with a friend, but both were barred from entering.

Other groups of students were seen being turned away on Friday, too, though some students walked freely in.

Mr. DePlasco said mall officials had met with schools and community groups. But Councilwoman Letitia James, who represents the area, said Forest City Ratner had not contacted her about the policy, and John Dew, chairman of Community Board 2, said he had not heard about the restrictions.

“I think there’s better ways to address the security issue besides just closing their doors,” Ms. James said, adding that the restrictions raised questions of legality and discrimination.

On Thursday, at an entrance on Flatbush Avenue, a guard asked Chaniece Faulkner, 20, of Canarsie, for identification. She handed over an ID from Monroe College, and her friend Sharivia Alford, 19, of Coney Island, showed one from Lehman College. Allowed to enter, they went straight to a McDonald’s.

Ms. Faulkner said she was not happy about having to show identification. Then again, she said, looking around the mall, “it’s calmer than usual.”


Mitchell Trinka contributed reporting.

    Brooklyn Malls Try to Limit Youth Loitering, NYT, 17.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/nyregion/18mall.html

Prosecutors Detail Abuse in Brooklyn Girl’s Last Days

September 4, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

Two days after the bruised, emaciated body of a 4-year-old girl was discovered in a Brooklyn apartment, new information from officials emerged about her life and death as her mother on Saturday made her first appearance in court to face criminal charges.

In a criminal complaint, prosecutors outlined a fearsome litany of abuse that they said the girl, Marchella Pierce, suffered in her final days at the hands of her mother, Carlotta Brett-Pierce, 30. The girl, who had been plagued by severe health problems since her birth on April 30, 2006, weighed 18 pounds when she died, according to the complaint.

Ms. Brett-Pierce repeatedly struck the girl with a belt and a video box at their home on Madison Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the complaint said, citing a witness account. The mother lashed the girl to a bed with twine and forced her “to take blue sleeping pills,” the complaint added.

The girl’s body was emaciated and covered with bruises on her head, torso and limbs, and “ligature marks” were found on her feet, apparently from where her mother affixed them to the bed’s footboard with twine, the complaint said.

In interviews with detectives, Ms. Brett-Pierce admitted tying the girl down on Wednesday, “because the child was wild,” Tracey Downing, an assistant district attorney, said at Ms. Brett-Pierce’s arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court.

“The mother said she tied the child because the child got up at night and ate from the refrigerator and made a mess,” Ms. Downing said.

The abuse took place when, in the opinion of a physician for the medical examiner’s office, the girl’s state of malnutrition “put her at a grave risk of death,” the complaint said.

In an arraignment that lasted about 10 minutes, Ms. Brett-Pierce stood silently, dressed in a hooded white sweat shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers. She clasped her hands behind her back. At one point, she smiled and waved to her mother, Loretta, and to her brother, Brian Colas, who sat together in the courtroom. Her mother waved back.

The case is still under investigation by law enforcement and medical authorities, as well as by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services, which had been monitoring the family since at least November, officials said.

Ms. Brett-Pierce’s lawyer, George Sheinberg, pointed out that his client had not been charged with homicide and said she should be released on her own recognizance. But Judge Leonard P. Rienzi ordered Ms. Brett-Pierce held on $300,000 bail, which appeared to visibly distress her relatives.

“My sister loved her kids,” Mr. Colas, 23, said outside of court after the hearing. He said the proceeding was the first time he had ever heard allegations that his sister had restrained or beaten her child.

“The media’s trying to make her into an animal,” added Mr. Colas, who the prosecutor said lives in the apartment with Ms. Brett-Pierce.

After the arraignment, Mr. Sheinberg said, “There is nothing to defend until I get the preliminary reports and autopsy reports.” He added: “The complaint can say many things, but until we have evidence of what happened, if anything happened, I have nothing before me. We don’t even have a medical examiner’s report; we don’t have hospital reports.”

A spokeswoman for the child welfare agency said workers were still examining records for information on the case.

An autopsy conducted Friday was inconclusive, and Ellen S. Borakove, spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, said Saturday that further studies, including forensic testing, investigations and an analysis of medical records, could take a week or more.

The girl’s plight became public after her mother dialed 911 on Thursday morning, saying her daughter was unresponsive when she tried to wake her. Ms. Brett-Pierce told investigators her daughter had fallen down stairs, but the bruises on her body were inconsistent with a fall, Ms. Downing said.

Ms. Brett-Pierce was charged with second-degree assault, endangering the welfare of a child, unlawful imprisonment and reckless endangerment, according to the complaint. Mr. Sheinberg said a grand jury hearing would probably take place on Thursday.

The girl’s father, Tyrone Pierce, 30, who is separated from Ms. Brett-Pierce, was present in court on Saturday but declined to comment.

The complaint said a broken video box “with what appeared to be blood on it” was found at the family’s home. An official said a plastic container used to hold a VCR cassette was found in the garbage at the home.


Ann Farmer and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

    Prosecutors Detail Abuse in Brooklyn Girl’s Last Days, NYT, 4.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/nyregion/05arraign.html

Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee Spread Fear

August 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ROBBIE BROWN

ATLANTA — After a suspected arson and reports of gunshots at an Islamic center in Tennessee over the weekend, nearby mosques have hired security guards, installed surveillance cameras and requested the presence of federal agents at prayer services.

Muslim leaders in central Tennessee say that frightened worshipers are observing Ramadan in private and that some Muslim parents are wary of sending their children to school after a large fire on Saturday that destroyed property at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Federal authorities suspect that the fire was arson.

The Islamic center has attracted national attention recently because its planned expansion into a larger building in some ways parallels a controversial proposal to build an Islamic center two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.

The Murfreesboro center, which has existed for nearly 30 years, suddenly found itself on front pages of newspapers this month and on “The Daily Show.” It became a hot topic in the local Congressional race, with one Republican candidate accusing the center of fostering terrorism and trying to link it to the militant Palestinian group Hamas.

Then, on Saturday, the police say, someone set fire to construction equipment at the site where the Islamic center is planning to move, destroying an earthmover and three other pieces of machinery. And on Sunday, as CNN was filming a news segment about the controversy, someone fired at least five shots near the property.

“We are very concerned about our safety,” said Essam Fathy, head of the center’s planning committee. “Whatever it takes, I’m not going to allow anybody to do something like this again.”

No people were injured in either incident. The cases are being investigated by the police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

In a statement on the center’s Web site, a spokeswoman called the fire an “arson attack” and an “atrocious act of terrorism.”

In Nashville, 30 miles northwest, local imams met with representatives of the United States attorney’s office on Monday to discuss the risk of further anti-Islamic violence. Several mosques have requested police surveillance, they said, especially with the end of Ramadan this year nearly coinciding with the ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We’re worried that these attacks could spill over into Nashville,” said Mwafaq Mohammed, president of the Salahadeen Islamic Center there. “We don’t want people to misunderstand what we’re celebrating around Sept. 11. It would be better to take precautionary measures.”

Another mosque, the Islamic Center of Nashville, has installed indoor and outdoor surveillance cameras, hired round-the-clock security guards and requested that F.B.I. agents be on site during worship services, according to the imam, Mohamed Ahmed.

“Whoever did this, they are terrorists,” Mr. Ahmed said. “What’s the difference between them and Al Qaeda?”

But in other parts of Tennessee, including Chattanooga, Knoxville and Memphis, Muslim leaders reported that they had experienced no hostility and saw no reason to increase security.

    Incidents at Mosque in Tennessee Spread Fear, NYT, 30.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/us/31mosque.html

Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence

August 26, 2010
The New York Times
By TRYMAINE LEE

NEW ORLEANS — In the days after Hurricane Katrina left much of New Orleans in flooded ruins, the city was awash in tales of violence and bloodshed.

The narrative of those early, chaotic days — built largely on rumors and half-baked anecdotes — quickly hardened into a kind of ugly consensus: poor blacks and looters were murdering innocents and terrorizing whoever crossed their path in the dark, unprotected city.

“As you look back on it, at the time it was being reported, it looked like the city was under siege,” said Russel L. Honoré, the retired Army lieutenant general who led military relief efforts after the storm.

Today, a clearer picture is emerging, and it is an equally ugly one, including white vigilante violence, police killings, official cover-ups and a suffering population far more brutalized than many were willing to believe. Several police officers and a white civilian accused of racially motivated violence have recently been indicted in various cases, and more incidents are coming to light as the Justice Department has started several investigations into civil rights violations after the storm.

“The environment that was produced by the storm brought out what was dormant in people here — the anger and the contempt they felt against African-Americans in the community,” said John Penny, a criminologist at Southern University of New Orleans. “We might not ever know how many people were shot, killed, or whose bodies will never be found.”

Broken levees left 80 percent of New Orleans submerged, but in unflooded Algiers Point, for instance, a mostly white enclave in a predominantly black neighborhood on the west bank of the Mississippi River, armed white militias cordoned off many of the streets.

They posted signs that boasted, “We shoot looters.” And the sound of gunfire peppered the hot days and nights like thunderclaps of a second storm.

Reginald Bell, a black resident, said in a recent interview that he was threatened at gunpoint by two white men there a few days after the storm. The men, on a balcony a few blocks from his home, yelled at him, “We don’t want your kind around here!”

Then one of the men racked his pump-action shotgun, aimed it at Mr. Bell and dared him to be seen again on the streets of Algiers Point, Mr. Bell said. The next day, he said, the men confronted him on his porch while he sat with his girlfriend. They shoved guns — a shotgun and a long-nose .357 Magnum — in the couple’s faces and reiterated their demand.

“There was no electricity, no police, no nothing,” said Mr. Bell, 41, sitting on his porch on a recent afternoon. “We were like sitting ducks. I slept with a butcher knife and a hatchet under my pillow.”

The West Bank area of the city was spared any flooding, but in the days and weeks after the storm, it was littered with fallen trees and, according to witnesses, with the bodies of several black men — none of whom appeared to have drowned.

“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks,” said Malik Rahim, who lives around the corner from Mr. Bell and came to his aid. “I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.

“We’ve been screaming it from the top of our lungs since those first days, but nobody wanted to listen.”

Mr. Bell said that he went to the police not long after the confrontation with the two gun-wielding white men but no report or action was taken. It was not until last year when he was interviewed by a federal grand jury looking into civil rights violations in post-Katrina New Orleans that people seemed to pay attention, he said.

Some of the most serious accusations surfaced after investigations by The Times-Picayune and the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which spotlighted much of the police violence and racially motivated violence around Algiers Point.

One case is that of a former Algiers resident, Roland J. Bourgeois Jr., who is white and was accused of being part of one of the vigilante groups. He was recently indicted by the federal government on civil rights charges in the shooting of three black men who were trying to leave the city. According to the indictment, Mr. Bourgeois, who now lives in Mississippi, warned one neighbor that “anything coming up this street darker than a brown paper bag is getting shot.”

The highest-profile case involving the police is the Danziger Bridge shooting in eastern New Orleans, where six days after Katrina, a group of police officers wielding assault rifles and automatic weapons fired on a group of unarmed civilians, wounding a family of four and killing two, including a teenager and a mentally disabled man. The man, Ronald Madison, 40, was shot in the back with a shotgun and then stomped and kicked as he lay dying, according to court papers.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu in May invited the Justice Department to conduct a full review of the city’s Police Department. The Justice Department has also begun several civil and criminal investigations into post-Katrina violence involving the police and civilians.

Thomas Perez, an assistant attorney general, said the federal government was investigating eight criminal cases involving accusations of police misconduct. Many people in the city — including activists, victims and witnesses — had long contended that racial violence was being ignored by local law enforcement.

“We were dismissed as kooks for the last four years,” said Jacques Morial, a co-director of the Louisiana Justice Institute, a nonprofit advocacy organization, and the son of New Orleans’ first black mayor. “I think what we are seeing now recalibrates the reality of Katrina, and I think it vindicates lots of folks.”

The city’s police superintendent, Ronal Serpas, who took over the department in May, said he was troubled by what has come to light since the storm.

“We have to confront this and look at it head on,” Mr. Serpas said. “There have been far too many examples of men who have worn this badge and admitted in court to behavior that is an absolute insult to this city and to the men and women of this department who wear this badge with dignity and pride.”

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Rahim, 62, walked through the streets of Algiers and pointed out where, block by block, the militias had set up barricades and stood guard. He walked along the levee where the charred remains of Henry Glover were found in the trunk of a burned-out car, precipitating the indictment of three current and two former police officers.

“How can you remove the scars from the eyes of all the children who witnessed these atrocities?” Mr. Rahim asked.

General Honoré said that he had been asking himself questions, too.

“I think, every year there is more time for people to reflect on it,” he said. “I came out of Katrina with one perspective on it. And there isn’t a month that goes by that I don’t talk to someone who survived it who gives me a different perspective than I had before.”

    Rumor to Fact in Tales of Post-Katrina Violence, NYT, 26.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27racial.html

Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim, Then Stabs Him

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

It was the first fare of the cabdriver’s shift. A young man hailed him at the corner of Second Avenue and East 24th Street, wanting to go to 42nd and Second. It was 6 p.m. on Tuesday; the traffic was dense.

Once the fare, Michael Enright, a 21-year-old film student who had been recently trailing Marines in Afghanistan, settled in the back, he started asking friendly enough questions: Where was the driver from? Was he Muslim?

The driver, Ahmed H. Sharif, 44, said he was from Bangladesh, and yes he was Muslim.

Mr. Enright said, “Salaam aleikum,” the Arabic greeting “Peace be upon you.”

“How’s your Ramadan going?” Mr. Enright asked, Mr. Sharif said.

He told him it was going fine. Then, he said, Mr. Enright began making fun of the rituals of Ramadan, and Mr. Sharif sensed this cab ride might not be like any other.

“So I stopped talking to him,” Mr. Sharif said. “He stopped talking, too.”

As the cab inched up Third Avenue and reached 39th Street, Mr. Sharif said in a phone interview, Mr. Enright suddenly began cursing at him and shouting “This is the checkpoint” and “I have to bring you down.” He said he told him he had to bring the king of Saudi Arabia to the checkpoint.

“He was talking like he was a soldier,” Mr. Sharif said.

He withdrew a Leatherman knife, Mr. Sharif said, and, reaching through the opening in the plastic divider, slashed Mr. Sharif’s throat. When Mr. Sharif turned, he said, Mr. Enright stabbed him in his face, on his arm and on his thumbs.

Mr. Sharif said he told him: “I beg of you, don’t kill me. I worked so hard, I have a family.”

He said Mr. Enright bolted out of the slowly moving cab. Mr. Sharif then found a police officer who apprehended Mr. Enright. The officer told him, Mr. Sharif said, that Mr. Enright said he had tried to rob him.

Mr. Sharif received more than two dozen stitches at Bellevue Hospital Center and was released. Mr. Enright was given a psychiatric evaluation there.

The Manhattan district attorney charged Mr. Enright with second-degree attempted murder as a hate crime, first-degree assault as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon. He was arraigned on Wednesday in Manhattan Criminal Court, appearing in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, and ordered held without bail. If convicted of the top charge, he would face up to 25 years in prison.

“He’s terrified,” said Mr. Enright’s lawyer, Jason A. Martin. “He’s shocked at the allegations. He’s just trying to cope with it right now.”

The violence that erupted during the cab ride came amid a heated and persisting national debate over whether to situate a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks north of ground zero. Upon learning of the attack on the cabdriver, some Muslim groups called for political and religious leaders to quiet tensions.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: “As other American minorities have experienced, hate speech often leads to hate crimes. Sadly, we’ve seen how the deliberate public vilification of Islam can lead some individuals to violence against innocent people.”

In a statement, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said, “This attack runs counter to everything that New Yorkers believe, no matter what God we may pray to.” He said he had spoken to Mr. Sharif and told him “ethnic or religious bias has no place in our city.” He invited him to come to see him at City Hall on Thursday.

The arresting officers said Mr. Enright seemed to be drunk, the police said, and a city official briefed on the investigation said there was an empty bottle of Scotch in his backpack. The police did not do a Breathalyzer test.

Mr. Sharif, however, said Mr. Enright did not appear inebriated to him.

Mr. Sharif, who lives in Jamaica, Queens, with his wife and four children, came to the United States about 25 years ago and was a cook before becoming a cabdriver 15 years ago. He said nothing of this nature had happened to him before. Recently, some passengers asked him about the center planned near ground zero, he recalled, and he replied that he was against it, that there was no need to put it there.

What is known about Mr. Enright presents a complicated picture. An only child, he lives with his mother in Brewster, N.Y., a middle-class suburb about 50 miles north of Manhattan. Neighbors said he was friendly enough and often skateboarded outside his house.

He is a senior, studying film, at School of Visual Arts, on East 23rd Street, near where he hailed the cab.

He was arrested in November on charges of criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. According to the police, he was picked up on Second Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, where he was acting violently, banging on walls and ringing doorbells. There was also a warrant out for him at the time for another violation, though it was unclear on Wednesday what it was for.

Mr. Enright had been working as an unpaid intern with an Internet media company called tvworldwide.com on a documentary that followed Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Third Marines, known as the Lava Dogs.

An article in The Journal News in March said the film, “Home of the Brave,” was to be Mr. Enright’s senior thesis. The article said that in October, Mr. Enright spent time at Kaneohe Bay in Hawaii filming the Marines as they prepared for deployment to Afghanistan. In April and May, he spent five weeks embedded with them in Afghanistan, according to military officials in Afghanistan. One of the members of the regiment was a friend from Brewster High School, Cpl. Alex Eckner.

In the article, Mr. Enright said that the experiences of Mr. Eckner led him to want to do the film.

Mr. Enright is also a volunteer with Intersections International, an initiative of the Collegiate Churches of New York that promotes justice and faith across religions and cultures. The organization, which covered part of Mr. Enright’s travel expenses to Afghanistan, has been a staunch supporter of the Islamic center near ground zero. Mr. Enright volunteered with the group’s veteran-civilian dialogue project.

Joseph Ward III, the director of communications for Intersections, said that if Mr. Enright had been involved in a hate crime, it ran “counter to everything Intersections stands for” and was shocking.

Mr. Enright, according to the article in The Journal News, was also working as a landscaper at Four Winds Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Katonah, N.Y.

The older brother of Alex Eckner, Wesley Eckner, 27, said in an interview: “It’s crazy to hear this. It sounds completely out of character.”

Wesley Eckner, who served three combat tours with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan and is now in college, said that Mr. Enright was “a jolly kid” who liked to “goof around.” Whereas the older Mr. Eckner liked to go with his brother to the gun range to fire vintage World War II rifles, he said, Mr. Enright gravitated to taking photographs and loved movies.

During the time Mr. Enright was in Afghanistan, Mr. Eckner said, things had been quiet with the Marine unit, though it had come under plenty of fire before he arrived.

Yet he recalled a curious call from Mr. Enright not long after he had returned from overseas. He asked Mr. Eckner how he was dealing with readjusting, leading Mr. Eckner to believe he was having some trouble. He found that odd, considering that Mr. Enright had been there for such a short period. He said Mr. Enright had never said anything to them that was anti-Muslim.


Reporting was contributed by John Eligon, Ann Farmer, Michael M. Grynbaum, Andy Newman, Ray Rivera, D. Z. Stone and Karen Zraick.

    Rider Asks if Cabby Is Muslim, Then Stabs Him, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/nyregion/26cabby.html

Four Are Indicted in Suburban N.Y. Hotel Killing

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM DOLNICK

WHITE PLAINS — From the moment Ben Novack Jr. was found bludgeoned, bound and gagged inside a hotel suite in a wealthy New York suburb a year ago, the details of his life and violent death have grown more peculiar with each disclosure.

His blood-covered body was found on the floor of Room 453 at the Rye Town Hilton, where Mr. Novack, 53, was helping run an Amway convention. His face was bound in duct tape, as were his legs, taped below the knees, and his hands, bound behind his back.

A Rolex watch was not taken, but his trademark bracelet, with B-E-N spelled out in diamonds, was gone. Hotel records showed that no one had entered the hotel room with a key before the killing of Mr. Novack, whose father founded the famed Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach.

A week after the murder, an anonymous letter, written in Spanish, surfaced, saying that Mr. Novack’s mother, who had died three months earlier, had also been murdered.

There were police reports and court testimony about Mr. Novack’s comic book memorabilia — his collection of Batman-themed material was said to be the second largest in the country and to include a full-size replica of the Batmobile — as well as his taste in pornography featuring women missing limbs.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors and local authorities announced the indictment of the four people they say plotted the attack, including the woman who had been a suspect all along: his wife, a former stripper whom he had previously accused of threatening to kill him. The motive, authorities said, was seizing control of his fortune.

Mr. Novack’s wife, Narcisa Veliz Novack, known as Narcy, was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Fla,; her brother, Cristobal Veliz; and another relative, Denis Ramirez, were arrested in Brooklyn. A fourth suspect, Joel Gonzalez, who was believed to have been hired to kill Mr. Novack, remained at large.

Ms. Novack, 53, was arraigned on Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Fort Lauderdale and ordered held without bail. Mr. Veliz and Mr. Ramirez were arraigned on Thursday afternoon in Federal District Court in White Plains.

The four defendants are charged with interstate domestic violence, stalking and conspiracy to commit interstate domestic violence and stalking. If convicted of the top count, they face a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, called Mr. Novack’s death “a savage killing” as he announced the charges on Thursday during a news conference in White Plains.

“The plot that led to the death of Ben Novack,” he said, “was a family affair.”

The Westchester County district attorney, Janet DiFiore, described the killing as motivated by greed, saying Ms. Novack “was intent on eliminating her husband and taking his family fortune for her own.”

Mr. Novack grew up inside the Fontainebleau, the Miami Beach landmark that was founded by his father and opened in 1954. The hotel had such an air of glamour — it had an elevated pool, a bar filled with celebrities and politicians, a sensuously curved facade that opened up to a vast collection of rare antiques — that it was chosen as the setting for a scene in the James Bond movie “Goldfinger.”

Mr. Novack’s aunt Maxine Fiel remembered her nephew enjoying the perks of luxury hotel living, which included trick-or-treating trips in a chauffeured limousine, but for all its opulence, she described his childhood as “pretty lonely.”

Mr. Novack amassed a dizzying array of Batman memorabilia and other collectibles that was packed inside the couple’s home “floor to ceiling,” according to Henry R. Zippay Jr., one of Ms. Novack’s estate lawyers. “They were avid collectors of everything that interested them. His focus was on Batman, primarily.”

Mr. Bharara said the estate, which in addition to the Batman trove included several homes in Florida, boats and vintage automobiles, was worth $5 million to $6 million.

When Mr. Novack met his future wife, she was a stripper, according to The Miami Herald. The couple had a stormy relationship that included accusations of spousal abuse.

The police were called in 2002 after robbers broke into their large two-story home in Fort Lauderdale. Mr. Novack told the police that he had been tied and handcuffed to a leather chair for more than 24 hours. He said the robbery was conducted by several men he did not know, but it was orchestrated by someone he knew well: his wife. She said that the robbery was part of an elaborate sex game. No charges were ever filed.

On the day her husband was killed, Ms. Novack told the police that she went down to breakfast about 7 a.m., leaving him asleep. When she returned 40 minutes later, she said, she found him bound and bloody on the floor.

When she talked to the police the next day, she offered possible motives for his murder. She said he had enemies, carried large sums of money when he traveled, and that he had recently clashed with a comic book collector who had shown up at the house.

Police gave Ms. Novack a lie detector test, and she “showed indications of deception” when questioned about her knowledge of the killing, according to a court record filed on July 24.

The indictment unsealed on Thursday described Ms. Novack’s role in the murder plot.

Prosecutors say she traveled with her husband from Florida to Rye Brook, N.Y., on July 9 to oversee an Amway convention at the Rye Town Hilton hotel that his company, Convention Concepts Unlimited, had organized. Her brother and at least one co-conspirator drove from Florida to New York on July 2 and again on July 9. On July 10, Mr. Gonzalez and a co-conspirator scouted out the hotel in preparation for the attack, prosecutors say.

That morning, the indictment states, Ms. Novack opened the door to the hotel suite that she shared with her husband to allow Mr. Gonzalez to enter. Mr. Gonzalez “beat, cut and bound” Mr. Novack, according to the indictment.

During the attack, Ms. Novack provided the assailants with a pillow that was held over her husband’s face, prosecutors said.

Ms. Fiel, Mr. Novack’s aunt, said that news of the arrests came as a relief.

“This is what we’ve been fighting for all the time,” she said. She said she had never met Ms. Novack, though they had once had an unpleasant conversation over the phone, and she called the motive simple: “Ben had a lot of money.”

Mr. Bharara said the authorities had filed a civil complaint seeking the forfeiture of the estate, as well as Mr. Novack’s life insurance policy, to prevent Ms. Novack from inheriting any proceeds.

There has already been a struggle in the courts over the estate, which, according to Mr. Zippay, Mr. Novack left to his wife. In February, a Florida judge granted Ms. Novack control of it before reversing himself three days later, ordering her to post a high bond before she could be named personal representative of the estate, Mr. Zippay said. She did not post the bond.

Ms. Novack also sought to gain control of the estate of her husband’s mother, Bernice Novack, who was found dead in April 2009 in her Fort Lauderdale home with severe injuries to her head, broken teeth and broken fingers.

The death was ruled accidental, but Ms. Fiel has long believed that her sister was murdered as part of a plot to seize the family’s money. In 2002, Bernice Novack told the police that her daughter-in-law strongly disliked her, adding that she believed that she was once poisoned by her.

When asked about Mrs. Novack’s death, Mr. Bharara said, “We are taking a look at that, as you expect we would, and we may have more to say about that later.”

    Four Are Indicted in Suburban N.Y. Hotel Killing, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/nyregion/09batman.html

Pa. City Fights Crime With Soccer, Strict Curfews

June 22, 2010
Filed at 3:19 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHESTER, Pa. (AP) -- Leaders in one of Pennsylvania's oldest cities are preparing to extend a five-day state of emergency to at least a month, but residents say they've been living with violence for decades.

Charles Stansbury's 2-year-old cousin was killed this month in a shooting in Chester. He says crimes like it are nothing new there and wonders why nothing has been done until now.

The little boy and three other people were shot to death within eight days. Mayor Wendell Butler Jr. responded with a 9 p.m. curfew in five high-crime neighborhoods.

The crackdown comes amid Chester's efforts to shed its negative image with a $500 million revitalization plan that includes a 12,000-seat Major League Soccer stadium.

A Philadelphia Union spokeswoman says the recent events will have no effect on the sold-out home-opener Sunday.

Chester was settled in 1644 and sits about halfway between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Del.

    Pa. City Fights Crime With Soccer, Strict Curfews, NYT, 22.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/06/22/us/AP-US-Chester-Emergency.html

A Son’s Killing, and a Queens Mother’s Crusade

May 28, 2010
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD

Permits had been secured for a protest march, but Stephanie Guerra did not want any “frenzied talk,” “rowdiness” or, God forbid, candlelight.

She got her wish. The rally, such as it was, consisted of four women walking slowly down a street in March in Astoria, Queens, with two police escorts rolling alongside. Ms. Guerra handed out fliers asking people to help find her son’s killers. She began outside the 114th Precinct station house, where detectives were working on the case, though not, she suspected, hard enough. She stared up at the boxy beige building and wondered what was going on inside. Nineteen months into the investigation, she still had little idea.

Nearby, on 33rd Street, she bent down to touch, for the first time, the sidewalk where her son’s blood had pooled. She took in the neighborhood — middle class, quiet — and the location, near the precinct house. Not the kind of place where homicide cases just disappear. Yet she felt as if her son’s death had vanished. Like a stone falling into a well.

Inside the station house, Lt. Edward Keough, the detectives’ supervisor, saw things differently. He said he has had up to three people dedicated to the case, which presents a tangle of challenges: an uncooperative victim who died without telling the full truth, a code of silence on the street, and a worry he shares with Ms. Guerra that as time passes, the case — like the one-third of New York City homicides that remain unsolved after a year — will get harder.

“Not that it gets cold,” he said, “but you exhaust certain angles, and the next angles take a little longer.”

As Ms. Guerra puzzles out what mix of patience and aggression an ordinary woman needs to make sure her son’s unheralded death is thoroughly investigated, she is trying to bridge a disconnect between two parallel worlds.

For the police, cases like hers are as hard as headline-grabbing mysteries, but without the glory. They cannot always keep families totally informed, they say, without jeopardizing investigations. For Ms. Guerra, who is divorced and lost her only other child, born prematurely, eight years ago, the problem is of a different magnitude. Sometimes, she says, she thinks: My life was destroyed, and no one else noticed. She pictures herself standing by the well, waiting for the splash.

A Lull, and Then Action

Her son, Keron Agard, 24, was stabbed on Aug. 18, 2008, and died five weeks later. No newspaper or television station mentioned his death. Ms. Guerra came to believe the lead detective was avoiding her. Maybe no one cared, she could not help thinking, because her son was a young black man attacked on the street late at night. Maybe people assumed he was up to no good.

She, too, wonders what he was doing that night, but calls it beside the point: “My son should be able to walk the streets of the United States without fear for his life. Whether he was going to get himself a drink or a prostitute, I don’t care — why is he dead?”

Police records show the investigation has ebbed and flowed. For three months, there were bursts of activity. Then nine months passed with just one notation in the file. On Sept. 15, 2009, The Daily News printed an article, at Ms. Guerra’s urging, about the year-old case. Suddenly, things happened. The police issued new subpoenas for phone records. They asked for a picture of her son. Detectives pushed the busy crime lab for DNA results on blood from a box cutter — and found a tantalizing clue.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a response” to the article, Lieutenant Keough said recently, adding that gaps in the file can reflect impasses or slow-going work. “It never stopped being a priority for us.”

Most painful for Ms. Guerra was not knowing what the police were doing. She was relieved yet affronted when they sketched out their investigative timeline recently — for a reporter.

“My understanding of the English language is just as good as yours,” she said. “It wouldn’t have taken much to call me back.” Knowing some details might have spared her a debilitating depression, she said: “I would feel as if someone was doing their job.”

Lived ‘to Please Him’

Ms. Guerra, 49, immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago and lives in a high-ceilinged apartment overlooking tree-lined streets in Hollis, Queens. Alongside painstakingly arranged pillows, vases and oil paintings are two pictures of her son.

In his elementary school graduation photo, an optimistic-looking Ms. Guerra crouches beside Keron, 11, grinning in a suit and spotted tie. On his memorial service bulletin, he gazes from a stark headshot with a tough-guy stare.

“I lived my life to please him,” Ms. Guerra said. “Not to be one of these parents who embarrass their kids.”

Mr. Agard went to LaGuardia Community College and got a real estate license. Lately, Ms. Guerra says, he had been “immature,” reliant on “the Bank of Mommy.” Still, she harbored high hopes for him.

She cooked him six-course meals and invited his friends — except those she barred for using profane language. She is a strict Jehovah’s Witness. If he or his friends were involved in crime, she said, he would have been afraid to tell her.

The night of the attack, he was at her place when his phone rang five times. A friend picked him up. Less than an hour later, Detective Martin Carrano called to say Mr. Agard had been stabbed in Astoria, where he had no known ties.

His mother tended him at Elmhurst Hospital Center. They talked about the future as he lay with open wounds “like a watermelon gouged out.”

Everyone expected him to recover, and so, in the crucial early days, the case was of course not a homicide. His mother wonders if that made the police less attentive. Lieutenant Keough wonders if not knowing that death was looming made Mr. Agard less cooperative.

Lieutenant Keough, 39, is what the police call “an active cop,” with 284 arrests and 19 medals in 16 years of service. Reviewing the police file, he said it showed that investigators responded normally to the assault. They searched the neighborhood that night for witnesses. People heard the fight. A Spanish-speaking woman found Mr. Agard on her stoop and called 911.

“We got a lot of earwitnesses, so to speak, but not eyewitnesses,” Lieutenant Keough said.

Next the police subpoenaed Mr. Agard’s phone records, checked his friends for gang connections. Meanwhile, Ms. Guerra extracted promises: Her son would get his act together, get a dog, learn “green” construction techniques.

She never asked him what happened — doctors’ orders, she said. But when the police visited him, she asked him if he would cooperate, because, she recalled, “I know young people have a code on the street.”

He told her yes. But Lieutenant Keough says he was “not particularly helpful.”

Mr. Agard told the police that he had taken the subway to Astoria to visit a friend and had been approached by three strangers, Hispanic or white men, peddling marijuana. One pulled out a fake gun, he said; he hit that man and was stabbed by another.

Only later would the police hear that Mr. Agard had actually been driven to Astoria — by a friend with a criminal record, the one who had called him that evening.

“He lived for a very long time, and you know what? He lied to us,” Lieutenant Keough said. “That doesn’t make me not want to solve the case, but it doesn’t make it easier.”

When resentment of the police is widespread, as it is among young black men, there is social pressure not to cooperate, law enforcement experts say. Victims also fear retaliation for “snitching,” Lieutenant Keough said.

“If anything comes out of this,” he said, “I hope victims learn: You never know when you’re going to die, so you might want to cooperate while you can.”

A Lead Is Lost

Mr. Agard eventually went home, but not for long. A high fever struck. Back in the hospital, he died on Sept. 27, 2008.

On Nov. 7, the police say they put out Crime Stoppers fliers offering a reward for information. Ms. Guerra thinks if her son had been white, or had died on Fifth Avenue, the fliers would have gone up sooner. (Sometimes she even doubts they were ever posted, since the police only asked for his picture a year later.)

On Dec. 16, Ms. Guerra brought a female friend of her son’s to the station house. Ms. Guerra had told the police that a friend had picked up her son that night, but she did not know his name. The female friend identified him from police photos.

Now the police had a lead. But they did not act right away, and soon it was too late. Four days later the friend — Ms. Guerra asked that he not be identified for her safety — was shot to death. The police eventually linked that killing to an unrelated criminal scheme involving cars.

On Dec. 26, the detectives alerted the police to look for the man’s associates, to see if they knew anything, even gossip, about Mr. Agard’s death.

Then the record goes fallow. The file shows that on April 22, 2009, the police questioned people arrested for selling marijuana near the spot where Mr. Agard died. Then, for five months, nothing.

‘A Person Without Direction’

Ms. Guerra grew isolated. She asked Detective Carrano to call her regularly, but said he did not.

(The police declined to provide an interview with Detective Carrano, who is retiring. Lieutenant Keough said some detectives are better than others at communicating with families, which he encourages, “even if it’s just to be a sympathetic ear.”)

Ms. Guerra did not know what to call herself. If your parents die, you are an orphan; your wife, a widower. What is a woman who loses both her children?

She cried on the bus as people stared. She took antidepressants, saw therapists. She stopped her work as a baby nurse. Sometimes, she would get dressed, walk out the door, turn around and lie back down.

She slept in her son’s socks and undershirts, wrapped herself in his cowboy comforter, propped his childhood stuffed dog, Andy Randy Davis, on a living room chair. She replayed memories like the secret song that she sang only to her son, never to the babies she cared for at work.

“I’ve never been a person without direction,” she said. “I’ve become this person I wouldn’t like.”

She didn’t think it was such a hard case. Don’t the police deal all the time with witnesses who lie, disappear and die? It was their job to find the truth anyway.

With some ambivalence, she enlisted a crime victims’ advocate, Shawn Williams, who contacted journalists and local politicians. She is wary of support groups, movements, angry words. Jehovah’s Witnesses teach that only God takes revenge, she said, but practicing that is hard: “I am just stuck at rage.”

Best Break in Months

Last Sept. 15, the Daily News article ran. The case sprang to life. Investigators canvassed more streets, more witnesses, more phone records. On Sept. 17, they finally asked Ms. Guerra for a photo of her son.

They called the crime lab and learned that the DNA from blood on a box cutter at the scene was not Mr. Agard’s — maybe it was the killer’s. It did not match any DNA in the police database, but if the person were later arrested and tested, the computer would alert the police to a “hit.”

The police issued alerts asking other precincts to hold certain people, if stopped, for questioning. A new detective, Daniel Autera, took over the case.

There were no instant results.

When Ms. Guerra passed out fliers in Astoria on March 13, she found the police respectful and helpful. Detective Autera, she said, gave her “a much better vibe.”

Ten days later, the police say, they got their best break in months. But it made Ms. Guerra furious.

A man was arrested in Brooklyn for marijuana possession, a misdemeanor. He had been friendly with Mr. Agard and the man who went with him to Astoria. The police say he told them that Mr. Agard’s friend went there to sell drugs.

“It went bad, and he left with the product and left his friend there to take the beating,” Lieutenant Keough said. Mr. Agard, he said, did not seem to have been “the major player.”

“He might have been a very good guy,” he said. “He ended up in the wrong place with the wrong people.”

Ms. Guerra says her son smoked marijuana but would not have dealt — or if he did, “he was the brokest drug dealer I’ve ever seen.”

She said the man arrested in Brooklyn might have said whatever the police wanted. She believes they want an easy solution to cover up an “inept” investigation that only started in earnest a year after her son’s death: “It is so much cleaner to say, ‘Hey, it had to be a drug deal — typical black youth.’ ”

Lieutenant Keough said: “I can find out how your son was killed, but I can’t mold it to come out the way you want. Things might be disclosed that you don’t necessarily like.”

Ms. Guerra still trusts Detective Autera, she stressed. Like it or not, she and the police are bound together. They are practically the only people who still think about this death.

“These are the kind of cases that maybe you get a hit 10 years later and you get closure,” Lieutenant Keough said. “And at that point, maybe it’s only for Mom.”


Todd Heisler contributed reporting.

    A Son’s Killing, and a Queens Mother’s Crusade, NYT, 28.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/nyregion/29mother.html

Formal Charges Expected in Death of Utah Boy

May 14, 2010
Filed at 5:25 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Formal charges are expected Friday against the mother and stepfather of a 4-year-old boy whose badly beaten and disfigured body was found wrapped in plastic and buried in a Utah canyon.

Nathanael Sloop, 31, is being held on suspicion of aggravated murder in Ethan Stacy's death. He and Stephanie Sloop, 27, also face charges of desecration of a corpse, felony child abuse and obstruction of justice, police said.

Both remain jailed. Their first court appearances are scheduled for Friday and security will be tight, said Deputy Davis County Attorney David Cole.

Attorney Richard Gallegos, who has represented Nathanael Sloop in previous criminal cases, has not returned messages seeking comment. It was unknown if Stephanie Sloop had an attorney.

Police unearthed Ethan's body Tuesday, less than two weeks after a Florida judge finalized a divorce that required the boy's biological father to share custody.

The father, Joe G. Stacy of Tazewell, Va., wrote in a November custody petition that Ethan's mother was unstable and had abandoned the youngster, though the judge said she never read that.

Joe Stacy, who then lived in Apopka, Fla., eventually agreed to share custody of the boy, with Ethan spending the school year with his father and summers with his mother, according to divorce papers obtained by The Associated Press.

The divorce settlement was approved by Judge Maura T. Smith of the Ninth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida in Orlando. Smith said Thursday the divorce was a ''cut-and-dried'' uncontested settlement.

She said she had not read Joe Stacy's initial petition and simply approved the final divorce and custody agreement.

Joe Stacy appeared alone April 28 for the 10-minute hearing, one of hundreds of divorce cases the court handles a week, Smith told the AP.

The couple divided their personal property, and Stephanie Sloop gave up claims to a Florida house that fell into foreclosure in December, according to court files.

She didn't wait long to remarry. Stephanie and Nathanael Sloop exchanged vows in a courthouse wedding in Utah eight days after her divorce.

The Sloops locked a badly beaten Ethan in his bedroom while they drove 10 miles for the ceremony, police said.

Police said Ethan died Sunday and Stephanie Sloop reported him missing late Monday, saying he had wandered away from the family's apartment complex.

Police said they searched the complex and neighborhood until the couple revealed the location of the boy's body Tuesday. The search then shifted to Wolf Canyon, which borders the Powder Mountain ski resort, about 40 miles northeast of Salt Lake City.

According to police interview statements used to hold the couple in jail, Nathanael Sloop acknowledged beating the boy for days before his death and Stephanie Sloop did nothing to stop it.

Detectives wrote that Nathanael Sloop used a hammer to disfigure the dead boy's face and teeth before burial to make it harder for anyone to identify the body.

------

Associated Press Correspondent Michael Schneider in Orlando, Fla., contributed to this report.

    Formal Charges Expected in Death of Utah Boy, NYT, 14.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/05/14/us/AP-US-Missing-Boy-Utah.html

In Newburgh, Gangs and Violence Reign

May 11, 2010
The New York Times
By RAY RIVERA

NEWBURGH, N.Y. — It started with adolescent taunting near a frozen pond on a January afternoon and soon escalated into a brawl.

By the time it was over, Levi King Flores, a 17-year-old suspected gang member, was dead from a stab wound between his shoulder blades. A 13-year-old was in jail for his murder. And the year was off to a bloody start.

Gang violence is nothing new in this dilapidated city an hour north of Manhattan. Built along a scenic bluff on the west bank of the Hudson River, Newburgh has long been known for problems far out of proportion to its population of 29,000. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was racial strife and disastrous urban renewal efforts. In the 1980s, when the city was known as “crack alley,” it was drug-fueled violence, which has ebbed and flowed here ever since.

But this latest round of violence is shining a harsh new glare on the city, both for the intensity of the attacks and the young ages of many of those involved. The community led the state in violent crimes per capita in 2008 and is on course to do so again this year.

Gang violence has been responsible for all but 2 or 3 of the city’s 16 homicides in the last two and a half years. By law enforcement estimates, gang members with national affiliations outnumber the city’s police by a ratio of three to one, not counting the hundreds of young people in homegrown groups.

At a Senate hearing with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in Washington last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer called the situation in Newburgh “shocking.”

“There are reports of shootouts in the town streets, strings of robberies and gang assaults with machetes,” Mr. Schumer said.

At the senator’s urging, Mr. Holder promised to send a top-level official to Newburgh to examine the problem. Even before that assurance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had already made Newburgh one of its top priorities in the region after a spate of killings in 2008.

“I think that we will see shortly some of the results of that work,” Mr. Holder said at the hearing.

Newburgh’s persistent violence is remarkable considering what the community is not: a big city. Though people on the streets here like to call it the sixth borough of New York, it is no such thing, either in density or geography.

Adorned with brick row houses and 19th-century Gothic Revival mansions, relics of its industrial past, the city has a certain nostalgic charm. Pleasure boats and upscale restaurants with colorful awnings line the riverfront esplanade. From there, a grassy slope leads to Grand Street, a tree-lined avenue where the expansive homes of the city’s Gilded Age stand in varying states of renovation and neglect.

But just a few blocks away is Lander Street, a menacing little stretch of boarded-up row houses and graffiti-tagged walls that has become one of the state’s most implacable centers of poverty and violence. Young men with pit bulls occupy porch stoops at all hours, guarding barely concealed drug markets inside. It is one of several such streets within a few blocks in the city’s northeast end that law enforcement officials say are mainly controlled by the Bloods street gang, the city’s largest with an estimated 160 members.

A number of homegrown groups — not formal gangs necessarily, but with the same territorial and violent tendencies — occupy various blocks and bear names like Ashey Bandits, Ave World and D-Block.

The narrow avenues and one-way streets make it hard for police — even in unmarked cars that are by now well known by the residents, including a green Chevrolet Suburban they call the “Green Goblin” — to sneak up on anybody.

“As soon as we turn the corner, they call out ‘One time!’ ” said Officer Joseph Palermo, on a recent night patrol.

The city’s southeast side, a largely Hispanic area known as the Heights, is controlled by Hispanic gangs like the Latin Kings, la Eme and a local group known as the Benkard Barrio Kings.

A sense of how embedded the gang culture has become can be gleaned at the local high school, the Newburgh Free Academy.

Two years ago, Torrance Harvey, a social studies teacher, and Mark Wallace, the school’s violence prevention coordinator, created a class where students could come and talk about issues important to them. During a recent session, Mr. Harvey drew a diagram on the board with the word “community” in the center and asked the class to define it. The students rattled off the usual institutions: churches, schools, law enforcement. But high on the list they also called out “gang-bangers,” “drug dealers” and “crackheads.”

Central to the problem, Mr. Harvey and Mr. Wallace said, is the lack of jobs and activities available to young people. The city has no supermarkets, one Boys and Girls Club that is closed on weekends and a virtually nonexistent bus system, leaving young people without cars too far from the only steady source of employment, at regional malls well outside of town.

“Kids are energy,” Mr. Wallace said, “and if they don’t have some place to go, where are they going to go? The corner.”

Many of those involved are not yet teenagers. Among those stabbed in the January fight was a 12-year-old who, while later testifying against Mr. Flores’s killer, lifted his shirt in court to show his knife wounds. Three months later, that same boy would find himself in jail along with seven others, accused of beating and stabbing a man nearly to death with baseball bats and knives.

“That’s the thing: Today’s victim is tomorrow’s suspect,” said Joseph Cortez, a Newburgh gang detective.

To complicate matters, the acting city manager, Richard F. Herbek, soberly announced earlier this year that Newburgh was broke. It needs $10 million to make it through the rest of this year and is facing a $6 million shortfall in the coming year, leading to fears of further cuts to community services, including the Police Department, which is already down to about 85 officers from a high of more than 100 a few years ago. Officials, though, say police cuts would be a last resort.

“It’s a tough, urban city,” said Nicholas Valentine, a tailor who doubles as the mayor of Newburgh. “We have pockets in this city that will rival any other area in the northeast, from Cleveland to Detroit, and we don’t have the resources to deal with it.”

Sitting on a stoop on Chambers Street recently, a 19-year-old woman who asked that her name not be used for safety concerns said she began “gang-banging” in seventh grade and stayed with it until a few months ago. She belonged to D-Back, an informal group named for nearby Dubois Street.

“I had the flag going on, the clothes going on, all that,” she said.

She had followed the example of her older brother, she said. “I’d see him getting so much respect outside in the ’hood, and I’m like, ‘That’s my bro, I want that respect,’ ” she said.

By 10th grade, she was selling marijuana, making as much as $2,500 a week. She had clothes, jewelry, everything she says a young girl could want. “You hear kids with jobs and as much money as they get paid in a week,” she said. “I was making that in a day or two, you know.”

But for her, things began to change the night of May 6, 2008. That night, Jeffrey Zachary, a baby-faced 15-year-old, was killed in a drive-by shooting across from his house on Dubois Street. Police officials said he was not a gang member and had been hit mistakenly.

The woman, who had been with Jeffrey earlier that day, wanted revenge. Everyone in D-Block did. But his mother, who had lost another son in nearly identical fashion three years earlier, pleaded with them not to retaliate.

“She said ‘Listen, that’s not what I want,’ ” the 19-year-old recalled. “ ‘This is going to go on and on, it’s never going to stop.’ And she was right.”

For Jeffrey’s family, his death was overwhelming. His sister, Tova Zachary, 23, had been in the house when she heard the shots. She ran out to find her brother on the ground. She clutched him, pleading with him: “Please don’t go. Hold on. Hold on.”

That night, she sneaked into the emergency ward at nearby St. Luke’s Cornwall Hospital a few blocks away where doctors were trying to save her brother. She had done the same thing three years earlier as doctors tried in vain to save her other brother, Trent, 19.

“Everyone always mentions that they died in the exact same way,” Ms. Zachary said. “But not everyone knows they died in the exact same emergency room.”

Jeffrey Zachary’s death resonated beyond the neighborhood. In his office in Goshen, about 30 miles away, James Gagliano, an F.B.I. special agent who is head of the Hudson Valley gang task force, keeps a yellowed newspaper clipping of the teenager’s death under his desktop glass.

Mr. Gagliano had coached youth basketball in Newburgh for years. Though he never coached Mr. Zachary, he remembered him from the courts playing for a youth team at St. Mary’s Church.

“I can’t tell you how many times I saw him there,” Mr. Gagliano recalled. “When he caught a bullet and he was the second kid in that family to die as a result of gang of violence — you talk about a mother’s grief.”

Jeffrey Zachary’s death came about the same time that Mr. Gagliano took over as agent in charge in the Hudson Valley region, armed with orders to build federal gang cases, starting in Newburgh. Over the next several months, the number of agents whose primary focus was gangs increased from 1 to 10. He also enlisted the aid of the local police, the State Police and other federal agencies to build a 30-member gang task force to go after the city’s most hardened gangsters. But building federal cases takes time, and jail is only part of the solution, said Mr. Gagliano, a kinetic West Point graduate whose arms are covered with tattoos from years of undercover work.

For that reason, he has also taken an unusually active role in the community, lobbying city officials and business leaders to build an activity center where young people can learn job skills, play basketball or indoor soccer and find a safe place away from the street corners.

“Newburgh is hemorrhaging and we have to make a change,” he said. “And it can’t just be on the law enforcement side.”

Others are also taking up that charge. A group of mothers who have lost children to violence recently formed an organization called Mothers for Upward Movement. They hope to raise money to pay for recreational activities for young people like bus trips to the Bronx Zoo.

“So many of these kids have never even been out of the community,” said Jennifer Murchison, 39, whose 16-year-old son James Murchison was stabbed to death in May 2008.

Reflecting recently on her lost son, who was the second oldest of her five children, Ms. Murchison started doing a silent roll call in her head.

“I’m almost 40, and all my friends are still alive,” she said finally. “My kids are young, and they’ve lost at least eight friends, and a brother.”

    In Newburgh, Gangs and Violence Reign, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12newburgh.html

3 Relatives Dead, Child Feared Speaking Up, Police Say

April 1, 2010
The New York Times
By VICTORIA CHERRIE

CHARLOTTE — A 10-year-old girl ran out of her home with her 2-year-old brother to waiting police officers late Monday night. Leaving behind her father, who then fatally shot himself, the girl proceeded to help unravel a grisly murder-suicide, the police said. Two adults and two children were dead.

The father, Kenneth Jermaine Chapman, 33, had suffocated his wife, Nateesha Ward Chapman, 34, in an apartment they had recently moved from, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police said. In the family’s new apartment nearby, he stabbed 13-year-old Na’Jhae Parker and suffocated her 13-month-old sister, Nakyiah Jael Chapman — within a day of killing their mother. With the two children’s bodies in the apartment for several days, Mr. Chapman continued to live there with his 10-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son.

The 10-year-old, a fifth grader, suspected that her stepmother and siblings were dead, the police said. But she continued to attend school and not discuss the situation for fear that she could endanger herself and her 2-year-old brother.

Officials at McClintock Middle School in Charlotte called the Chapmans’ home when Na’Jhae, an eighth grader, did not show up for class. A school spokeswoman declined to give any details of the call.On Thursday, new details emerged about other warning signs of the family’s troubles. Mecklenburg County Youth and Family Services said that it received a telephone referral about the family on Sept. 21. A department spokesman declined to give details about the call but said the information did not meet the legal definition for abuse or neglect or indicate that a child was in danger.

Two calls were made to 911 about the family: one by a friend of Mr. Chapman’s, on March 19, and one by Nateesha Chapman’s uncle, at about 11:15 Monday night.

The friend told the police on March 19 that he was concerned about a Facebook posting that indicated that Mr. Chapman might be suicidal, according to a police spokesman, Rob Tufano said. The friend said Mr. Chapman had told him to “check the news in a few days.”

An officer went to the family’s old apartment about 6:30 p.m. that day. All the lights were out and no one answered the door, Mr. Tufano said. The officer returned later, but no one answered the door.

On Monday night, Nateesha Chapman’s uncle asked the police to check on his niece, whom he had tried to reach several times in the past two weeks. When officers went to the family’s new apartment, the 10-year-old girl and 2-year-old boy ran from the home.

Hours later, guided by information from the girl, the police went to the family’s old apartment and found Ms. Chapman’s body.

The Chapmans moved to Charlotte from Martinsburg, W.Va., about a year ago to be closer to Ms. Chapman’s relatives and to benefit from a better economy, friends said.

“Up here it seemed like everything was all right,” said Solomon Wright, a neighbor in West Virginia who taught Na’Jhae, the 13-year-old, and her 10-year-old sister in school. “I never saw the evil. That’s what troubles me the most. I didn’t see it. If I had, maybe I could have helped.”

At McClintock Middle School in Charlotte this week, students decorated Na’Jhae’s locker with flowers. On Thursday, teenagers marched through Charlotte’s Uptown area to raise awareness of domestic violence.

    3 Relatives Dead, Child Feared Speaking Up, Police Say, NYT, 2.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/us/02charlotte.html

9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide

March 29, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM and KATIE ZEZIMA

It is not clear what some students at South Hadley High School expected to achieve by subjecting a freshman to the relentless taunting described by a prosecutor and classmates.

Certainly not her suicide. And certainly not the multiple felony indictments announced on Monday against several students at the Massachusetts school.

The prosecutor brought charges Monday against nine teenagers, saying their taunting and physical threats were beyond the pale and led the freshman, Phoebe Prince, to hang herself from a stairwell in January.

The charges were an unusually sharp legal response to the problem of adolescent bullying, which is increasingly conducted in cyberspace as well as in the schoolyard and has drawn growing concern from parents, educators and lawmakers.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.

In the Prince case, two boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury, harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly. Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said at a news conference in Northampton, Mass.

Appearing with state and local police officials on Monday, Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.

“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”

It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.

Christine Swelko, assistant superintendent for South Hadley Public Schools, said school officials planned to meet with the district attorney this week or next. “We will then review this evidence and particularly the new information which the district attorney’s office has but did not come to light within the investigation conducted by the school,” Ms. Swelko said in a statement.

Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day.

At South Hadley High School, which has about 700 students, most students and teachers refused on Monday to talk about the case. Students waited for parents in the pouring rain and a sports team ran by, with one student telling reporters, “Go away.”

Ashlee Dunn, a 16-year-old sophomore, said she had not known Ms. Prince personally but had heard stories spread about her in the hallways.

“She was new and she was from a different country, and she didn’t really know the school very well,” Ms. Dunn said. “I think that’s probably one reason why they chose Phoebe.”

On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home. Her sister found her hanging from a stairwell at home, still in her school clothes, at 4:30 p.m.

Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.

“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.

Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.

Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.

The Massachusetts House and Senate have passed versions of an anti-bullying law, but disagreement remains on whether all schools will be required to conduct staff training about bullying — a provision in about half the states with such laws and one that is vital, said Robert O. Trestan, Eastern States Civil Rights Counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, which has led the effort for legislation in Massachusetts.

The prospective law, Mr. Trestan said, is aimed at changing school cultures and preventing bullying, but would not label bullying a crime because it is a vague concept. “These indictments tell us that middle school and high school kids are not immune from criminal laws,” he said. “If they violate them in the course of bullying someone, they’ll be held accountable. We don’t need to create a new crime.”

A South Hadley parent, Mitch Brouillard, who said his daughter Rebecca had been bullied by one of the girls charged in Ms. Prince’s death, said he was pleased that charges were brought. One of the students was charged separately in a case involving his daughter.

“My daughter was bullied for three years, and we continually went to the administration and we really got no satisfaction,” Mr. Brouillard said, adding, “I was offered an apology a few weeks ago that they should have handled it differently.”

The school has convened an anti-bullying task force, which met Monday, to help determine how to deal with bullying. “That’s the really clear message we’re trying to send — if you see anything at all, online, through friends, you have to tell us,” said Bill Evans, an administrator leading a group subcommittee.

The task force must also consider whether state law affects existing procedures. “The big question out there is what the legislature will impose on school districts,” Mr. Evans said.

Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer in Cambridge, Mass., who has argued that proposed cyberbullying laws are too vague and a threat to free speech, said that he thought the charges announced Monday would pass legal muster. The sorts of acts of harassment and stalking claimed in the charges were wrong under state law, Mr. Silverglate said, but a question would be whether they were serious enough to constitute criminal violations, as opposed to civil ones.

“There is a higher threshold of proof of outrageous conduct needed to reach the level of a criminal cause of action, in comparison to the lower level of outrageousness needed to prove a civil violation,” he said.

A lawsuit involving another case of high school bullying, in upstate New York, was settled on Monday. A gay teenager had sued the Mohawk Central School District, saying school officials had not protected him.

In the settlement, the district said it would increase staff training to prevent harassment, pay $50,000 to the boy’s family and reimburse the family for counseling, The Associated Press reported. The boy has moved to a different district.


Erik Eckholm reported from New York, and Katie Zezima from South Hadley, Mass.

    9 Teenagers Are Charged After Classmate’s Suicide, NYT, 30.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/us/30bully.html

Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock U.S. Consulate

March 15, 2010
The New York Times
By ELISABETH MALKIN and MARC LACEY

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — The married couple gunned down Saturday as they drove back from a children’s birthday party with their infant daughter in the back seat were concerned about the violence plaguing this border town, but they never believed they could be its next targets, the husband’s brother said in an interview on Monday.

The couple, Leslie Enriquez, 35, a pregnant American consulate worker, and her husband, Arthur H. Redelfs, 34, an officer at the county jail in El Paso, were within sight of the bridge leading to the United States border crossing when gunmen said to have links to drug traffickers drove up to their car and opened fire, killing them both.

“He was a wonderful man,” said the brother, Reuben Redelfs. “We just regret this as a senseless act of violence.”

Gunmen also killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two young children in a near-simultaneous shooting elsewhere in the city, in what appeared to be coordinated assaults on American officials and their families. The killings provoked outrage from Washington and raised new questions about whether employees of the United States and their family members were increasingly at risk of being swept into the cross-fire of Mexico’s bloody drug wars.

The couple had been married for a couple years and lived in El Paso, where they were raising their 7-month-old daughter, who was unharmed in the shooting. Mr. Redelfs said he was now caring for the girl.

Despite concerns about the security in Ciudad Juárez, the couple traveled frequently between Texas and Mexico, where they had friends and Ms. Enriquez worked in the section of the American Consulate dealing with complaints or concerns of Americans in Mexico.

“They weren’t worried as targets,” Mr. Redelfs said.

Asked if he believed the couple were targets because of Ms. Enriquez’s consular job, Mr. Redelfs chose his words cautiously, saying, “I find it more than a coincidence that two separate incidents involving consular employees who were shot and killed occurred on the same day.”

Silvio Gonzalez, a spokesman for the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, said the agency would be closed Tuesday “as we mourn the loss in our community.” The consular office was closed Monday for a holiday.

On Sunday night, staff at the consulate in Juárez held a meeting in which they vented their fears and discussed ideas for improving security.

State Department officials said concerns about security were not new along Mexico’s northern border, long the scene of some of that country’s worst violence. But as levels of drug violence soared in recent years, the State Department has looked at ways to tighten security at its border consulates.

Unlike other consulates around the world, those along Mexico’s northern border have their own diplomatic security officers assigned to oversee the security at the consulate and at the homes of all foreign service officers. Security at most other consulates is managed by regional officers that oversee the safety of consulates in various countries.

Diplomats at border consulates receive hardship pay to compensate them for the increased risk they assume by accepting assignments at those posts. And they are eligible for special antiterrorism training — known in State Department as “crash-bang courses” — meant to teach them how to respond to robberies, shootings and kidnapping attempts.

The killings came during a particularly bloody weekend when nearly 50 people were killed nationwide in drug-gang violence, including attacks in Acapulco as American college students began arriving for spring break.

The killings followed threats against American diplomats along the Mexican border and complaints from consulate workers that drug-related violence was growing untenable, American officials said. Even before the shootings, the State Department had quietly made the decision to allow consulate workers to evacuate their families across the border to the United States.

In Washington, President Obama denounced the “brutal murders” and vowed to “work tirelessly” with Mexican law enforcement officials to prosecute the killers. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the killings underscored the need to work with the Mexican government “to cripple the influence of trafficking organizations at work in Mexico.”

In a sign of the potential international reverberations of these killings, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico similarly expressed his indignation and condolences and said he would press forward with “all available resources” to control the lawlessness in Ciudad Juárez and the rest of the country.

The F.B.I. was sending agents to Ciudad Juárez on Sunday to assist with the investigation and American diplomats were en route to meet with their Mexican counterparts, said Roberta S. Jacobson, the American deputy assistant secretary of state who handles Mexico.

The coordinated nature of the attacks, the automatic weapons used and the location in a city where drug cartels control virtually all illicit activity point toward traffickers as the suspects, said Mexican and American officials, declining to be identified. Officials with the state of Chihuahua issued a statement Sunday night saying that initial evidence, corroborated by intelligence from the United States, pointed to a gang known as Los Aztecas, which is linked to the major drug cartel in Ciudad Juárez.

American interests in Mexico have been attacked by drug traffickers before but never with such brutality. Attackers linked to the Gulf Cartel shot at and hurled a grenade, which did not explode, at the American consulate in Monterrey in 2008.

The shootings in Ciudad Juárez took place in broad daylight on Saturday as the victims were en route home from a social gathering at another consulate worker’s home. The first attack was reported at 2:32 p.m.

Jorge Alberto Salcido Ceniceros, 37, the husband of a consular worker, was found dead in a white Honda Pilot, with bullet wounds to his body, the authorities said. In the back seat were two wounded children, one aged 4 and one 7. They were taken to the hospital.

Shell casings from a variety of caliber weapons were found at the scene.

Another call came in 10 minutes later, several miles away. This time it was a Toyota RAV4 with Texas plates that had been shot up, with Mr. Redelfs and Ms. Enriquez dead inside and their baby crying from a car seat in the back. Mexican officials initially gave Ms. Enriquez’s age as 25. Ms. Enriquez, an American citizen, was shot in the head. Her husband was shot in the neck and left arm. A 9-millimeter bullet casing was found at the scene.

Mr. Calderón is scheduled on Tuesday to make his third visit to Ciudad Juárez in the last five weeks as he tries to contain the disastrous public relations fallout from the killing of 16 people in January that Mr. Calderón first brushed off as “a settling of accounts” between members of criminal gangs.

It turns out the victims of the massacre were mostly students celebrating a birthday. By all accounts, they were just young people from a rough neighborhood trying to steer clear of the drug gang violence that has turned Ciudad Juárez into Mexico’s deadliest city. More than 2,000 people were killed there last year, giving it one of the highest murder rates in the world.


Elisabeth Malkin reported from Ciudad Juárez, and Marc Lacey from La Unión, Mexico. Ginger Thompson and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, Antonio Betancourt from Mexico City, and Jack Healy from New York.

    Drug Slayings in Mexico Rock U.S. Consulate, NYT, 15.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/world/americas/16juarez.html

Op-Ed Contributor

To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes

March 15, 2010
By MICHAEL SERINGHAUS

New Haven

PERHAPS the only thing more surprising than President Obama’s decision to give an interview for “America’s Most Wanted” last weekend was his apparent agreement with the program’s host, John Walsh, that there should be a national DNA database with profiles of every person arrested, whether convicted or not. Many Americans feel that this proposal flies in the face of our “innocent until proven guilty” ethos, and given that African-Americans are far more likely to be arrested than whites, critics refer to such genetic collection as creating “Jim Crow’s database.”

In truth, however, this is an issue where both sides are partly right. The president was correct in saying that we need a more robust DNA database, available to law enforcement in every state, to “continue to tighten the grip around folks who have perpetrated these crimes.” But critics have a point that genetic police work, like the sampling of arrestees, is fraught with bias. A better solution: to keep every American’s DNA profile on file.

Your sensitive genetic information would be safe. A DNA profile distills a person’s complex genomic information down to a set of 26 numerical values, each characterizing the length of a certain repeated sequence of “junk” DNA that differs from person to person. Although these genetic differences are biologically meaningless — they don’t correlate with any observable characteristics — tabulating the number of repeats creates a unique identifier, a DNA “fingerprint.”

The genetic privacy risk from such profiling is virtually nil, because these records include none of the health and biological data present in one’s genome as a whole. Aside from the ability in some cases to determine whether two individuals are closely related, DNA profiles have nothing sensitive to disclose.

But for law enforcement, the profiles are hugely important: DNA samples collected from crime scenes are compared against a standing database of profiles, and matches are investigated. Obviously, the more individuals profiled in the database, the more likely a crime-scene sample can be identified, hence the president’s enthusiasm to expand the nationwide repository.

The current federal law-enforcement database, the Combined DNA Index System, or Codis, was designed for profiles of convicted criminals. When it became operational in 1998, only certain classes of convicted criminals (for instance, sex offenders) were profiled. Over the past decade, the list of qualifying crimes has quietly grown (states make their own laws on collection). And last year, the F.B.I. joined more than a dozen states and moved to include DNA profiles from arrestees not yet convicted.

There are several key problems with this approach to expanding the database. First, the national DNA database is racially skewed, as blacks and Hispanics are far more likely than whites to be convicted of crimes. Creating profiles of arrestees only adds to that imbalance.

Second, several states, including California and Colorado, have embraced a controversial new technique called familial DNA search, which exploits the fact that close relatives share substantial fractions of their DNA. If efforts to find a DNA match come up empty — that is, if the perpetrator is not yet profiled in the database — the police in these states can search for partial matches between crime-scene samples and offenders in their record base. If they find a partial match, they can zero in on relatives of the profiled person as possible suspects.

This sounds elegant, and it occasionally works: in Britain, a handful of high-profile cases have been solved using familial search. But this approach is crippled by a very high false positive rate — many partial matches turn up people unrelated to the actual perpetrator. And it raises serious legal questions: how can we justify the de facto inclusion in DNA databases of criminals’ family members who have been neither arrested nor convicted?

Moreover, familial search threatens to skew racial bias further still: by effectively including all close relatives of profiled individuals, the database could approach universal population coverage for certain races or groups and not others. Even if this bias is found to be legally permissible, it may still prove politically unpalatable.

A much fairer system would be to store DNA profiles for each and every one of us. This would eliminate any racial bias, negate the need for the questionable technique of familial search, and of course be a far stronger tool for law enforcement than even an arrestee database.

This universal database is tenable from a privacy perspective because of the very limited information content of DNA profiles: whereas the genome itself poses a serious privacy risk, Codis-style profiles do not.

A universal record would be a strong deterrent to first-time offenders — after all, any DNA sample left behind would be a smoking gun for the police — and would enable the police to more quickly apprehend repeat criminals. It would also help prevent wrongful convictions.

As a practical matter, universal DNA collection is fairly easy: it could be done alongside blood tests on newborns, or through painless cheek swabs as a prerequisite to obtaining a driver’s license or Social Security card. Once a biological sample was obtained, its use must be limited to generating a DNA profile only, and afterward the sample would be destroyed. Access to the DNA database would remain limited to law enforcement officers investigating serious crimes.

Since every American would have a stake in keeping the data private and ensuring that only the limited content vital to law enforcement was recorded, there would be far less likelihood of government misuse than in the case of a more selective database.

Provided our privacy remains secure, there is no excuse not to use every bit of science we can in the fight against crime. The key is making sure that all Americans contribute their share.

Michael Seringhaus is a student at Yale Law School.

    To Stop Crime, Share Your Genes, NYT, 15.3.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/opinion/15seringhaus.html

8 Deaths in a Small Town, and Much Unease

January 2, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

JENNINGS, La. — Every few months for the last four and a half years, someone driving the back roads here in Jefferson Davis Parish has come across a body.

They fit the same pattern: The bodies have been those of young women raised by extended families in the nearby towns of Lake Arthur and Jennings. At some point, the women lost their footing and succumbed to the undercurrent of drugs and prostitution that has been steadily eating away at the parish.

Since May 2005, there have been eight such discoveries in this quiet countryside of rice and crawfish farms in southwestern Louisiana. The most recent was in August.

The women appear to have been murdered, but most of the bodies were found in such a state of decomposition that the causes of death have not been determined. The victims were black and white, aged 17 to 30. Most knew one another or were even related, members of a small circle in a small town.

The deaths have caused considerable soul-searching among victims’ relatives here worried about the plague of drugs and prostitution that might have contributed to the women’s deaths. There has also been anger at what many local residents view as missteps by sheriff’s investigators, like lost or missing evidence, and fury at the possibility that a serial killer might be loose.

“Whoever is doing this, I don’t know how they sleep at night,” said Sarah Benoit, the mother of Crystal Benoit Zeno, a cheerful, mischievous 24-year-old whose body was discovered by hunters in a dry canal in September 2008. “I just don’t understand.”

Long a stopping-off point for drug traffickers along Interstate 10, Jennings, the parish seat, has a thriving crack trade, which turns many young men to crime and women to prostitution.

The sight of young women walking among the derelict houses on the south side of town once brought dismay to parents. Now a woman alone evokes dread.

“My girls won’t go anywhere unless someone’s with them,” Ms. Benoit said.

At Tina’s, a one-room bar where some of the victims used to come, rumors and theories abound. Law enforcement officials are treating the deaths as if they were murders committed by a “common offender” — a serial killer — but emphasize that is not a sure thing. It is not clear if the deaths are related or — because of decomposition — if they are all even murders.

Four people have been arrested or have had arrest warrants issued in connection with the deaths. Two were even held on murder charges for months before being freed because of evidence problems; the other two were never charged.

Frankie Richard was one of those two. A onetime owner of local strip joints, Mr. Richard (pronounced REE-shar) has a history of assault arrests. He admits to being a crack addict and claims to have had sex with most of the victims. He was among those last seen with Kristen G. Lopez, whose body was found floating in a canal on March 18, 2007.

A woman who was with Mr. Richard and Ms. Lopez at a cheap hotel just before Ms. Lopez disappeared told the police that Mr. Richard and his niece had killed Ms. Lopez. Soon after, the woman recanted her statement.

“I have my suspicion about who done it,” Mr. Richard, 54, said, sitting on the front porch of his childhood home on a chilly Sunday afternoon, still reeling from what his mother said was a three-day binge. “But I don’t want to pin the tail on no donkey because I don’t want false allegations to cause a family to go through what mine did.”

Mr. Richard was in rehab when one of the victims died, Sheriff Ricky Edwards said.

The pace of the investigation, and the apparent mistakes along the way, have tested the town’s patience. In 2007, the chief of detectives in the parish sheriff’s office made a deal to buy a pickup truck from an inmate in the parish jail, a woman he knew to be an acquaintance of one of the victims. A witness later said she saw Ms. Lopez in that same truck on the day of her disappearance, but by then the detective had washed and resold the truck.

The detective was fined and taken off the investigation. He now supervises the evidence room at the sheriff’s office.

Over time, dissatisfaction has turned to outright suspicion that the local police are involved in or are covering up the deaths. In a small town like Jennings, where law enforcement officers, victims and criminals are often related by blood and friendship, the police’s failings inevitably take on an ominous cast.

Some victims’ relatives who consider the police ineffective, or worse, have turned to Kirk Menard, a private investigator with a background in workers’ compensation and insurance fraud cases, but not in homicide. (Mr. Menard is perhaps uniquely qualified in one respect: his stepfather, who died last year, was the brother of Richard E. Hickock, one of the Clutter family killers profiled in Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood.”)

For months, Mr. Menard has been secretly videotaping women who fit the profile of the victims, hoping to catch license plates when the women get into strangers’ cars. This past June, he made a short video of Necole J. Guillory, 26, walking along the street. Two months later, her body was found by weeding crews along Interstate 10.

Sheriff Edwards acknowledges that many residents distrust the investigation, but said the dissatisfaction arose mainly out of frustration. In December 2008, he set up a task force of law enforcement officials from nearby parishes, the state police and the F.B.I. Several victims’ relatives said they were reassured by the diligence of the task force, which works out of a nondescript storefront in a rundown strip mall.

But for now, investigators are still hoping for a break.

“This person will screw up, the right person will come forward and give us some information, and we will be able to bring justice for these ladies,” the sheriff said.

The relatives have learned to grieve in uncertainty. Many of the victims had already faced more hardship than anyone should — violent men, rape, mental problems, addiction — but there had always been the hope that, with love and support, they could make it through intact.

“It’s the school of hard knocks that they never got a chance to graduate from,” said Sonya Benoit Beard, sitting at her kitchen table over a pool of photographs of her bubbly cousin Whitnei C. Dubois, 26, whose body was found at a rural crossroads in May 2007.

Melissa Gary, the mother of Ms. Lopez, said she woke up every morning wondering what had happened to her child. When she shows up for work at the truck stop casino by the highway, she says she wonders if she is coming face to face with the killer.

Or the killer could be a complete stranger. She just does not know. Nobody knows.

“There’s eight murders in Jeff Davis parish, and not one’s been solved,” Ms. Gary said, breaking down in tears.

“Something is wrong in this parish,” she said. “Something is wrong in Jeff Davis Parish.”

    8 Deaths in a Small Town, and Much Unease, NYT, 2.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/us/02serial.html