A nanny accused of killing the two young children she was
caring for on Oct. 25 in their Upper West Side apartment was charged on Saturday
night with first-degree murder, the police said.
The nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, 50, was charged with fatally stabbing the children,
Lucia Krim, 6, and her brother, Leo, 2, shortly before their mother, Marina
Krim, returned from a swimming lesson with her other young daughter.
The police said they had delayed charging Ms. Ortega for more than a week
because she was intubated and unable to speak as doctors treated wounds she
received when she stabbed herself in the throat and slashed her wrists.
Ms. Ortega talked with New York City detectives on Saturday afternoon from her
bed at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she remains
under police guard, Paul J. Browne, the chief police spokesman, said in a
statement.
Mr. Browne gave no details about Ms. Ortega’s condition nor any indication of
when she would leave the hospital.
He also declined to give information about a possible motive.
On the day of the killing, Ms. Krim returned home in the early evening with her
3-year-old daughter to find her two other children dead of knife wounds in the
bathtub. As Ms. Krim walked into the bathroom, police said, Ms. Ortega plunged a
kitchen knife into her own throat.
Ms. Ortega, who police said was a naturalized American citizen from the
Dominican Republic, had been referred to the Krims by a family friend and had
worked for them for about two years. Police said there was no record of her
having committed a previous crime or any indication that there were tensions
between her and the Krims.
But relatives and friends of Ms. Ortega have said that she seemed to have been
unraveling lately and had sought help from a mental health professional. Her
home, which she shared with several relatives including her teenage son, was
crowded, and she had financial difficulties.
By choosing
to charge George Zimmerman with second-degree murder in the killing of Trayvon
Martin, Angela B. Corey, the special prosecutor appointed to the case in
Florida, selected the toughest possible charge involving a killing short of
first-degree murder, which requires a finding of premeditation and carries the
death penalty as a possible punishment.
Under second-degree murder, the jury must find that a death was caused by a
criminal act “demonstrating a depraved mind without regard for human life,” said
Eric Abrahamsen, a criminal defense lawyer in Tallahassee, reading from the
state’s standard jury instructions. The maximum sentence for second-degree
murder is life in prison; the minimum penalty under these charges is 25 years.
Dan Markel, a law professor at Florida State University, said he was “very
surprised” by the severity of the charges “in light of the evidence that seems
to have been brought to the attention of the public so far.” Many legal experts
had predicted that Mr. Zimmerman would be charged with manslaughter.
The charge of second-degree murder also means that Mr. Zimmerman will not be
entitled to be released on bail before his trial. Instead, his lawyer will be
able to ask for what Florida calls an Arthur hearing, which can take place weeks
after the arrest, to determine whether he should be allowed to post bond.
Jeff Weiner, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers who practices in Miami, said an Arthur hearing “is not a mini-trial, but
it’s a very good preview of the evidence that the state has at this point.”
Mr. Weiner suggested that the prosecutor might have “overcharged” to retain the
option, should she feel a murder conviction is slipping away, of asking the
judge to instruct the jury to consider lesser offenses, like manslaughter. It is
also possible, he said, that she might be trying to coax Mr. Zimmerman to the
negotiating table to plead guilty to such a lesser charge. But, he added, it is
impossible to say whether it is overly tough, since evidence has not yet been
produced.
The case will almost certainly include a pretrial hearing to determine whether
the state’s Stand Your Ground law, which grants broad protections to people who
claim to have killed in self-defense, applies; if the judge finds that Mr.
Zimmerman acted appropriately, the case will end there. If the judge decides
that the protections of the law do not apply, the case will go forward.
At trial, however, the question of self-defense can be brought up again and
possibly will, said Robert Weisberg, a criminal law expert at Stanford Law
School. That could lead to a fallback position for the jury — if allowed by the
judge — of a lesser verdict of manslaughter should the jury decide that Mr.
Zimmerman sincerely but unreasonably believed that he was appropriately using
lethal force to defend himself, which is known as “imperfect self-defense.”
Either side in the case could request that the judge instruct the jury to
consider that middle ground, and if the evidence supports such a finding the
judge will in almost all cases comply, Professor Weisberg said. A confident
prosecutor may not want to risk missing the toughest conviction, however, and a
confident defense lawyer may not want to risk giving the jurors a lesser charge
that they can choose instead of acquittal. And so, he said, the question may
come down to, “Who’s feeling lucky?”
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.
The authorities
arrested and charged a suspect on Monday
night in the weekend shooting near Seton Hall University that left one student
dead and four other people injured.
The suspect, Nicholas Welch, 25, was detained Monday evening at his home in East
Orange, N.J., a few doors from the house where the shooting occurred early
Saturday morning.
The police are still looking for another suspect, Marcus Bascus, 19, who they
said gave Mr. Welch the gun he used in the shooting.
Both Mr. Welch and Mr. Bascus have at least one previous arrest on drug charges,
the police said. They face charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The police said Mr. Welch had no ties to any of the victims.
The gunman had been at large since the shooting, which took place in a
neighborhood so dangerous that guests are often checked for weapons before
entering parties.
According to witnesses, the man tried to enter a party that was being held at a
two-story house on South Clinton Street about a mile from Seton Hall’s campus.
The street borders the Vailsburg neighborhood of Newark, which is troubled by
gangs and has been the scene of one other recent shooting.
Witnesses said bouncers turned away the man, who they believed would disrupt the
party. But he returned later, around 12:20 a.m, entered the party and opened
fire. Jessica Townsend, a friend of one of the victims, said she saw the man
enter with his arm outstretched, holding a gun. He shot five partygoers, at
least one in the head. The gunman then fled.
The police said Mr. Welch could not go far from the scene of the shooting
because the area was locked down by the police, so he simply went back to his
house, at 531 South Clinton Street.
Jessica A. Moore, 19, a sophomore honors student from Virginia who had tried to
help another victim, was shot and died later that day. The two other female
victims, both undergraduates at Seton Hall, were shot in the neck and face. The
two male victims were not connected to the university. All were taken to
University Hospital in Newark.
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.’ ”
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a
crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape,
but one overwhelming factor put him away: he confessed.
At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could
have known, including the fact that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the
head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence
would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication
would come only years after Mr. Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled
in 1991.
“I beat myself up a lot” about having confessed, Mr. Lowery said in a recent
interview. “I thought I was the only dummy who did that.”
But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence
later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a
professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known
that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill,
the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There
are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance
by persistent interrogators.
New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could
provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim
that only the defendant could have committed the crime.
An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions
and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those
confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether
intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody
confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence
Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going
forward.”
The notion that such detailed confessions might be deemed voluntary because the
defendants were not beaten or coerced suggests that courts should not simply
look at whether confessions are voluntary, Mr. Neufeld said. “They should look
at whether they are reliable.”
Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he
studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false
confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.
Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,”
rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I
had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,”
he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the
interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been
contaminated.”
Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were
“mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to
lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen
of them were taken to the crime scene.
Mr. Lowery’s case shows how contamination occurs. He had come under suspicion,
he now believes, because he had been partying and ran his car into a parked car
the night of the rape, generating a police report. Officers grilled him for more
than seven hours, insisting from the start that he had committed the crime.
Mr. Lowery took a lie detector test to prove he was innocent, but the officers
told him that he had failed it.
“I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to
hear,” he recalled. “And then get a lawyer to prove my innocence.”
Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants
in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before
trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.
In one such case involving Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a
murder in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors argued that the victim may have been
sexually active and so the DNA evidence may have come from another liaison she
had. The prosecutors asked the jury to focus on Mr. Deskovic’s highly detailed
confession and convict him.
While Professor Garrett suggests that leaking facts during interrogations is
sometimes unintentional, Mr. Lowery said that the contamination of his
questioning was clearly intentional.
After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime
with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the
facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’ ” But the
rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back.
“They fed me the answers,” he recalled.
Some defendants’ confessions even include mistakes fed by the police. Earl
Washington Jr., a mentally impaired man who spent 18 years in prison and came
within hours of being executed for a murder he did not commit, stated in his
confession that the victim had worn a halter top. In fact, she had worn a
sundress, but an initial police report had stated that she wore a halter top.
Steven A. Drizin, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the
Northwestern University School of Law, said the significance of contamination
could not be understated. While errors might lead to wrongful arrest, “it’s
contamination that is the primary factor in wrongful convictions,” he said.
“Juries demand details from the suspect that make the confession appear to be
reliable — that’s where these cases go south.”
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training
officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to
contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.
“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’
that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false
confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to
reoffend.”
Mr. Trainum has become an advocate of videotaping entire interrogations.
Requirements for recording confessions vary widely across the country. Ten
states require videotaping of at least some interrogations, like those in crimes
that carry the death penalty, and seven state supreme courts have required or
strongly encouraged recording.
These days Mr. Lowery, 51, lives in suburban Kansas City, in a house he is
renovating with some of the $7.5 million in settlement money he received, along
with apologies from officials in Riley County, Kan., where he was arrested and
interrogated.
He has trouble putting the past behind him. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “You
run in to so many people who say, ‘I would never confess to a crime.’ ”
He does not argue with them, because he knows they did not experience what he
went through. “You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naďve
about your rights,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that
situation.”
