History > 2011 > USA > Violence (I)

19 Car Fires Are Set Around Hollywood

December 30, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — The first car fire began on Friday shortly after midnight, in the underground parking garage of a West Hollywood apartment building. Three minutes later, the Fire Department received reports of a similar fire just blocks away. Then another, and another.

By 1 a.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department was battling five car fires in and around Hollywood. At 3 a.m., there were half a dozen more, and sirens blared through the area. By dawn, there were 19 fires in the neighborhood, residential blocks lighted by white smoke coming from the burning cars.

It was the work of a fast and furious arsonist, the police said, although they had few clues about the suspect and whether the fires were set by one person or several.

On Thursday, the police arrested Samuel Arrington, 22, who was accused of setting three fires within five blocks along Sunset Boulevard early that morning and remained in custody. It was not clear whether the fires early Friday morning were set by a copycat or by an accomplice in the earlier fires, officials said. They were scouring surveillance videos from the neighborhood and asking residents to come forward with any information.

“We’re hoping that somebody saw something,” said Cmdr. Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, which sent several detectives to the scenes. “Chances are whoever did this wanted to watch and would have gone someplace with singed eyebrows. We’re looking at every home security video and anything else we can get.”

All through the neighborhood early Friday, people emerged from their homes in their bedclothes, woken by the relentless helicopters buzzing overhead, if not the smell of the blazes.

Although several buildings were damaged in the fires, including the former home of Jim Morrison, lead singer of the Doors, there were no injuries. But the police feared that the arsonist would try to light more fires over the holiday weekend, and have deployed more officers to the neighborhood.

    19 Car Fires Are Set Around Hollywood, NYT, 30.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/31/us/19-car-fires-are-set-around-hollywood.html

Only Questions Follow the Arrest

of a Decorated Soldier in the Murder of a Stranger

December 23, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WILMINGTON, Del. — In a completely random act of violence, the police say, Staff Sgt. Dwight L. Smith drove into a stranger as she was walking her dog in a stately Wilmington neighborhood on Monday morning, put the woman into his vehicle and then killed her with blows to the head, according to the criminal charges.

So beloved was the victim, Marsha Lee, 65, that hundreds in the community joined her grieving family at a temple on Thursday afternoon. Van Olmstead, a member of the temple’s board of trustees who knew her, said there was an overflow crowd, “like in the High Holidays.”

The family of the suspect — who is 24 and had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received a Purple Heart — was haunted by questions of its own. Could Sergeant Smith have committed such a horrific act? Could he have snapped so completely?

The killing — described in a police affidavit filed with the Court of Common Pleas in Wilmington — could not have been more chilling.

At 9:20 a.m. Monday, a witness in the upscale Brandywine Hills neighborhood reported hearing what sounded like a collision, according to the affidavit, and then seeing a man get out of a red Hummer, and push something into the back seat. Another witness reported hearing a woman screaming, “You’re hurting me,” or “You’re killing me.”

Later that morning, Ms. Lee, a member of Congregation Beth Emeth, was reported missing by her husband. He identified her shoes, knit cap, gloves and sunglasses found lying in the road where the collision happened. By evening, the police had detained Sergeant Smith, who was driving a red Hummer splattered inside and out with a substance that turned out to be blood, the affidavit said.

Sergeant Smith first told the police that he did not know how blood got into his vehicle, but then later in questioning said that Ms. Lee had been in his car. He told the police that he had “clicked on,” and wanted to kill someone, according to the affidavit. He said that he originally promised to take her to the hospital, but changed his mind, stating that he “bashed in her head,” the affidavit said. Her body was found in a wooded area nearby, naked except for her socks.

The police said that there was no evidence of sexual assault, and that, when asked why the victim was unclothed, Sergeant Smith told them that “he wanted it to look like something else,” the affidavit said. Sergeant Smith has been charged with two counts of murder and with kidnapping and is being held without bail at the Howard Young Correctional Facility in Wilmington.

Had Sergeant Smith’s experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan changed him in ways his family could never understand?

His father, Dwight Smith Sr., who lives in a tidy two-story brick house trimmed with an American flag in a middle-class neighborhood of Wilmington, said in television interviews this week that his son had been wounded in an attack in Afghanistan, and twice nearly died.

After the attack, which Mr. Smith said took place in April, his son suffered head trauma and traumatic stress, and had not been the same person since returning home.

“He made it back, but for me, I don’t think he made it all the way back,” Mr. Smith said, according to the CBS News affiliate in Philadelphia. “The kid that I sent over there with them was not the man they sent back. My thoughts and prayers go out to the other family because this is a tragedy for two families.”

Mr. Smith said that he had spoken with his son after Ms. Lee’s death and that his son had no memory of committing any violent act.

Sergeant Smith is an active-duty soldier based at Fort Drum, N.Y., on a scheduled break, said Julie Cupernall, a spokeswoman for Fort Drum. His service began in 2006, she said, adding that he was deployed to Iraq from September 2007 to November 2008, and to Afghanistan from May 2010 to April 2011.

According to Sergeant Smith’s Facebook page, he studied military history at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University and is married to Jasmin Smith. It features photographs of him in a military uniform with a blond woman, possibly Ms. Smith, of a red Hummer and of soldiers mugging for the camera at what appeared to be a military base. One soldier is mock bound and gagged as if he was a prisoner.

A link to a Facebook page for a woman identified as Jasmin Smith says she is married to Dwight Smith, and lists a hometown of Höchstadt, Germany, and a current location of Fort Drum.

Sergeant Smith’s older brother, Marcus Rogers, told The News Journal, a daily in Wilmington, that his brother suffered from memory loss.

“Sometimes he would be talking and then just black out for a little bit,” Mr. Rogers said. “He would be out of it and then just start talking again.”

Chief Michael Szczerba of the Wilmington police, in an interview, called the case was “very unusual.” Most homicides, he said, involved drugs and perpetrators with long criminal histories. Sergeant Smith is scheduled to have a preliminary hearing in court on Tuesday morning.

The soldier’s father blamed the lack of support for returning soldiers. “These kids have to get more help from our government when they are coming back from battle — not just my kid, all of the kids, especially with the wars drawing down,” he said in an interview with Fox 29 of Philadelphia on Tuesday. “This isn’t going to be the first; this isn’t going to be the last.”

 

Jack Styczynski and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

    Only Questions Follow the Arrest of a Decorated Soldier in the Murder of a Stranger, NYT, 23.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/24/us/soldier-admitted-killing-wilmington-woman-police-say.html

Before a Brutal Death,

a Reputation for Generosity and Eccentricity

December 21, 2011
The New York Times
By TIM STELLOH

She has come to be known for the brutal way in which she was killed: set ablaze inside an elevator, burned alive just feet from her apartment door.

But in the modest six-floor building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, where she died, Deloris Gillespie was often celebrated for how she lived, her considerable generosity and slight eccentricity on frequent display.

She was the grandmotherly matron who, at Christmastime, delivered cards to other tenants. If your heat was out, she would call the super. If you were homeless, she might feed you a can of soup or potato chips out front, or perhaps even let you stay in her three-bedroom apartment.

She placed floral displays in the common hallway and hung a Home Sweet Home sign off her doorknob. She also tied a shopping cart to the doorknob, and once used duct tape to seal her front door to the frame — not so much to keep anyone out, a relative said, but rather to see if someone had entered without her permission.

She was described as a hoarder, someone who might need the services of Jerome Isaac, who lived a block and a half away. Mr. Isaac, 47, was known to most as a reserved man who collected bottles and cans and delivered them to the same Key Food on Flatbush Avenue where Ms. Gillespie did her grocery shopping, a neighbor and relative said.

Ms. Gillespie hired Mr. Isaac to clean out her apartment; she believed he was stealing from her, however, and fired him, said her nephew, Rickey Causey, 52, who had lived with her since June. On Saturday, the police believe, Mr. Isaac murdered the 73-year-old woman, dousing her with accelerant and then setting her on fire.

On Wednesday, as relatives dug through Ms. Gillespie’s belongings and neighbors struggled to make sense of her murder, a memorial sat on the steps of her building. More than a dozen candles burned through the afternoon, and bouquets of white roses and other flowers leaned near the building’s front door.

“Right now, it’s just crazy,” Mr. Causey said. “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.”

Ms. Gillespie was one of more than a dozen children raised by a family that came from sharecroppers and teachers in Louisiana, Mr. Causey said. She attended Grambling State University, where she studied education, he said, adding that his aunt always went home in the summers to pick cotton and earn a little extra money.

After graduating, she moved to New York City in the early 1960s.

“She said she didn’t want to marry nobody from the South,” Mr. Causey said, adding, “She didn’t want to marry no dirt farmer.”

For the last 30 years, relatives said, Ms. Gillespie had worked the night shift for the Postal Service. Though neighbors recalled always seeing her in uniform, they seemed to know little of her life outside 203 Underhill Avenue.

In the 1980s, neighbors said, she led a tenant association that fought to keep rental units in the building from being converted for individual sale.

“They wanted us out of there,” said Maria Daley, who wept as she sat in a parked city bus on Saturday night while the police scoured the building for evidence. Ms. Gillespie fought for the tenants, Ms. Daley said.

Ramon Vargas, who has lived in the building for more than 30 years, said Ms. Gillespie’s efforts were successful: the apartments did not become co-ops.

In the years since, Ms. Gillespie had taken on other roles on behalf of tenants.

Smith Lambert, 25, who grew up in the building, described her as an unrivaled advocate.

“If we didn’t have no heat, she always called out the superintendent to get the heat going,” Mr. Lambert said. “If there was garbage in the hallway, she was always the one to pick up the garbage.”

For Christmas, he said, she would knock on doors and offer holiday wishes. She would clip coupons and save them for neighbors and give food and shelter to the homeless, neighbors said. When Mr. Lambert’s aunt had a stroke, Ms. Gillespie was the first to knock on their door. She gave the family a gift of $20, or perhaps $50, he said.

Neighbors and relatives recalled how Ms. Gillespie often gave things away: VCRs, dressers, garbage cans, radios, DVDs, tables, beds — anything that was old and she wanted to get rid of, or that she had bought because it was on sale.

The items, Mr. Causey said, seemed to represent “whatever she thinks somebody might need.”

Ms. Gillespie would place the items on a table on the first floor of the building; sometimes she would be there with them, sometimes she would not, Mr. Lambert said.

For Mr. Causey, who left Louisiana in June after the loss of his home in a fire and the death of his mother, Cora Causey, who was Ms. Gillespie’s sister, the events of the last week have been too devastating. For $227, he bought a Greyhound ticket for a bus that was to depart New York City at 10:45 on Wednesday night.

By Thursday night, he expected to be back in Louisiana.

    Before a Brutal Death, a Reputation for Generosity and Eccentricity, NYT, 21.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/nyregion/woman-set-ablaze-in-elevator-is-fondly-remembered.html

Cornered by Attacker in Elevator,

Fire Victim, 73, Had No Way Out

December 18, 2011
The New York Times
By PATRICK McGEEHAN and TIM STELLOH

By the time Deloris Gillespie saw him, waiting on the other side of an elevator door, it was too late to escape.

With her shopping bags in hand, she pushed open the door. There stood a man she knew, Jerome Isaac. He set upon her immediately, the authorities said, armed with a tank of fuel and a barbecue lighter, wearing white gloves and a surgical mask. He was angry, he would tell the police on Sunday, because he believed she owed him about $2,000 for odd jobs.

But there was no way Ms. Gillespie, 73, could have been prepared for what happened.

Mr. Isaac, 47, methodically set the woman aflame, burning her alive in the elevator of her building in Brooklyn on Saturday, only a few feet from her apartment door, the police said. He sprayed the flammable liquid in the woman’s face and over her cowering body, and then lighted a Molotov cocktail to ignite the fire.

Within minutes, Ms. Gillespie was burning to death in the narrow cab, and her assailant had fled down the stairs. The attack lasted only a few minutes, all of it captured by surveillance cameras; the sheer, calculated brutality stunned even the most hardened of homicide detectives.

Several hours later, Mr. Isaac, “reeking of gasoline,” turned himself in Sunday morning at a transit police station, and by the afternoon, the police said, he had confessed to the attack. He faces charges of first-degree and second-degree murder and arson.

Ms. Gillespie and Mr. Isaac lived less than two blocks apart in the Prospect Heights neighborhood. She had a reputation for trying to help people who were down on their luck. She gave food and shelter to the homeless and welcomed strangers into her apartment, sometimes hiring them for small tasks and chores, according to friends and relatives. That was how she came to know Mr. Isaac, they said.

Mr. Isaac was less known to neighbors. Some described him as being intelligent, well dressed and well spoken. But Mr. Isaac was mostly known for his penchant for collecting cans and bottles in the neighborhood; he was called “the recyclist.”

He hails from a large family from Trinidad, with seven siblings, according to his sister Janet Isaac, who lives in Maryland.

Ms. Isaac had not heard about her brother’s arrest when contacted by a reporter on Sunday evening. “My Lord,” she exclaimed. She said that she had not been in touch with him lately and did not know how he supported himself.

To those who knew him, Mr. Isaac did not seem like a troublemaker; the police said he had no criminal record in New York.

Rickey Causey, a nephew of Ms. Gillespie’s who had been living with her since he arrived in June from Louisiana, where he said his home burned down, said that Mr. Isaac had posted a typewritten bill on her door for his work clearing clutter from her apartment months before. Total due: more than $300.

Despite Mr. Isaac’s insistence on the money, Mr. Causey said that his aunt had not feared Mr. Isaac. “She wasn’t scared of no one,” Mr. Causey said.

He said Ms. Gillespie, whose apartment was filled with items she had collected over the years, had caught Mr. Isaac stealing things, including a VCR and a cake pan. “He was taking the good stuff,” Mr. Causey said. So, he said, she dismissed him.

Whatever transpired between Ms. Gillespie and Mr. Isaac, the detached way in which he carried out the attack was extraordinary, according to police officials who watched the surveillance footage.

While Ms. Gillespie was out buying groceries, he rode the elevator to her floor and, outfitted like an amateur exterminator, waited for her to return, the police said. As soon as the elevator delivered her, Mr. Isaac was blocking her exit.

He sprayed her face with liquid from the hose that snaked around his torso. As she turned and shrank back into a corner of the narrow cab, he doused her with it. Then he went through with his plan: He lighted the fuse on the bottle bomb in his other hand and set Ms. Gillespie aflame. She dropped to the floor, engulfed and screaming.

But Mr. Isaac was not finished yet, the police said. To ensure that Ms. Gillespie did not survive, he tossed the long-necked bottle into the elevator with her. He sprayed more of the fuel on her. Only then did he run away.

Mr. Isaac told the police that he hid out on a rooftop near his apartment and fell asleep. After he woke and wandered the streets, he learned that he was wanted, so he went to a transit police station about two and a half miles from Ms. Gillespie’s apartment building.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department, said that Mr. Isaac initially admitted to having set a fire, but later confessed to the immolation of Ms. Gillespie. They found some of the equipment he had used on the roof of 571 Lincoln Place, where he said he had hidden, Mr. Browne said.

He said that Mr. Isaac had also set a fire at his own apartment a few blocks away, at 315 Lincoln Place, on Saturday afternoon. Mr. Isaac suggested to the police that he may have suffered burn wounds to his face, hands and neck in that fire, which left the top and bottom of the door to Mr. Isaac’s second-floor apartment scorched and the hall smelling of gasoline.

A next-door neighbor, Eric Charles, 42, said Mr. Isaac had lived in the building for several years and often rode a bicycle around the neighborhood collecting cans and bottles. Mr. Charles said he was shocked when he learned his neighbor had been charged with murdering Ms. Gillespie.

“I would never think he was capable of that,” Mr. Charles said.

Vernon J. Geberth, a retired commander of the Bronx Homicide Task Force, said that the way Ms. Gillespie was killed was “extremely rare” and especially torturous.

“The worst way of dying is by fire, because every nerve ending is assaulted simultaneously in the most horrific way,” Mr. Geberth said. “You have someone with pent-up anger and rage that’s so intense they don’t only want to kill, they want to see the victim suffer.”

 

Al Baker and Sarah Maslin Nir contributed reporting.

    Cornered by Attacker in Elevator, Fire Victim, 73, Had No Way Out, NYT, 18.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/nyregion/woman-burned-alive-in-brooklyn-elevator-police-question-man.html

Woman Is Burned Alive in an Elevator in Brooklyn

December 17, 2011
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR and AL BAKER

The surveillance video, its images disturbingly clear, ends with a woman being burned alive in the elevator of a Brooklyn apartment building on Saturday.

But in the beginning, it seemed routine: a man dressed as an exterminator, wearing gloves, with a protective mask perched atop his head and carrying a container on his back, takes the elevator to the fifth floor.

Sometime later, an older woman carrying groceries took the same ride to the fifth floor.

Two cameras recording from different positions, one inside the small tiled elevator and another in a hallway, show the doors open and the man with the container approach. The man, who appeared to be in his 40s, first sprays the woman in the face, then douses her methodically from head to toe with what a city official said was an accelerant as she turned and cowered, raising her hands, the grocery bags hanging from her wrists.

Having cornered the woman in the elevator, the man struggles to light a barbecue lighter. He then ignites a Molotov cocktail — a wine or Champagne bottle filled with accelerant with a rag stuffed in its neck. He retreats and comes back again, spraying more liquid on his victim. And suddenly the silent video goes white with a conflagration in the small space: the woman, on fire.

Investigators are poring over the footage, a disturbing silent film capturing what is perhaps a singular act of violence: a woman being burned alive.

The crime took place Saturday afternoon at 203 Underhill Avenue in Prospect Heights. Detectives and fire marshals were reviewing the footage and interviewing neighbors.

The police identified the victim as Doris Gillespie, 64. One neighbor said that Ms. Gillespie was a postal worker.

As of early Sunday morning, there had been no arrests, but investigators were already following a major lead: the man appeared to have been burned on his face and hands. Investigators immediately began looking for him at local hospitals.

The Police Department released photographs of the suspect, taken from the video, late Saturday night.

Firefighters and the police arrived about 4 p.m. after callers to 911 reported fire and smoke in the building, unaware of what had happened in the elevator.

A resident of the fifth floor, John, 29, who would not give his last name, said he had heard screaming and saw smoke coming from the elevator. “I thought it was kids because the screaming was high-pitched,” he said. “I looked out the door and saw smoke coming out of the elevator.”

Residents were evacuated from the building after the fire. Hours later, some, like Maria Daley, wept while sitting on a city bus that had been provided for the displaced tenants. “She was my friend,” Ms. Daley said. “I just spoke to her yesterday.”

Another neighbor, Heidi Matthews, 46, said Ms. Gillespie had given her a plant on Mother’s Day. “It’s hard to believe somebody would do that to her,” she said.

“We all loved her,” Ms. Matthews said. “She was a part of this neighborhood for years.”

 

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    Woman Is Burned Alive in an Elevator in Brooklyn, NYT, 17.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/nyregion/woman-burned-alive-in-brooklyn-elevator.html

Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey

Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted

December 14, 2011
The New York Times
By RONI CARYN RABIN

An exhaustive government survey of rape and domestic violence released on Wednesday affirmed that sexual violence against women remains endemic in the United States and in some instances may be far more common than previously thought.

Nearly one in five women surveyed said they had been raped or had experienced an attempted rape at some point, and one in four reported having been beaten by an intimate partner. One in six women have been stalked, according to the report.

“That almost one in five women have been raped in their lifetime is very striking and, I think, will be surprising to a lot of people,” said Linda C. Degutis, director of the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which conducted the survey.

“I don’t think we’ve really known that it was this prevalent in the population,” she said.

The study, called the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, was begun in 2010 with the support of the National Institute of Justice and the Department of Defense. The study, a continuing telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 16,507 adults, defines intimate partner and sexual violence broadly.

The surveyors elicited information on types of aggression not previously studied in national surveys, including sexual violence other than rape, psychological aggression, coercion and control of reproductive and sexual health.

They also gathered information about the physical and mental health of violence survivors.

Sexual violence affects women disproportionately, the researchers found. One-third of women said they had been victims of a rape, beating or stalking, or a combination of assaults.

The researchers defined rape as completed forced penetration, forced penetration facilitated by drugs or alcohol, or attempted forced penetration.

By that definition, 1 percent of women surveyed reported being raped in the previous year, a figure that suggests that 1.3 million American women annually may be victims of rape or attempted rape.

That figure is significantly higher than previous estimates. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network estimated that 272,350 Americans were victims of sexual violence last year. Only 84,767 assaults defined as forcible rapes were reported in 2010, according to national statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But men also reported being victimized in surprising numbers.

One in seven men have experienced severe violence at the hands of an intimate partner, the survey found, and one in 71 men — between 1 percent and 2 percent — have been raped, many when they were younger than 11.

A vast majority of women who said they had been victims of sexual violence, rape or stalking reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, as did about one-third of the men.

Women who had experienced such violence were also more likely to report having asthma, diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome than women who had not. Both men and women who had been assaulted were more likely to report frequent headaches, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, limitations on activity, and poor physical and mental health.

“We’ve seen this association with chronic health conditions in smaller studies before,” said Lisa James, director of health for Futures Without Violence, a national nonprofit group based in San Francisco that advocates for programs to end violence against women and girls.

“People who grow up with violence adopt coping strategies that can lead to poor health outcomes,” she said. “We know that women in abusive relationships are at increased risk for smoking, for example.”

The survey found that youth itself was an important risk factor for sexual violence and assault. Some 28 percent of male victims of rape reported that they were first assaulted when they were no older than 10.

Only 12 percent of female rape victims were assaulted when they were 10 or younger, but almost half of female victims said they had been raped before they turned 18. About 80 percent of rape victims reported that they had been raped before age 25.

Rape at a young age was associated with another, later rape; about 35 percent of women who had been raped as minors were also raped as adults, the survey found.

More than half of female rape victims had been raped by an intimate partner, according to the study, and 40 percent had been raped by an acquaintance; more than half of men who had been raped said the assailant was an acquaintance.

The public release of the report was postponed twice, most recently on Nov. 28. The findings are based on completed interviews lasting about 25 minutes each; they were conducted in 2010 with 9,086 women and 7,421 men.

    Nearly 1 in 5 Women in U.S. Survey Say They Have Been Sexually Assaulted, NYT, 14.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/health/nearly-1-in-5-women-in-us-survey-report-sexual-assault.html

11th Body, Believed to Be of Missing Woman, Is Found

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER and NOAH ROSENBERG

They had planned to gather on Tuesday, on the barren shore along Ocean Parkway on Long Island, to remember the victims of a suspected serial killer, the remains found scattered among the area’s shrouded thickets over the past year.

Instead, they paid special respects to the woman whose disappearance unfurled this grim string of mysteries in the first place.

Hours before relatives of some of the victims were to hold their vigil, law enforcement officials said they had discovered what they believed to be the “skeletal remains” of Shannan Gilbert, a New Jersey prostitute last seen in May 2010.

In their search for Ms. Gilbert, who was 24 then, investigators found the remains of 10 other victims, including 8 women, a toddler and a man wearing women’s clothing, raising the specter of a serial killer of prostitutes. Each victim had a possible connection to the sex trade, said Richard Dormer, the Suffolk County police commissioner. (The toddler, whose body was discovered on April 4, is believed to be the child of a prostitute whose remains were found miles down Ocean Parkway on April 11.)

The relatives arranged the anniversary vigil before the prospect of Ms. Gilbert’s discovery was even raised: On Dec. 13 of last year, officials reported the discovery of four bodies in the brush on Jones Beach Island.

The authorities have maintained, though, that Ms. Gilbert’s case is not necessarily related to the others. The location of the body believed to be hers, Mr. Dormer said Tuesday, has helped validate his belief that Ms. Gilbert drowned while trying to reach the parkway through the swampland nearby after knocking on a door in Oak Beach. The body was found, Mr. Dormer said, about a quarter mile northeast of where investigators last week retrieved what they believed were Ms. Gilbert’s purse, jeans, shoes and cellphone.

“She traveled at least half a mile, three quarters of a mile, on foot through that muck,” Mr. Dormer said at a news conference on Tuesday. “It would be very easy to get exhausted and fall down and not be able to move any further.”

Later, Mari Gilbert, Shannan’s mother, appeared at the vigil with a small group of friends and relatives of the other victims. Those gathered released balloons into the air, recited the Lord’s Prayer and, in some cases, hammered crosses into the earth beside the parkway.

But Mari Gilbert, who said the authorities contacted her on Tuesday morning with news of the discovery, was unconvinced that the remains were her daughter’s, noting that an autopsy had not been completed. “Until I hear positive confirmation that it’s my daughter, I’m going to believe it’s not,” she said.

Ms. Gilbert has also expressed doubts that her daughter’s death was accidental. She spoke on Tuesday of hoping to meet a killer who the authorities are not sure exists. “I want to meet him face to face one day,” she said. “And I just want to ask him: ‘Who hurt you? Who hurt you this badly that you have to hurt others?’ ”

Mr. Dormer said areas adjacent to where the remains had been found were drained over the last week to aid in the search. Detectives were traveling through thick brush on an amphibious vehicle, Mr. Dormer added, before noticing “the skeletal remains lying on the surface of the ground.”

It is still unclear why Ms. Gilbert might have charted such a dangerous course through the swamp. After leaving a seaside home in the Oak Beach area early on May 1, 2010, Ms. Gilbert banged on the door of a resident, Gus Coletti, shortly before 5 a.m. “She kept saying, ‘Help me,’ ” Mr. Coletti said in an interview last spring. When he dialed 911, she ran. He did not see her again.

Since the discovery of the first bodies along Ocean Parkway, on Dec. 11 and Dec. 13 last year, victims’ relatives have forged a unique, if heart-rending, connection, they say. “We’re a family,” said Lorraine Ela, the mother of Megan Waterman, whose body was found last December, “but not by blood.”

At one point, Mari Gilbert expressed her grief that, if the remains were not her daughter’s, another victim had been added to the tally. “Nobody truly knows how,” she began, before Ms. Ela completed her thought. “How it feels to have a missing child come up deceased,” Ms. Ela said.

Over the past year, Ms. Gilbert seemed to find solace in the notion that her daughter’s disappearance had shined a light on other victims.

“Everyone has their destiny,” she said last spring. “Maybe this was hers.”

    11th Body, Believed to Be of Missing Woman, Is Found, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/nyregion/body-possibly-shannan-gilberts-is-found-on-long-island.html

Craigslist Used in Deadly Ploy to Lure Victims in Ohio

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

AKRON, Ohio — They were men thrown hard against the rocks of bad fortune — out of work, their marriages broken, their youth, with its possibilities, behind them.

To their eyes, the advertisement on Craigslist, offering $300 a week, a free trailer and unlimited fishing to “watch over a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows,” may have seemed like a sign that their luck was finally turning.

Instead, in a scheme so macabre that residents here are already speculating on when it will be turned into a movie script, three of the four men, one from Virginia, one from the Akron area and one still unidentified, were lured to their deaths, their bodies buried in shallow graves. The fourth man, from South Carolina, who was hired and driven to the property in rural southern Ohio, was shot in the arm but escaped and alerted the authorities. The “farm” was in fact land owned by a coal company.

More bodies may still be found, as the bogus advertisement, which was picked up by online job aggregators, drew more than 100 responses from Ohio and other states.

In Ohio, hit hard by the recession, the abundance of eager applicants pulled in by the advertisement has surprised no one, stirring talk about the lengths that people will go these days to find employment. “People here are desperate for work,” said a clerk at a motel in Akron, whose employer did not want him to give his name.

The police have suggested robbery as a motive, but other theories have also circulated, including identity theft and, perhaps more chilling, simply a desire to kill. The perpetrators appeared to be looking for loners who would not be missed.

Law enforcement officials have arrested two suspects, Richard J. Beasley, 52, of Akron and Brogan Rafferty, 16, a high school student from nearby Stow. Mr. Beasley, who has a long criminal record, has not been charged in connection with the killings yet but is being held on other charges, including 15 counts of promoting prostitution and also selling the painkiller OxyContin. On Thursday, sources said that the federal government had filed kidnapping and wire fraud charges in connection with the Craigslist case. (The F.B.I. would confirm only that it had issued a hold to keep Mr. Beasley incarcerated.)

Mr. Beasley appeared in court on the drug charge on Thursday, and on Friday he is to be arraigned on the prostitution charges.

Mr. Rafferty has been charged with the attempted murder of Scott Davis, 48, of South Carolina, the aggravated murder of David Pauley, 51, of Norfolk, Va., and two counts of complicity in those crimes. Prosecutors want the teenager, a tall youth who towered over the police officers escorting him from the courthouse in Caldwell this week, to be tried as an adult, something that is virtually routine in Ohio for crimes this serious. Judge John W. Nau of Noble County Common Pleas Court has issued a gag order in the case; he will take up the issue on Dec. 15.

Neither suspect has been charged in the murders of the other victims, Timothy Kern, 47, of Massillon, Ohio, whose body was found last week buried near a mall in Akron, and the unidentified man, whose body was found on the rural property in Noble County, where officials also found Mr. Pauley’s body on Nov. 14.

In a phone interview, Carol Beasley, Mr. Beasley’s mother, insisted that her son was innocent, and said that he had spent hundreds of hours in charitable work, like taking food to the poor, and had taken Mr. Rafferty — “a nice young man” — under his wing. “We never saw anything in Richard that was violent,” said Ms. Beasley, a retired secretary at Buchtel High School in Akron. “I hope the courts will see the truth.”

Yvette Rafferty, Mr. Rafferty’s mother, has said that if he was involved, he must have been in thrall to Mr. Beasley, a family friend. Ms. Rafferty, a striking woman, tall and rail thin, paced in front of the courthouse in Caldwell on Tuesday, waiting for a chance to talk to her son.

“All I know is he would not hurt anyone in the world unless he was threatened,” she said.

One applicant who was rejected, Ron Sanson, 58, a former construction worker, said he was interviewed by Mr. Beasley, who was dining on Chinese food, in the food court of a mall.

Mr. Sanson, who is divorced, said he had been in and out of work since fracturing his leg in 2006. He said potential employers balked at his age, even for jobs shoveling snow. “You’re not going to be out there shoveling snow in the middle of the night,” he was told.

He said he had good antennae for trouble, but picked up nothing strange about Mr. Beasley, who, he said, looked like a farmer, with “a scraggly beard” and a red, white and blue baseball cap.

“He seemed all right with me,” Mr. Sanson said.

He did not get the job; the fact that he had gone to college and been in the Navy may have put Mr. Beasley off, he speculated.

Less fortunate were Mr. Pauley, who had driven from Virginia with all his belongings, and Mr. Kern, who was struggling to support his three children.

Erin Sendejas, who worked with Mr. Kern for five years at a Domino’s Pizza, said that he quit his job as a delivery man several months ago because his car was breaking down and he could not make enough money after paying for repairs.

“He was just trying to find any job,” she said. “When he was here, all he talked about was his kids. He just felt that they were priorities in his life.”

Mr. Kern had been missing since Nov. 13, and his body might never have been found were it not for Mr. Davis, the man from South Carolina who escaped.

Before the gag order was issued, Sheriff Stephen S. Hannum of Noble County had said that his office had responded to a call on Nov. 6 and found “a white middle-aged man” with a gunshot wound to the arm and a story about answering an advertisement on Craigslist.

Mr. Davis told the sheriff that he had met two people for breakfast in Marietta, Ohio, and after leaving his car in Caldwell, was driven to the nearby “farm.”

While walking through the wooded area, Mr. Davis reported, he “heard what he thought was a gun being cocked. He turned to see a gun pointed at his head. He deflected the gun and ran,” hiding in the woods and finally seeking help at a house two miles away.

A search of the property revealed a hand-dug grave, the sheriff said. On Nov. 11, a woman in Boston called the sheriff’s office to say that her twin brother, David Pauley, was missing and that he had answered the same advertisement on Craigslist.

Ms. Beasley said she had met with her son at the Summit County Jail, where he is being held on the prostitution and drug charges. “We prayed for Brogan and this whole situation,” she said.

Jon Platek, the Akron campus pastor at The Chapel, where the Beasleys attended church and often brought Brogan Rafferty, said that Mr. Beasley had attended only very sporadically in recent years. He said that Mr. Beasley used to come with his family, even as a child, and church members remembered him wearing cowboy boots and a big belt buckle, unusual attire in Akron in the 1960s and 1970s.

The crimes have deeply affected the congregation, Pastor Platek said. “It’s one thing to do something out of passion, but it’s another to do something at this level,” he said. “I sit with a lot of deeply troubled people that don’t do this.”

    Craigslist Used in Deadly Ploy to Lure Victims in Ohio, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/three-lured-to-death-in-ohio-by-craigslist-job-ad.html

The Molester Next Door

November 7, 2011
The New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI

The longest, most exhaustively researched article I ever wrote for a newspaper or magazine was about a child molester who had sexually abused a little boy living down the street. The abuse went on for more than two years, beginning when the boy was 10.

This molester had a job. A house. A wife. Two kids of his own. And he gained access to his victim not through brute force but through patience, play and gifts: help with his homework, computer games, a new bike. To neighborhood observers, including the victim’s parents, the molester’s attentiveness passed for kindness, at least for a while. A molester’s behavior very often does.

The arrest on Saturday of a former Penn State University assistant football coach — who is accused of sexually abusing eight pre-adolescent, adolescent and teenage boys — brought this all back to me. I wonder if people who know the coach and saw him working with kids will comment on how genuinely nurturing he seemed and how this surely prevented or discouraged suspicions about him.

This is something that has come up repeatedly over decades — I wrote that article back in 1991, for The Detroit Free Press — but that remains tough to accept: the predator to watch out for is less likely to don a trench coat and lurk behind a bush than to wear a clerical collar and stand near the altar or to hold a stopwatch and walk the sidelines. And he (or, for that matter, she) works with children as a function of being drawn to them for reasons beyond their welfare.

The former Penn State assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, 67, founded and ran a charity program for disadvantaged boys. That’s one of the ways he got to know and interact so extensively with kids, some of whom received special favors related to his college-football connections. His alleged abuse of them is said to have occurred over a 15-year period ending in 2009.

He maintains his innocence of the charges against him. That’s important to note, because sexual abuse of children is a crime so rightly enraging that the specter of it has prompted unfair rushes to judgment in the past.

But true or not, the accusations against Sandusky, spelled out in great detail in a 23-page grand jury report, bring to mind many proven cases in which a molester occupied a position of trust, identified and gravitated to children who were especially vulnerable, made them feel special and was by all outward appearances their champion, which many molesters indeed believe themselves to be.

In their own minds these molesters aren’t predators. They’re people whose affinity for children just happens to have a sexual element, the satisfaction of which they’ve convinced themselves isn’t such a big, harmful deal.

Parents face a tricky challenge. They need to be watchful but not paranoid, because most clergy members, scout leaders, camp counselors and coaches aren’t abusers in waiting and are improving children’s lives. They deserve the opportunity to.

But parents should also remain conscious of an additional lesson suggested by the Penn State story. Institutions do an awful job of policing themselves.

That has been true of the Boy Scouts, which has paid out tens of million of dollars in response to lawsuits by former scouts molested by adults who continued to work in the organization despite complaints or questions about their behavior.

That has been true of the Roman Catholic Church, whose diocesan heads and bishops repeatedly transferred abusive priests from one parish to another rather than report them to law enforcement authorities. This cover-up spanned decades and went all the way up the hierarchy of the church.

Many factors explain it, including a fear of scandal and desire to protect the church’s image. The Boy Scouts, too, didn’t want messiness exposed.

Was that a dynamic at Penn State as well? Two university officials have been indicted for not contacting the police after being alerted many years ago to the possibility that Sandusky was abusing boys from his charity on university premises.

And there are lingering questions about whether the university’s renowned head football coach, Joe Paterno, was irresponsible.

According to an account in the indictment that he hasn’t disputed, a graduate assistant in 2002 told him of inappropriate activity in a university shower between a boy and Sandusky, who had already retired from his longtime job as the coordinator of the football team’s defense. Coach Paterno relayed that to a university official, then apparently moved on. And Sandusky continued to interact with troubled boys.

Paterno absolutely should have followed up. Maybe he just couldn’t envision someone like Sandusky — a distinguished professional, a seeming do-gooder — as a molester. But it’s important that we all do.

    The Molester Next Door, NYT, 7.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/08/opinion/the-molester-next-door.html

Federal Rape Definition Too Narrow, Critics Say

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By ERICA GOODE

WASHINGTON — Thousands of sexual assaults that occur in the United States every year are not reflected in the federal government’s yearly crime report because the report uses an archaic definition of rape that is far narrower than the definitions used by most police departments.

Many law enforcement officials and advocates for women say that this underreporting misleads the public about the prevalence of rape and results in fewer federal, state and local resources being devoted to catching rapists and helping rape victims.

“The public has the right to know about the prevalence of crime and violent crime in our communities, and we know that data drives practices, resources, policies and programs,” said Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, whose office has campaigned to get the F.B.I. to change its definition of sexual assault. “It’s critical that we strive to have accurate information about this.”

Ms. Tracy spoke at a meeting in Washington on Friday, organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, that brought together police chiefs, sex-crime investigators, federal officials and advocates to discuss the limitations of the federal definition and the wider issue of local police departments not adequately investigating rape.

According to the 2010 Uniform Crime Report, released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last week, there were 84,767 sexual assaults in the United States last year, a 5 percent drop from 2009.

The definition of rape used by the F.B.I. — “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will” was written more than 80 years ago. The yearly report on violent crime, which uses data provided voluntarily by the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies, is widely cited as an indicator of national crime trends.

But that definition, critics say, does not take into account sexual-assault cases that involve anal or oral penetration or penetration with an object, cases where the victims were drugged or under the influence of alcohol or cases with male victims. As a result, many sexual assaults are not counted as rapes in the yearly federal accounting.

“The data that are reported to the public come from this definition, and sadly, it portrays a very, very distorted picture,” said Susan B. Carbon, director of the Office on Violence Against Women, part of the Department of Justice. “It’s the message that we’re sending to victims, and if you don’t fit that very narrow definition, you weren’t a victim and your rape didn’t count.”

Steve Anderson, chief of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, said that the F.B.I.’s definition created a double standard for police departments.

“We prosecute by one criteria, but we report by another criteria,” Chief Anderson said. “The only people who have a true picture of what’s going on are the people in the sex-crimes unit.”

In Chicago, the police department recorded close to 1,400 sexual assaults in 2010, according to the department’s Web site. But none of these appeared in the federal crime report because Chicago’s broader definition of rape is not accepted by the F.B.I.

In New York City, 1,369 rapes were reported by the police department, but only 1,036 — the ones that fit the federal definition — were entered in the federal figures. And in Elizabeth Township, Pa., the sexual assault of a woman last year was widely discussed by residents. Yet according to the F.B.I.’s report, no rapes were reported in Elizabeth in 2010.

In a recent survey conducted by the Police Executive Research Forum, almost 80 percent of the 306 police departments that responded said that the federal definition of rape used by the Uniform Crime Report was inadequate and should be changed.

Greg Scarbro, the F.B.I.’s unit chief for the Uniformed Crime Report, said that the agency agreed that the definition should be revised and that an F.B.I. subcommittee would take up the issue at a meeting in Baltimore on Oct. 18.

“Our goal will be to leave that meeting with a definition and a mechanism,” Mr. Scarbro said. But he noted that law enforcement agencies would have to support any change.

A more comprehensive definition of rape is used by the National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, started by the F.B.I. in 1988 to address deficiencies in the Uniform Crime Report. But that system covers 28 percent of the population and has not gained wide traction as a reporting method. If the F.B.I. does adopt a broader definition, law enforcement agencies — especially those that use the federal standard in their own counts — may find themselves explaining a sudden increase in reported rapes.

“You can’t ignore the politics of crime,” said Charles H. Ramsey, commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department and the president of the police research forum, who backs changing the federal definition.

“With the new definition it’s going to dramatically change the numbers,” Mr. Ramsey said. Police chiefs will then need to explain to the public that the increase represents an improvement in reporting, rather than a jump in actual numbers of sexual assaults.

The Chicago Police Department uses a definition of sexual assault laid out by Illinois statute. Currently, the Uniform Crime Report does not include any rape statistics from Chicago; a footnote in the report says that the city’s methodology “does not comply with the Uniform Crime Reporting Program guidelines.” The Chicago Department plans to start reporting the subset of rapes that meet the federal definition to the F.B.I., according to Robert Tracy, chief of crime control strategies.

But Tom Byrne, chief of detectives in Chicago, told the participants at the meeting on Friday that “Technically we’re going to be taking rapes off the books.”

The gap between the federal counts and the real numbers reported to the police may be most apparent in small towns, said Robert W. McNeilly, police chief in Elizabeth Township, just outside Pittsburgh.

“When we have a sexual assault in a small town, people know about it, people talk about it,” Chief McNeilly said. “But when the U.C.R. report comes out at the end of the year and we report zero rapes, I think we lose credibility.”

In some cases, however, police departments contribute to the problem. The Baltimore Police Department made sweeping changes in the way it dealt with sexual assault after The Baltimore Sun revealed last year that the department was labeling rape reports as “unfounded” at a rate five times the national average.

The problem, said Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, was rooted in the attitudes and lack of understanding of officers and detectives toward rape and rape victims.

“We didn’t just suddenly veer off the road and strike a tree — this was a very long process that led to this problem,” Commissioner Bealefeld said.

After making changes, the department saw an 80 percent reduction in “unfounded” classifications. But because they were misclassified, Commissioner Bealefeld said, those reports never reached the F.B.I. or appeared in the Uniform Crime Report.

“When you unfound those cases, you take it off your U.C.R. numbers, as though they never occurred,” he said.

    Federal Rape Definition Too Narrow, Critics Say, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/federal-rules-on-rape-statistics-criticized.html

Police Dept. Reviews

Unsolved Rapes for Ties to Officer

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and AL BAKER

The police are investigating whether a New York City police officer, already charged with raping a woman last week at gunpoint in Upper Manhattan, may be responsible for other unsolved sex attacks, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said on Thursday.

The officer, Michael Pena, 27, a patrol officer in the 33rd Precinct, is accused of grabbing a 25-year-old teacher off the street, leading her to a building’s backyard in Inwood and raping her there.

When officers from the 34th Precinct, who received a 911 call from a resident who saw the attack from her window, arrived, Officer Pena and the woman were standing in the yard, and the woman ran over and said he had raped her, officials said. The officers handcuffed him and found his police identification and badge in his pocket and his gun on the ground next to him.

Since his arrest, several law enforcement officials said investigators had zeroed in on a few unsolved cases to see if Officer Pena’s DNA matched samples in those rapes. Detectives have been looking through sketches of rape suspects, comparing them with Officer Pena, who is being held on $500,000 bail.

The authorities have not received any indication whether biological evidence links the officer to past crimes.

Mr. Kelly confirmed that investigators had focused on a few specific unsolved crimes, but he would not discuss why those cases were being looked at, or identify where they occurred. He said the unsolved crimes all occurred since Officer Pena joined the Police Department three years ago.

“They have picked out some that they think have potential for having been perpetrated by this individual,” the commissioner said after a promotion ceremony at Police Headquarters.

“This is a very, very disturbing case,” he said. “We’ve looked at other incidents to see if this individual may be involved; that part of the investigation is certainly still going forward.”

He added that it was “very disturbing that anyone with that tendency, or that potential, that capability at all, is a member of the New York City Police Department.”

Investigators said the nature of the attack had the earmarks of a repeat predator.

“I think that if you throw out the fact that he is a cop — take it out of your mind that he is a cop, and you have a cop who would rape a woman, a stranger like that — you have to think it is not a one-time thing,” said one law enforcement member who insisted on anonymity because the investigation is ongoing. “It’s not like any other kind of crime.”

In any case of this kind, the authorities would compare the suspect’s DNA against a vast pool of DNA samples collected from victims or locations in past, unsolved rape cases.

Mr. Kelly said psychologists were asked if the nature of last Friday’s sexual assault suggested that it was the work of someone who had committed a similar act before.

“They believe that it certainly is possible, that something else happened in the past; that it was not the first time,” the commissioner said. “But so far we cannot say with any sort of certitude that there was another incident.”

Juan A. Campos, Mr. Pena’s lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no knowledge that his client is suspected of being involved in other crimes.

Mr. Campos said he met Wednesday with prosecutors and was not informed that Officer Pena was being examined in connection to any other case.

“I’ll be shocked if there’s anything else,” Mr. Campos said in a telephone interview on Thursday morning. “As far as I know, this is his one and only arrest, and he’s had no other problems with the law ever.”

Officer Pena’s appearance had undergone a change in the last month: he had recently grown a beard. The department generally bans beards, except when they are required for religious reasons, undercover work or perhaps a skin condition. Officer Pena had sought permission for a beard because of a shaving-related skin irritation, Mr. Browne said, and received approval from the Department’s medical division about two weeks ago.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.

    Police Dept. Reviews Unsolved Rapes for Ties to Officer, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/nyregion/nypd-reviews-unsolved-rapes-for-ties-to-officer.html

After Strauss-Kahn, Fear of Rape Victim Silence

August 24, 2011
The New York Times
By CARA BUCKLEY

She seemed to be the perfect witness. She came forward right away, disclosing detail after damning detail of a sexual attack that, backed by forensic evidence, seemed airtight. She stuck to her story. But then her case fell apart after prosecutors questioned her credibility. The charges against the man she accused, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, were dropped.

Now, rape victims, women’s rights advocates, detectives and prosecutors are sifting through the wreckage of the case of the accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, trying to determine what it will mean for rape cases — already among the most delicate in the criminal justice system — in the days and months to come.

Advocates for domestic violence victims said women who are raped would almost certainly be more fearful of stepping forward, knowing that everything in their past may be exposed; indeed, reporting of rapes usually drops in the aftermath of high-profile sexual assault cases. This reluctance, experts said, will be heightened for new immigrants, who are already fearful of authority, often fleeing a sexually violent past.

“This is going to twist and turn things around,” said Susan Xenarios, head of the Crime Victims Treatment Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center.

Other advocates said the dismissal relayed a chilling message that rich and powerful men were more likely to get away with sexual assaults. Still others said the facts of the Strauss-Kahn case were unique unto themselves.

Experts said rape crisis centers usually see a drop in reported cases in the aftermath of high-profile sexual assault cases, especially those in which the prosecution failed, like the case against Duke University lacrosse players; the recent acquittal, on the most serious charges, of two New York police officers who visited a drunk woman repeatedly in her apartment; and the William Kennedy Smith case in the 1990s.

More rapes go unreported than not: according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 6 in 10 sexual assaults are not reported, and just 6 percent of rapists serve jail time.

Michael J. Palladino, president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, said the publicity of this case would unquestionably be a deterrent for some women. “I’m sure some will hesitate,” he said. “They’re really dragged through the mud, and they’re victimized a second time.”

That thought was echoed by Richard Emery, a longtime civil rights lawyer, who said: “The victim is terribly, terribly tortured, at every level. First by the crime itself. And secondly by the system. There’s no escaping.”

Lynn Hecht Schafran, senior vice president of Legal Momentum, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization for women and girls, said the Diallo case did have its uncommon aspects. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, she noted, went to “unique lengths” to explain its reasoning in dropping the case. The unusual background, including prosecutors’ contention that Ms. Diallo repeatedly lied about her past, should not be a deterrent to other women, she said.

“Victims do not have to be pristine to be believed in court,” Ms. Schafran said.

None of the women’s advocates interviewed expressed doubt in Ms. Diallo’s claim that she was assaulted. And they said her initial account of a gang rape in her home country — which she later admitted was false, contributing to the undoing of her case — could be explained by her anguished state and troubled past, several advocates said.

Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of the center for battered women’s legal services at the Sanctuary for Families, a nonprofit group that works with victims of domestic violence, noted that a vast majority of Guinean immigrant women had suffered from female genital mutilation, and many were forced into early marriages.

“Erratic responses are something that we see over and over again,” Ms. Leidholdt said. “Her behavior was consistent with a trauma victim.”

Women from tightly knit West African communities in New York were especially focused on the dismissal, saying it lent credence to entrenched beliefs that governed behaviors and attitudes among Muslim immigrants here: that in the event of a sexual attack, a woman is still to blame.

“In Africa, if something happens to you, you have to shut your mouth,” said a 35-year-old former saleswoman from West Africa, who left a job as a home attendant after a charge in her care made sexual advances, and who did not want her name published for fear of community retribution. “But when you come here from Africa, you think that there’s protection for women’s rights.”

Still, several women said they were inspired by Ms. Diallo.

A 23-year-old graduate student who is from Guinea and lives in the Bronx said Ms. Diallo’s allegations emboldened her to lodge a complaint against a professor who had made sexual advances and offered her a higher grade if she complied. The woman, who requested anonymity for fear of community stigmatization, was raped by a family member years ago, she said, yet until recently never told anyone. She said the dismissal in the Diallo case suggested to her that people in power would always be protected.

“I feel more vulnerable,” she said.

As for Ms. Diallo, the young graduate student said the former hotel worker had already been ostracized among New York’s Guineans for being an “unlucky woman.”

“This situation,” the young woman said, “is going to make things worse.”

    After Strauss-Kahn, Fear of Rape Victim Silence, NYT, 24.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/nyregion/after-strauss-kahn-case-fears-that-victims-wont-speak-up.html

Man Randomly Stabs Four, One Fatally,

Then Slashes Himself, the Police Say

August 23, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and MATT FLEGENHEIMER

A naked man with a knife unleashed a torrent of violence inside the building where he lives in Upper Manhattan on Tuesday, randomly stabbing four residents, one fatally, before running outside and slashing himself, the police said.

The suspect, who was arrested nearby as he lay on the ground outside cutting himself, began attacking residents on the second floor of the building, at 870 Riverside Drive near West 160th Street in Washington Heights, about 4 p.m., the police said.

The suspect, Christian Falero, 23, who lives on the fifth floor, “knocked on various doors in the apartment building,” apparently at random, “and stabbed people as they answered the door,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

As residents opened the doors to their foyers, Mr. Falero stabbed them with a 10-inch knife, Mr. Browne said. In all, Mr. Falero stabbed four residents, including the man who later died, and punched a home attendant, Mr. Browne said.

Asked if the police knew a motive for the violence, he said, “No, it just appeared to be psychotic.”

Police identified the dead man as Ignacio Reyes-Collazo, 81, who was stabbed four times in the head and chest. He was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he was pronounced dead.

His wife, who is 75, was also stabbed four times.

One of their neighbors, a 60-year-old woman was stabbed in the eye and chest. She was in critical condition on Tuesday night at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt.

In another apartment, the police said that Mr. Falero stabbed an 85-year-old woman repeatedly. He also punched a woman, a 22-year-old home attendant.

The police did not release the names of the injured victims.

After Mr. Falero fled the seven-story building, residents said, they saw him running down the street yelling that it was the end of the world. Then he lay on the ground and started cutting himself outside a building at 812 Riverside Drive, the police said.

Police officers, who happened to be in the area, saw him and took him into custody as calls were being phoned in to the police.

“When they did so, they realized he was a suspect in the apparent random stabbings of four individuals,” Mr. Browne said.

Mr. Falero, who was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt for psychiatric evaluation, has no prior arrests, Mr. Browne said. Any criminal charges against him would await the result of that evaluation, he said.

Jackie Rowe-Adams, 63, who lives on the same floor as the suspect, said, “People know this young man had problems; you see signs.”

Of the victims, she said: “I really hope they’re all right. They’re good people.”

Outside 870 Riverside Drive on Tuesday evening, several local residents gathered. One man, Maurice Samuels, 31, described how one victim, the grandmother of a friend of his, had sat back against a light post, her face bloodied, as emergency vehicles arrived.

 

Joseph Goldstein and Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

    Man Randomly Stabs Four, One Fatally, Then Slashes Himself, the Police Say, NYT, 23.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/nyregion/police-say-man-stabbed-4-in-manhattan-then-himself.html

Killing of Black Man

Prompts Reflection on Race in Mississippi

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

JACKSON, Miss. — No one disputes that James Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black family man with a quick wit and a demanding sense of style, was robbed, beaten and then run over by a group of white teenagers in a motel parking lot early one morning in June.

But as the case builds — charges against the young man accused of driving the Ford pickup that hit Mr. Anderson were raised to capital murder on Friday, and the F.B.I. is now involved — significant questions remain.

Was the killing of Mr. Anderson premeditated racial violence? An act indicative of a deep cultural divide?

Or was the behavior of Daryl Dedmon, the slight, blond teenager who could be facing the death penalty, simply an anomaly born of anger, alcohol and teenage stupidity, as some close to the case suggest?

Beyond those questions, many here are asking whether Mr. Anderson’s death will prompt a deeper discussion of race relations in a state that has struggled mightily to move beyond its past.

“Racism has always been part of the lifestyle in Mississippi in one form or another,” said Dr. Timothy Summers, 68, a Jackson psychiatrist whose father started the first black-owned savings and loan in Mississippi in the 1950s.

“There still is that component of our culture that very much likes to hold on to how things have been in the past,” he said. “That group, however, doesn’t represent the broader cross-section of people who are good and honest but perhaps too naïve, perhaps too quiet, too complacent in looking at racism.”

Although they lived just 15 miles apart and spent Sundays in church, Mr. Anderson, 48, and Mr. Dedmon, 19, could not have led more different lives.

Mr. Dedmon liked his high school agriculture classes, but not as much as he loved hanging out with friends at a drive-in restaurant in the largely white suburban county where he lived, his friends say. He was the joker among a group for whom country music, Bible verses, Bud Light and pickup trucks serve as the cultural markers.

Mr. Anderson was a good country cook, a gifted gardener and always genial, his family said. He liked his job on the assembly line at the Nissan plant north of Jackson, where he had worked for about seven years.

“If you met him, the first thing you were going to see was that grand piano smile,” said his eldest sister, Barbara Anderson Young.

He made a point of taking care of old people and children and was helping his partner of 17 years, James Bradfield, raise the 4-year-old relative for whom Mr. Bradfield has legal guardianship. He sang tenor in the choir at the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church and was so good “he’d have you falling out,” Mr. Bradfield, 44, said.

And if a friend or relative was not dressed well enough for an event, he would tease him or her into a nicer outfit.

No one is sure why Mr. Anderson was in the parking lot at the Metro Inn at 5 a.m. on June 26. He might have been at a party, Mr. Bradfield said. He was by his truck when two carloads of partying teenagers pulled off the interstate, according to prosecutors, who cited video from a motel security camera and statements from witnesses. Family members say he might have lost his keys, which have not been returned to them.

The video shows some of the teenagers running back and forth between their cars and Mr. Anderson. He was beaten repeatedly and robbed, the district attorney said. Items like a cellphone, a ring and his wallet were taken, according to interviews with family members.

Then, one car drove off. But an F-250 pick-up — driven by Mr. Dedmon, the prosecutor said — pulled out of the parking lot and ran over Mr. Anderson as he staggered along the lot’s edge. The murder charge against Mr. Dedmon was raised to capital murder after District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith of Hinds County said he had evidence that Mr. Dedmon had robbed Mr. Anderson.

Why the teenagers drove across the Pearl River to that tough section of Jackson is at the heart of the case, which will be presented to a grand jury in a few weeks as a racially motivated crime, Mr. Smith said.

John Rice, 18, is the only other person charged, his accusation one of simple assault. A lawyer suggested at a hearing that the teenagers were out for a beer run. Mr. Smith and national civil rights groups believe they were seeking out a black person to harm. Witnesses told the police that one teenager yelled “white power” and that Mr. Dedmon, using a racial slur, later bragged about hitting Mr. Anderson.

Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is working with the family and their lawyer, Winston J. Thompson III. Mr. Dees said his group was investigating whether some of the teenagers involved may have loose ties to a gang with white-supremacist leanings. Mr. Smith is taking a more cautious approach.

“I don’t think there are aggressive gangs out there beating up black people,” Mr. Smith said. “I do think because of the political and economic structure and the re-engineering of society, it appears that certain parts of the country and Mississippi feel their culture is under attack.”

The Rev. Brian Richardson of Castlewood Baptist Church in Brandon, Miss., who went to Mr. Anderson’s funeral and has become close to the family, believes Mr. Dedmon is a product of his upbringing and a culture that does not do enough to stop bullying.

In an interview at his church in a nicely kept section of the county where Mr. Dedmon was raised, Mr. Richardson, who is white, said Mr. Dedmon had called his son, Jordan, 18, derogatory words for homosexual and mocked his friendship with black students when they were in high school together.

Mr. Richardson said he had raised the issue with school officials, and once had to deal with the police when Mr. Dedmon and some other boys drove to the family home.

The Richardsons point out that while racism is not unique to the Deep South, a deep streak of “us and them” exists.

“There is a subgroup that takes the Southern country-boy thing to another level,” Jordan Richardson said.

Mr. Dedmon’s lawyer did not respond to requests for an interview, but friends and family of some of the young people involved say the death was an accident.

At the Sonic Drive-In in Rankin County, where redneck is a term of endearment among the young whites who hang out nightly, the young people do not see Mr. Anderson’s death as a hate crime. And they say they are not racists.

“They don’t know how bad this hurts us,” said Shanna Brenemen, who attends Brandon High School and was close to Mr. Dedmon.

Although a conversation with them might be laced with racial slurs, they point to black friends, including some running Tater Tots and limeades to the cars parked at the drive-in. The way people are portraying them is simply wrong, they said.

“We’re just country, and whoever comes here, we welcome everybody,” said Mr. Dedmon’s younger sister, Tiffany, who will be a junior at Brandon High School. “This whole thing is getting blown out of proportion.”

In a letter he sent her from his jail cell, Mr. Dedmon said he had committed himself to Jesus. He warned his sister away from trouble. “I want you to get in the Bible for real,” he wrote. “I don’t want you to end up like this. I thought drinking was fun but look where it got me. And seriously choose your friends wisely, Tiff. My so-called friends got me in here.”

For Mr. Bradfield and Mr. Anderson’s siblings, the case is nothing but a hate crime. Jackson, for its part, has been slow to publicly address the case. Mayor Harvey Johnson, who is black, issued his first public statement on the matter last week. A public vigil was held on Aug. 14. A few hundred people marched from a nearby church to the motel parking lot and placed a wreath on the grassy spot near the curb where Mr. Anderson was hit.

Perhaps interest in the case was muted, people close to the family and in the community said, because Mr. Anderson’s family had been slow to come forward.

Although the family has created the James Craig Anderson Foundation for Racial Tolerance, they wanted to protect themselves from the media scrum and political opportunism that would surely come from a fist-pounding demand for justice, said Mr. Thompson, the lawyer. Mr. Anderson’s family and others wonder why only two of the seven teenagers were charged. And perhaps the toughest question of all: Could racism really be that blatant in a city that has worked for decades to overcome it?

“The Help,” a film that explores the relationships between black maids and their white employers in the 1960s, sold out several shows during its debut weekend here.

People walking out of a theater an hour after the vigil last week said that although Jackson has changed in some ways, racism remains.

“It’s still here,” said B. J. Quick, 50, a black man who saw the movie with his girlfriend, who is white. “It’s just under the surface more.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 22, 2011

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Anderson family's lawyer.
He is Winston J. Thompson III, not Winston J. Thompson II.

    Killing of Black Man Prompts Reflection on Race in Mississippi, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/23jackson.html

An Inmate’s Letter Recalls a Certain Summer

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By MICHAEL WILSON

“I was in London for a moment,” the letter began. “Just long enough to learn how to walk and talk and gather a few memories before leaving for Staten Island, where I grew up. Grew up too fast in some respects but not fast enough to outgrow the adolescent flaws and shortcomings of character to which I would steadily succumb in a bad way.”

The letter sounded like something from another age, but in fact, it was written July 31, with the return address of Mount McGregor Correctional Facility in Wilton, N.Y. It was from a 51-year-old inmate named Dempsey Hawkins, and it told the story of a stitch of time 36 years ago, when the writer fell in love with a girl named Susan Jacobson.

“I was 15, Susan, 13, when we moved beyond a casual association and began a teenage romance in the spring of 1975,” Mr. Hawkins wrote. They were neighbors and moved in the same circles, but met in earnest during a game of baseball. “I got hit in the face by the backswing of Susan’s bat,” he wrote. “As I was up next, I was standing too close to home plate and inattentive the moment the swing came round.

“Hours later I assured her I was O.K. and joked with her. Continued to joke and laugh with Susan in the following days, and began talking with her on the telephone, her front porch and during walks around the neighborhood.”

She was white and he was black, the son of a white woman from England and a black man from Illinois who had met when his father was overseas with the United States Air Force. Mr. Hawkins described an almost idyllic existence: “I had come across Susan countless times, whether as teammates in whiffle-ball games played once the summer air turned aromatic from backyard barbecues or among a group sledding down the steep, icy street past snowmen sitting hatted, scarfed and smiling under winter moonlight.”

Susan’s parents were not thrilled with the courtship, warning the teens that “they were leaving themselves wide open for criticism because of the race problem,” her mother, Ellen Jacobson, said later. But no one stood in their way.

“I began attending church with Susan and her siblings on Sunday mornings as well as playing afternoon card games with them in their home,” Mr. Hawkins wrote. “Some Saturdays we’d bike ride to Clove Lakes Park and sit on a bench and talk while ducks spun languorously atop the water. Other days we’d visit a local pizza parlor to sit and chat with pizza and Pepsi on the table and the smell of fresh dough creating an evocative comfort.”

He dragged his friends to watch Susan play baseball, but eventually, they left him to go on his own.

“The snows of December arrived and I was genuinely infatuated with Susan,” he wrote. “School became an hourglass through which the sands of my anticipation gradually streamed until I was with Susan again at her dining room table playing Monopoly with her brothers and sisters amid a volley of giggles and chatter resonating with the undertone of ‘Welcome Back, Kotter’ on television in an adjacent room.”

But they did more than giggle and play board games that winter, and they were careless. In January 1976, Susan discovered she was pregnant. She had an abortion. Her parents told her she was not allowed to see Dempsey anymore. She told him as much, but they continued to see each other anyway, secretly.

Spring arrived. On a hot Saturday, May 15, Susan left her house and did not come home for dinner. Her family called the police, and friends and neighbors searched for her. Dempsey said he had no idea where she was, and he helped look for the girl he loved.

But they did not find her. Months passed; nothing. Her parents, increasingly distraught, even sought help from a psychic in New Jersey who gave them tips on where to look for Susan. Nothing.

It seemed no one knew what had become of a 14-year-old girl in a close-knit island neighborhood on that Saturday afternoon. It would be two years before the truth emerged: a truth that will be more fully explored in this space next Saturday.

But in 1976, one person did know what had happened: Susan’s boyfriend, Dempsey Hawkins.

“I strangled Susan,” he wrote in the letter, “and concealed her body in a metal barrel in a wooded area across from a Procter & Gamble factory on Staten Island.”

    An Inmate’s Letter Recalls a Certain Summer, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/nyregion/an-inmates-letter-recalls-a-certain-summer.html

New York Police Officer Charged With Rape While Off Duty

August 19, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

An off-duty New York City police officer was arrested in Upper Manhattan on Friday after he grabbed a woman who was on her way to work, showed her he had a gun and raped her in the backyard of a nearby building, the police said.

The officer, Michael V. Pena, 27, was suspended without pay and stripped of his gun and badge after he was arrested about 6:30 a.m. by officers from the 34th Precinct who had responded to a 911 call from a neighbor awoken by the noise, the police said. He was charged with forcible rape, the officials said.

Officer Pena, a three-year member of the force who has been assigned to the 33rd Precinct since January, lives in Yonkers and had last worked a midnight shift that ended at 8 a.m. Thursday, said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman. He was due back at work on Saturday.

The woman, a 25-year-old teacher, told the police that she was on her way to work in the Bronx when a man who appeared to be intoxicated approached her near her home in Inwood and asked for directions to the No. 1 train, Mr. Browne said.

At one point, the man put his arm around her, opened his jacket, pointed at a pistol that was on his belt, and said, “ ‘You’re coming with me,’ ” Mr. Browne said.

The man, who was not believed to have identified himself as a police officer, led the woman along for two to three blocks “under threat,” Mr. Brown said. He turned into a backyard behind a residential building near Park Terrace West and West 217th Street, then raped her, Mr. Browne said.

A woman who lives in the building was awoken by the noise and looked outside to see what was happening. “She felt it just didn’t look consensual to her,” Mr. Browne said. About two minutes later, a man walking in the area came upon the attacker, whose pants were down, the police said. He excused himself, apparently believing he had interrupted a consensual encounter. When two uniformed officers arrived, within three minutes of the 911 call, they saw the attacker and the woman standing in the backyard, “and the victim ran to the police officers and said, ‘He raped me; be careful, he has a gun,’ ” Mr. Browne said.

The officers handcuffed the man and called an ambulance, which took the woman to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. As the police searched the man, they found his police identification and his badge in his pocket, Mr. Browne said.

“And his gun was on the ground next to him,” Mr. Browne said, referring to a loaded 9-millimeter Glock pistol.

Additional charges against the officer were pending, the police said.

    New York Police Officer Charged With Rape While Off Duty, NYT, 19.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/20/nyregion/off-duty-new-york-city-police-officer-charged-with-rape.html

Teenager’s Path and a Killing Put Spotlight on Mental Care

August 2, 2011
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG

LOWELL, Mass. — Pericles Clergeau, a tall, sturdy teenager with a troubled past, did not much like it when Kevin Allard, a radiant, sometimes manic youth, arrived at Adolescent Unit 2 at the Westborough state psychiatric hospital early last year.

“He was like the alpha male of the place, and I was the competition,” Mr. Allard said. “It was his turf, and I was mowing the lawn.”

On Feb. 3, 2010, the two 18-year-olds faced off in a basketball game called Taps, where one player can send the other’s score plummeting to zero by tapping in a rebound. The game was close and tense, and the verbal sparring kept escalating, too. Mr. Clergeau was near 21 points when a swish by Mr. Allard derailed him.

Catching his breath, Mr. Allard felt Mr. Clergeau — about six inches taller — very close behind. In seconds, Mr. Allard said, Mr. Clergeau’s arm was wrapped around his throat and he was dangling in a choke hold. He tried to wriggle free but passed out. Mr. Clergeau dropped him on the tarmac, and Mr. Allard came to with a deep laceration on his forehead, dripping blood, according to several accounts.

The next day, Dr. Bruce Meltzer, the unit’s medical director and psychiatrist, told a state mental health department investigator that “he fears the perp could commit murder and that it could happen at any time,” according to an internal document.

That concern got buried in an internal investigation. Mr. Clergeau was neither prosecuted nor placed for long in a more secure situation. And almost exactly a year later, on Jan. 29, 2011, Mr. Clergeau, homeless and adrift, was arrested in the killing of an employee at the shelter in Lowell where he had been staying. When the police arrived, Mr. Clergeau was standing behind the reception desk clutching a bloodstained knife. “I did it, I did it,” he said as he was being handcuffed, according to the police report.

The killing happened nine days after a 25-year-old mental health worker named Stephanie Moulton was slain at a group home in Revere. Ms. Moulton’s case spurred a statewide debate on whether budget cuts had eroded the public mental health system and endangered the safety of its workers. Indeed, in late June, a mental health safety task force issued a blistering report proclaiming the system to be in a crisis that, among other problems, created worrisome risks of violent tragedy.

The death of the shelter worker, Jose R. Roldan, 34, did not get as much attention as Ms. Moulton’s. But an examination of Mr. Clergeau’s case, based on interviews, confidential documents and court records, suggests that it involved an even more overt failure by the state both to help a deeply disturbed and dangerous individual and to keep the public safe.

Mr. Roldan’s killing was, in a way, a death foretold. Whether it was preventable cannot be known.

But Mr. Clergeau’s destructive and self-destructive path crisscrossed Massachusetts, taking him in and out of the custody of three state agencies as well as multiple treatment centers, hospitals, police departments and courts.

Over time, Mr. Clergeau established a clear pattern of lashing out violently. In turn, the government developed a pattern, too, of shuttling him from place to place until it released him to the streets and he ended up on the doorstep of a homeless shelter with little security, few resources and no knowledge of his history.

Other institutions that had treated Mr. Clergeau previously did not know his full history, either.

“No one seemingly put together a composite,” his court-appointed lawyer, Michael Collora, said. “Each incident was viewed in isolation.”

Those who had encountered Mr. Clergeau during his violent odyssey were saddened but not surprised by his first-degree murder charge. (He has pleaded not guilty.)

“I was only surprised it didn’t happen sooner,” said Christopher Casaubon, a mental health technician who suffered a shattered eye socket at Mr. Clergeau’s hand.

 

A Troubled Path

Speaking in the leafy courtyard of a public housing complex in Cambridge, Mr. Clergeau’s father said, “I knew something like that would be happening one day.”

The father, Joslin Clergeau, said Pericles started exhibiting emotional and behavioral problems at 4 or 5, not long after they emigrated from western Haiti.

“When Pericles was mad, he would bang his head on the walls,” said Mr. Clergeau, a taxi driver. “If you see his arm, you see the line of scars from when he’d bite, bite, bite himself.”

Mr. Clergeau said Pericles was first hospitalized at 7 or 8 after “he beat a boy with a chair when the boy called him gay.” He said Pericles celebrated his first communion on a psychiatric ward at Cambridge Hospital.

He also said — and Mr. Collora echoed — that no single psychiatric diagnosis was ever fixed to Pericles. Doctors speculated that Pericles had been traumatized by witnessing violence in Haiti, his father said. He did not think that was true. Even so, Pericles’s behavior came to mirror that of a small but intractable population of youths who, often based on trauma in their lives, are filled with rage that turns into violence.

Unable to pay for treatment, Mr. Clergeau said, he eventually granted custody of Pericles to the Department of Children and Families, which sent him to foster homes and residential schools.

At some point — Mr. Clergeau was fuzzy about when — Pericles accused him of child abuse. An investigation was done and, the father said, the accusation was not substantiated.

That could not be confirmed. The young man’s state agency files are closed, as is his juvenile criminal record. (The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services did not respond to questions for its child welfare and mental health departments.)

At 17, though, Pericles Clergeau became an adult in the eyes of the Massachusetts criminal justice system, and from then on his bumpy path can be more clearly traced.

 

Into the System

The year between Mr. Clergeau’s 17th and 18th birthdays was tumultuous. He was moved five times by a system that did not seem to know what to do with his increasing aggression.

Teenagers who violently challenge authority often disrupt a therapeutic environment and endanger the staff. Even though child welfare experts consider stability of placement to be beneficial and instability detrimental, these youths are the most likely to be bounced from program to program.

In early 2009, Mr. Clergeau, kicked out of his previous program because of an assault, turned 17 at a juvenile detention center. From there, he was transferred to the Hillcrest Center, a 14-acre campus in the Berkshires that specializes in youths with extreme psychiatric, emotional and behavioral disorders.

He tried to run away a few times, but his first major encounter with the police there occurred in May, when he flew into a despairing rage, destroying furniture, hitting an employee with a rock and trying to hang himself.

The following month, the police were summoned again. Arriving at the main building, Officer William C. Colvin observed broken glass and other debris littering the entrance. Inside, he saw a 6-foot-2-inch male student — Mr. Clergeau — face down on the floor with one staff member holding each of his legs and two more employees lying across his back.

Earlier that day, Mr. Clergeau had “gone AWOL,” and when finally located on the property, he was hostile, screaming and wielding a four-foot-long wooden sign post, the police report said.

Swinging the stick, he had run back into the school, smashing a large glass clock and a photocopier. He charged a solid wooden door, cracking it in half and tearing it from its hinges. When the principal and others tackled him, he tore at the principal’s face with the jagged post, causing what Officer Colvin described as “a long bruiser” from jaw to ear.

Mr. Clergeau was charged with assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, destruction of property and disorderly conduct. After a couple of days in jail, he was sent to the Brandon School and Residential Treatment Center in Natick.

In July, police officers reported there because Mr. Clergeau had become enraged during classroom detention. Having placed a staff member in a headlock and repeatedly punched him, Mr. Clergeau was charged again with assault and battery.

By September, he had been transferred to the Lowell Treatment Center. Not long after settling in, he was disruptive in class and ordered to return to his locked residential unit. He refused.

“He said, ‘If I’m getting in trouble for nothing, I might as well do something,’ ” Mr. Casaubon, a staff member at the school, said. Then Mr. Clergeau started hurling wooden chairs at his teacher.

Seeking to restrain him, Mr. Casaubon, who is muscular but shorter than Mr. Clergeau, managed to pin him against the wall. Mr. Clergeau promised to calm down if released. Mr. Casaubon let him go, he said, and the young man “sucker punched” him.

Mr. Casaubon, who needed surgery to rebuild his broken eye socket, said he pursued charges reluctantly, because “I knew nothing would happen.” (The case is still pending.) But, he said, “everybody was yelling at me to go to the police so that it would go on record that this guy is a violent person and shouldn’t be in public. I mean, that was him on meds. Imagine when he’s off meds.”

Afterward, Mr. Casaubon said, staff members learned that Mr. Clergeau had a record of previous assaults with similar modes of attack. “I sure wish I had known he strikes when you let go,” he said. “But it could have been worse. I’m not dead.”

Mr. Clergeau’s next stop was Westborough State Hospital, a hauntingly beautiful 19th-century asylum on a hilly campus overlooking a lake. The hospital has since closed because of budget cuts.

Mr. Clergeau was placed in a treatment program that served a combination of fragile, traumatized teenagers and violent juvenile offenders. It was a difficult mix.

Mr. Allard, who had a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and had been committed there after an encounter with the police, said Mr. Clergeau ruled the roost, intimidating his fellow patients and the staff, too.

During several months at the hospital, Mr. Clergeau reportedly assaulted nine staff members, sending a few out on medical leave, a person familiar with his stay there said. “You could feel the rage radiating off him,” another person said.

Both people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions for exposing what had happened.

The basketball game occurred on Mr. Clergeau’s 18th birthday, the day he technically aged out of the child welfare department’s care.

Two days later, he smashed a dresser drawer, fashioned a weapon and threatened to impale anybody who came near him. The unit was cleared of patients, the state police were called and Mr. Clergeau, after barricading himself in his room, was persuaded to surrender peacefully. He was led away in handcuffs.

Only then did the program staff learn, through a fax sent anonymously, that Mr. Clergeau had a record of violence, with eight outstanding warrants at that time.

The hospital’s human rights officer filed an internal complaint on behalf of Mr. Allard, which set off a departmental investigation that dragged on without resolution. But Mr. Clergeau was not prosecuted for anything that happened at the hospital. That was partly because the state Department of Mental Health discourages the criminalization of its adolescent patients; staff members did not press assault charges.

The police, learning about the attack on Mr. Allard after the fact, were in the process of opening an investigation when the weapon incident occurred.

“As we responded the next day and locked up the subject on the eight outstanding warrants, the investigation into the past A & B did not go anywhere,” David Procopio, a state police spokesman, said, referring to assault and battery.

Now back in his hometown, Ware, and feeling stable with an apartment and a job, Mr. Allard was stunned to learn that Mr. Clergeau had never been held accountable for, as he put it, “the attempted murder of me.”

“I can’t believe they let him out into a public place,” he said.

 

Last Resort

Mr. Clergeau was discharged from Westborough with the expectation that he would be imprisoned. Hospital authorities told the state police that he was “not a psych patient,” which appears to reflect a medical opinion that he belonged in a correctional setting.

At that point, Mr. Clergeau’s Lowell assault case was reactivated. A judge set bail at $1,000, and after a few weeks at a juvenile detention center, he was released to his father.

The family reunion did not go well.

“When they let him out of jail, they didn’t give him any medication,” his father said. “A lawyer told me, ‘He turned 18 now. They give him medication only if he asks.’ I say, ‘Stupid law.’ He has mental problems.”

After a month, under pressure from the Cambridge housing authority, Joslin Clergeau filed a restraining order against his son.

It was late April 2010, and Mr. Clergeau was now homeless.

In May, Mr. Clergeau was arrested on outstanding warrants while going door to door selling magazine subscriptions in Brookline. Once again taken to a juvenile detention center, he awaited the prosecution of his Berkshires case. He was found guilty of disorderly conduct and destruction of property — with no finding on the assault charge for what the judge deemed insufficient evidence — and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

In mid-August, Mr. Clergeau showed up at the Lowell Transitional Living Center. A 90-bed shelter for single adults, with limited social services and a meals program, it is often the “last resort” for people who get “shuffled around,” Gary Baker, the board president, said.

Anne Marie Malavich, case management supervisor there, said Mr. Clergeau arrived empty-handed, without any identification documents much less his own case files. She said he came across as “a very, very angry young man” with a “smirk on his face” and “an air of defiance.”

“Being sent to me was like being sent to the principal, and he was constantly being sent to me,” Ms. Malavich said.

Mary-Anne Buhlmann, 53, the slain man’s girlfriend, said, “Pericles was trouble, a troubled soul.”

In a darkened apartment with “The Price is Right” on the television and a memorial photo album bound with black ribbon by her side, Ms. Buhlmann said she and Mr. Roldan met at the shelter over a decade ago. She was a former battered woman, and he had “some demons,” she said; after moving into their own apartment, they remained connected to the shelter through his job there.

Last fall, Mr. Roldan came home uncharacteristically rattled, with a cut on his head, she said. He said Mr. Clergeau had whacked him, then claimed to have mistaken him for somebody else.

After that, Mr. Roldan told her that he was considering quitting his job because of Mr. Clergeau’s volatility. Not long before his death, he said he had been forced to penalize Mr. Clergeau for breaking rules.

“Jose said, ‘Mary-Anne, I had to kick Pericles out for a while and now he’s telling me he’s going to kill me,’ ” she said.

On Jan. 29, Mr. Roldan had been trying to calm an agitated Mr. Clergeau, who was accusing other residents of staring at him, when Mr. Clergeau stabbed him, severing his jugular vein. When the police arrived, he was still alive, barely, lying on the floor, a blood-soaked towel pressed to his neck.

Mr. Roldan was medically evacuated by helicopter. Before it was known that he had died, one officer transporting Mr. Clergeau told another that the charge was going to be “assault by means of a dangerous weapon.” Mr. Clergeau interrupted.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Officer, it’s going to be murder,’ ” Officer Marisol Nobrega noted in her report. “Murder.”

    Teenager’s Path and a Killing Put Spotlight on Mental Care, NYT, 2.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/us/03mental.html

Killing Rattles a Jewish Community’s

Long-Held Trust of Its Own

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSEPH BERGER

Yocheved Schachter, a 47-year-old nurse who lives in Borough Park, Brooklyn, acknowledges that she has a double standard of sorts: one for people who share her background, and one for people who do not.

“If you’re in the airport and need help, a Jew will help you,” said Ms. Schachter, who is a mother and a grandmother. “I pick up hitchhikers, boys waiting to go to yeshiva. When I travel and see another Jew, we’ll eyeball each other; there’s a connection. Everywhere you go, all over the world. I’ll still do it.”

So like her neighbors in Borough Park, she has been bewildered by the fact that Leiby Kletzky, 8, was kidnapped and killed, the police say, at the hands of another apparently religious Jew, though not a Hasidic one.

“The fact that this came from within,” she said, “it’s beyond belief.”

With its distinctive dress and customs, the insular ultra-Orthodox community of Borough Park has always been somewhat wary of outsiders who might introduce temptations and ideas that could erode their way of life. But the converse — too much trust of those within — has also been true, many civic and religious leaders say, and it is only in recent years that people have become less guileless about and protective of ill-doers from inside their tribe.

On Thursday, Levi Aron, 35, was ordered held without bail on a charge of second-degree murder, and the police disclosed elements of a confession. Mr. Aron, according to the police, said that Leiby had approached him on the street Monday afternoon, that he had taken the boy to a wedding in Rockland County that night and that he had suffocated the boy in a panic the next day when he realized the huge search effort that was under way. The police also say the boy may have put up a struggle.

It may never be known whether Leiby trusted Mr. Aron because he appeared to be someone like him. But the murder occurred at a moment of a slow change in how Borough Park residents regarded one another, and some people interviewed on Thursday predicted that, for better or worse, the tragedy would only accelerate it.

“Someone told me, ‘Now you know who your neighbors are,’ ” said Ben Herb, 37, who works at MS Optical on 16th Avenue. “I said: We always had to be cautious in this neighborhood. Here in the center of Borough Park is where you have to be very careful. Most of your neighbors are Orthodox Jews with which children are comfortable. That, in itself, is a risk.”

“My children don’t talk to strangers whether they wear a yarmulke or a do-rag,” he added.

The authorities and social service officials in Borough Park agreed that attitudes have been changing. Ruchama Clapman, who runs a small agency that deals with drug and alcohol abuse and sexual molestation largely within the pious Jewish community, recalled that 14 years ago when she started her agency she encountered tremendous resistance simply talking about the problems, “and it took many years before the community was accepting that we had these issues in our community.”

“It was hanging out dirty laundry,” she said.

People were afraid that if a victim sought help and a problem became widely known, parents might find it difficult to find matches for their sons and daughters, and social and business relations would be hurt. There was also the often misinterpreted prohibition against mesirah — informing on a fellow Jew to non-Jewish authorities — that was a leftover tenet from a time when European Jews had to deal cautiously with anti-Semitic officials.

Dov Hikind, the local assemblyman, has a radio show that for several years has highlighted the issue of sexual abuse by people in the Orthodox community.

“People were upset at me,” he said. “People were furious. They would say: ‘You’re embarrassing us. We’re dealing with it ourselves.’ They were not dealing with it.”

But they have been more willing to alert the authorities when crimes are committed by other Hasidim or Orthodox Jews. In a spate of cases between October 2008 and October 2009 alone, Brooklyn prosecutors arrested 26 ultra-Orthodox men — rabbis, teachers and camp counselors among them — on sexual abuse charges. Many others have come forward to the Jewish news media and to social agencies.

Mr. Hikind said there was no evidence that sexual abuse or other deviance was any more widespread in the Hasidic community than in other ethnic groups, but what is different, they said, is that the Hasidic community has just begun to grapple with these problems and educate its members.

Ms. Clapman, head of Mothers and Fathers Aligned Saving Kids, said Hasidim were aware that “we have problems that the outside world may have and the outside world is seeping in.”

The often overlooked diversity of Borough Park, with a Jewish population that has been estimated by local officials at 100,000 and with 250 synagogues, could in theory be a fertile field for distrust.

Although most outsiders tend to view Borough Park monolithically, seeing only men in black garb and women in long-sleeved dresses surrounded by a scrum of children, there are many important distinctions.

The Hasidim, who define themselves as such by their loyalty to particular grand rabbis and by their zeal in observance, are divided into numerous sects like the Bobov, Satmar and Belz, each originating from a different part of Eastern Europe and each with its own synagogues, yeshivas and even subtleties of dress (the Satmar hat brim is wider, the Bobov crown higher).

Moreover, a significant minority of Borough Park’s Jews are simply Orthodox, like Leiby’s parents, and do not revere a particular grand rabbi; others are Conservative, Reform or secular, a remnant of the mid-20th century when Borough Park’s Jews included people like Sandy Koufax.

There are rivalries between sects and even within sects. Yet there is a general amity that prevails, a belief that, as Ms. Schachter said, a Jew will readily help another Jew in need.

“I’m not saying that bad apples don’t exist,” she said. “You can have bad police officers, bad nurses and bad doctors. But you still trust a doctor.”

Joe Levin, a private investigator who works in the Orthodox world, said “some people in Borough Park are very naïve” because “they don’t believe Orthodox people can do bad things.”

Indeed, Motty Jay, 28, a wine consultant who had joined the search party for Leiby, said of the suspect: “This is not an Orthodox Jew that did it,” adding: “In order to do this you’ve got to be something different. Different than us.”

 

Juliet Linderman, Jed Lipinski and Liz Robbins contributed reporting.

    Killing Rattles a Jewish Community’s Long-Held Trust of Its Own, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/nyregion/leiby-kletzkys-killing-rattles-jewish-communitys-trust.html

In a World That Shelters, a Killing Stuns in Many Ways

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JIM DWYER

Down the block from the home of Levi Aron, the hardware-store clerk accused this week of slaughtering a child in Brooklyn, a neighbor, Miriam Levy, spoke about peculiar qualities that she had discovered only after Mr. Aron’s arrest.

Ms. Levy, 22, had looked at an online profile for him.

“His interests were ‘American Idol,’ Lady Gaga and ‘Glee,’ ” she said.

These may be fixtures of popular culture, but they are exotica in the ultra-Orthodox communities of Borough Park and the neighboring Kensington, where Mr. Aron lived, she explained.

“Most of us, the kids in this neighborhood, we don’t have TVs,” Ms. Levy said. “We wouldn’t know about such things.”

Leiby Kletzky, 8, vanished late Monday afternoon and was lost to his world for more than 30 hours, until police officers found his feet in Mr. Aron’s freezer early Wednesday.

For now, Mr. Aron is the only narrator of those missing hours, and his account must be viewed with great caution. In it, the authorities report, Mr. Aron stated that Leiby was alive until Tuesday night, when Mr. Aron killed him in a panic over the extensive search that the boy’s disappearance had inspired.

In this version of events, Leiby spent Tuesday in Mr. Aron’s house, watching television while Mr. Aron went to work. If the story is true, the boy was indulging a fascination with something that he had almost no experience with. He had crossed a bridge into a world that his community worked mightily to keep away.

On Thursday, four mourners who were leaving the Kletzky house stopped for a moment.

“There’s no TV in there,” said Barry Feldheim, 35. This is a common circumstance in the households of Borough Park, and the reason, he said, is simple: Television distorts reality and is not true to life as it is actually lived in the Hasidic community or elsewhere.

“We don’t want kids to see violence, murders,” Mr. Feldheim said. “Even romance.”

The absence of television is not a religious edict, at least as far as anyone could recall on the street on Thursday. It is a custom, and a protective one, said Rachel Eidlis, a schoolteacher. “It’s not trying to cover up or hide from the world,” Ms. Eidlis said. “When you watch these things on television, you lose sensitivity.”

Her husband, Benjamin Eidlis, said that computers were far more common, as it was all but impossible to survive in the business world without being online. The television, with its one-way stream, could not be seen as essential, and certainly not as desirable, he said.

OF course, it is entirely possible that the account of young Leiby watching television in Mr. Aron’s attic was created as a kind of wishful lie by a man who wanted to endow the boy’s time in his care with some meaning beyond the deranged brutality of its end.

The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn were the subject of a 1997 documentary, “A Life Apart,” which followed the styles of life, dress, prayer and association that drew clear boundaries around the local Hasidic communities. These were the elements of a psychic and physical village. There, a boy about to turn 9 could walk home from his day camp, fearless among the familiar.

Levi Aron’s father works at B&H Photo, a business run by the Hasidim of Borough Park. Every kind of modern technology can be bought there: televisions and DVRs and computers and cameras. Vans pick up the employees and bring them back to their neighborhood at the end of the workday. On Fridays, they are parked outside early in the afternoon, so the men can leave work on time to get home by sundown, when the observance of the Sabbath begins. The store does not reopen until Sunday.

These are the habits of a world that knows and protects itself. As Leiby’s disappearance became widely known on Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of hands posted fliers with his picture.

The village would turn itself inside out on Tuesday, with legions of people searching for any trace of the boy who was supposedly watching a forbidden television in an attic.

 

Colin Moynihan and Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    In a World That Shelters, a Killing Stuns in Many Ways, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/nyregion/sheltered-hasidic-community-stunned-by-kletzky-killing.html

Police Sort Through Suspect’s Account

as He Pleads Not Guilty in Killing

July 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and AL BAKER

For a couple of hours on Monday night, Leiby Kletzky, 8, sat in a car outside a catering hall in Rockland County, N.Y.; the windows were rolled down, if the man suspected in his killing is to be believed.

More than 400 people were at a wedding inside the hall, including the man who had driven Leiby there, Levi Aron, 35. No one apparently noticed the little boy sitting there on the warm night. And no one knew then that Borough Park, Brooklyn, was mobilizing to find him.

Leiby was 35 miles from home, where his world was defined by family and religion and community and Mr. Aron’s by dead-end jobs and marriages that fell apart. They encountered each other on a sidewalk in Borough Park, one a lost child who needed directions, the other an adult from nearby Kensington who indicated he could help.

On Thursday, three days after they met on the sidewalk, the police were trying to sort through Mr. Aron’s account of how he had met the boy, and what had happened during the undetermined time that they spent together before the boy was suffocated and dismembered.

Mr. Aron appeared in Brooklyn Criminal Court and pleaded not guilty to charges of kidnapping and murdering Leiby. Judge William Miller ordered him held without bail and said he would have to undergo a psychological evaluation after his lawyer said Mr. Aron might have mental problems.

The lawyer, Pierre Bazile said, “He has indicated to me that he hears voices and has had some hallucinations.” He also said Mr. Aron had “indicated despondency and concern for his well-being.”

Mr. Aron, in a green-checked shirt, stood stone-faced.

The police said Mr. Aron had scratches on his wrists and arms that they believed were indications of a struggle. They did not have a precise time of death, a law enforcement official said, but believed it was on Tuesday. There is “nothing to indicate otherwise at this point,” said the official, who, like others discussing the case, insisted on anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

The police said Mr. Aron told them that when he realized how many people were looking for Leiby — thousands of volunteers had joined the search, putting missing-person posters on street corners and in subway stations and all but turning the neighborhood inside-out — he became afraid to take him to his parents or to the authorities.

The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said at a news conference that that was when Mr. Aron, according to his account, had panicked and suffocated Leiby. Mr. Aron told the police that he had smothered the boy with a towel. Leiby, Mr. Aron told the police, “fought back a little bit until eventually he stopped breathing,” according to his confession, portions of which were reported by NBC New York.

Mr. Kelly said there were also ligature marks on Leiby’s body, indicating that Mr. Aron might have bound him as he killed him.

Mr. Kelly said detectives had corroborated much of what Mr. Aron had told them.

The police said Mr. Aron offered Leiby a ride — Monday had been Leiby’s first day to leave day camp by himself, and he had ended up blocks from a rendezvous point with his mother.

The boy had asked for directions to a Judaica bookstore, and Mr. Aron said he knew the way. He also offered Leiby a chance to watch television, something the police said the boy could not do at home.

But Mr. Aron could not find the bookstore, and ended up taking Leiby along to the wedding, at Ateres Charna in Rockland, north of New York City. While the police have confirmed that Mr. Aron was at the wedding, they have not yet determined with certainty whether Leiby was there, too.

“He indicated that he left the boy in the car, when he stopped in,” a law enforcement official said, “and he didn’t stay that long, because his back was bothering him and he left the kid in the car with the windows open.”

It was not clear if the bride and bridegroom were aware that Leiby was outside in the car.

The following morning, Mr. Aron said, he left Leiby in his attic apartment when he went to his job at a hardware supply store. Mr. Aron told the police that the boy was still asleep when he left for work.

While it was not clear exactly when Leiby was killed, detectives were confident that the parts of Leiby’s body found in a Dumpster on 20th Street had been put there not long before the police went to Mr. Aron’s apartment. “He got rid of it Tuesday going into Wednesday,” the law enforcement official said, adding that detectives were working on the theory that Mr. Aron had driven to the Dumpster alone.

Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the police, said crime scene technicians had checked the yard of the house where Mr. Aron lived — his father and uncle have apartments on the lower floors — and found no evidence that anyone had been buried there.

As Mr. Aron was being arraigned, relatives and friends struggled to make sense of the case against him. Some talked of his fondness for karaoke, saying he had spent weekend evenings at karaoke bars on Long Island. Keith Pappas, the general manager of the South Levittown Lanes bowling alley, which has a bar that schedules regular karaoke events, said that he did not know Mr. Aron, but that bartenders and other customers did; they told Mr. Pappas, he said, that Mr. Aron did not mingle much with others.

In Brooklyn, neighbors said he had been hit by a car when he was young. Louis, 41, who said he had known the Aron family since the 1970s and asked that his last name not be published, recalled that Mr. Aron’s mother had died several years ago. He said that Mr. Aron’s parents were planning to separate when she died.

Court records show that in 2004, Mr. Aron married an Israeli woman, Diana Diunov. They divorced a year later, and in 2007 he married Deborah M. Parnell and moved to Tennessee, where she had come from. Ms. Parnell’s mother, Carol Wagner, recalled the time before the wedding. She spoke of an engagement party in New York at Mr. Aron’s father’s home, the same house where parts of Leiby’s body were found early Wednesday, in the freezer of Mr. Aron’s refrigerator.

But the marriage fell apart, and Mr. Aron returned to Brooklyn. Co-workers at the hardware-supply company described him as a loner who had had no contact with customers.

Sam Lowy, 35, a salesman, said Mr. Aron was on the job on Tuesday, when other store employees helped search for Leiby. “We all searched,” Mr. Lowy said, “the employees, everyone went out, Jews and gentiles, to search.” He added, “It hit us harder.”

 

Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, Colin Moynihan, Noah Rosenberg and Tim Stelloh from New York, and Andrew O’Reilly from Spring Valley, N.Y.

    Police Sort Through Suspect’s Account as He Pleads Not Guilty in Killing, NYT, 14.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/nyregion/suspect-pleads-not-guilty-in-leiby-kletzkys-death-and-offers-account.html

Thousands Mourn Boy Killed in Brooklyn

July 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and JULIET LINDERMAN

With shock and grief clutching Borough Park in Brooklyn, thousands of mourners and residents poured into a neighborhood courtyard Wednesday evening for the funeral of an 8-year-old Brooklyn boy who was abducted and killed this week as he walked home from camp.

The funeral for the boy, which was held entirely in Yiddish, swelled to capacity before its scheduled start time at 8:30, prompting many of the thousands who could not get in to gather behind police barricades, crowding neighborhood streets as they waited to pay their respects to the young boy, Leiby Kletzky, whose remains were discovered earlier in the day. Throngs of police officers and members of a local security patrol group, the shomrim, kept order as a steady stream of visitors poured into the courtyard, adjacent to a school between 16th and 17th Avenues, within two blocks of where the boy lived. One shomrim volunteer estimated that close to 8,000 people were in attendance.

“We need to separate like the Red Sea so the family can get through,” one officer announced.

Inside, a large gathering of mourners in Orthodox and traditional modest dress — men and women separated as per custom — clutched leather-bound prayer books and chanted, some in tears, others stoic. Two elderly women known for their charity work passed around tins for donations, or tzedakah. Bottles of water and boxes of tissues were passed through the audience. Upfront, the women in Leiby’s family sat together, their heads covered in scarves and their faces etched with grief.

The service began shortly before 10 p.m., and was marked by a speech from the boy’s father, whose voice shook as he stood before the crowd and addressed his dead son, saying in Yiddish that he was lucky to have had him, if only for nine years.

“Thank God we had him,” he said, according to a translator.

And then, overcome by emotion, he went silent. A moment later the principal of Leiby’s school spoke.

“He got lost, he got lost,” he said, according to the translator. “There’s nothing to say, he got lost. God wanted it.” Several rabbis also spoke in Yiddish through intermittent tears, repeatedly breaking down. They extolled the boy’s good qualities, and reminded the community to be careful, urging the adults to protect their children. At one point the rabbi of the synagogue that Leiby attended recalled the boy’s devotion to his studies.

“He was such a good learner,” the rabbi said, according to a translation. “He used to pray all day. It was a pleasure to have him in the class. We’re not the boss. Everything is as God wanted it.”

The funeral came only hours after the family learned the news that their search for Leiby, who disappeared on Monday, had come to a devastating end. According to investigators, the boy — who would have turned 9 this month — was on his way to meet his parents after leaving the Nechmod Day Camp, at the Yeshiva Boyan at 1205 44th Street, on Monday afternoon when he got lost and asked for directions. His parents reported him missing, and surveillance footage later showed him in the company of a man the police identified as Levi Aron, 35, a local supply store clerk. The police said Mr. Aron took Leiby to his home, killed him, and cut up his body, parts of which were found in a refrigerator-freezer in Mr. Aron’s tiny attic apartment, less than two miles from the Kletzky home. He was charged Wednesday night with second degree murder. The news devastated the tight-knit community of Borough Park, where residents had raised reward money for Leiby’s return and formed search parties, scouring the streets in the days he was missing.

“We feel like we lost one of our own,” said Leah Rosenberg, a resident who showed up at the funeral. “He was everybody’s child. There was a pregnant woman dismembered in this neighborhood about 20 years ago. This brings it all back. It’s like ripping open an old wound. It’s a new pain and an old pain.

“Our hearts convey our condolences,” she added, before bursting into tears.

Some of those in attendance said they had viewed their community as relatively safe, and noted that a certain level of trust that had been implicit had suddenly been destroyed.

“I don’t even know the family, but I feel like it’s a community tragedy,” said Claire Wercberger, 54, a nursery school teacher who attended the funeral. “I’m devastated, horrified. There are no words. To say it’s a nightmare is an understatement. Everybody is heartbroken. It’s an unbelievable situation. It makes me much more on guard as a teacher and as a community member.”

Adriane Quinlan and Liz Robbins contributed reporting.

    Thousands Mourn Boy Killed in Brooklyn, NYT, 13.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/nyregion/thousands-mourn-boy-killed-in-brooklyn.html

With Boy’s Killing, Parents Confront Worst Fears

July 13, 2011
The New York Times
By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

They are the road rules of parenting, the self-defense tips of childhood, the maxims passed down for generations: Don’t talk to strangers. Don’t sit in the last car of the subway train. If you are lost, look for someone in a uniform. If something bad happens, scream!

Every day, parents put their faith in those rules and send their children, with a silent prayer, off into the world, trying to push away the knowledge that something bad could happen, as if thinking it would make it come true.

On Wednesday, it did come true for one Brooklyn family, as the body of 8-year-old Leiby Kletzky was found dismembered two days after he disappeared on a short walk between his day camp and where he was supposed to meet his parents. The boy, who had implored his parents for permission to walk home from camp alone, got lost and ran into a stranger who, the police said, kidnapped and killed him.

For parents across New York City, the tragedy set off a wave of fear, self-doubt and sometimes fatalism, not seen perhaps for 32 years, since Etan Patz, who was 6, vanished after begging to be allowed to walk alone to the bus stop, just two blocks from his home in SoHo.

The rules of parenting suddenly seemed flimsy, and the world became a scarier place, despite the relatively low crime rate.

“It hasn’t happened for a long time,” said Leslie Wolf-Creutzfeldt, a mother of two on the Upper West Side. “One feels kind of safe about the city, because there are so many people around. But if it happens to be a crazy person, then you realize, maybe, there’s nothing you can do.”

Parents tried to banish the unseemly relief that it was not their child who was taken. Some, if only because it was too painful to imagine otherwise, expressed the wishful conviction that they, through some marvel of judgment or technology, would navigate the minefields of parenting better.

“When I heard about the story of the little boy in Brooklyn, I thought about the number of blocks he was walking alone,” said Julliete Jones, a divorced mother of a 7-year-old boy, publishing consultant and Gramercy resident. “Maybe at 10 or 11 years old I will let him walk alone. But after this, I’m rethinking that.”

Some parents confessed that they monitor their children obsessively in a way not possible a generation ago, tracking their location through iPhones, or calling them repeatedly on their cellphones, even if — especially if — there was no answer.

“You live with that constant fear,” said Donna Zilkha, a mother of three children who grew up on the Upper East Side. “You have to give them the key at 12, because the kid needs to know you trust them. You hope they know about the doormen, the safe havens.”

But to a large degree, the fear is internal, and never leaves. “My daughter just moved into an apartment on the Lower East Side,” Ms. Zilkha said. “And every night, I think about the broken lock.”

Raising children is a constant calculus. What age is too young for them to go out alone? When do you begin stunting their independence if you are overprotective?

A Hasidic woman who lived down the block from the slain boy, and whose husband helped with the search, wrestled with that balancing act.

When she sent her two sons to school on Wednesday morning, Leiby was fresh in her mind as she counseled them, “Don’t talk to strangers,” said the woman, who asked not to be named for fear of upsetting her neighbors. But, she said, “I don’t want to scare him too much either; I want him to like his life.” On the other hand, she said, when parents are overprotective, “kids feel love that way too.”

Heinous crimes against children are nothing new in the life of the city, as numerous writers have known. In “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a rapist tries to attack the main character on the verge of her 14th birthday.

Part of what made the Patz case so agonizing was that the blond, blue-eyed, 50-pound boy disappeared without a trace, giving rise to missing children campaigns, like photographs on milk cartons. (Although no one has been charged, the lead suspect in the Patz case is serving a prison sentence for child molestation in Pennsylvania.) New York City’s murder rate was headed toward a record high of 1,733 in 1979, and kept climbing, feeding a sense that the city was a place where children should not walk alone. Now it has reached historic lows. Yet the security that parents feel is always tempered by unease. No parents want their child to be that statistic.

But, said Lenore Skenazy, who has championed letting children navigate the city on their own in her book, “Free-Range Kids,” “the chances of being that one are so small it’s almost something you cannot prepare for or defend against.”

“The Etan Patz case was such a shocker,” Ms. Skenazy said. “This one I think will reverberate the same way.” But she has no regrets, she said, that she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone.

“It’s still hard to remember that Etan Patz was 32 years ago,” she said, “and we haven’t, thank God, had anything like that in our city for an entire generation of children going to school and playing in parks and waiting at bus stops and coming home — and having their own children.”

 

Jenny Anderson, Mick Meenan and Adriane Quinlan contributed reporting.

    With Boy’s Killing, Parents Confront Worst Fears, NYT, 13.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/nyregion/boys-death-causes-parents-to-ponder-worst-nightmare.html

A Schizophrenic, a Slain Worker,

Troubling Questions

June 16, 2011
The New York Times
By DEBORAH SONTAG

BOSTON — Last November, Yvette Chappell found herself increasingly anxious that her 27-year-old son, Deshawn James Chappell, was spiraling downward into deep psychosis. He was exhibiting intense paranoia and calling late at night to complain about deafening voices in his head.

For over a year, Mr. Chappell, a schizophrenic with a violent criminal record, had seemed relatively stable in a state-financed group home in Charlestown. But after a fight with another resident, Mr. Chappell was shuttled from home to home, and his mother believed that he had fallen off his medication along the way.

Ms. Chappell said she had tried to communicate this concern to his caretakers, but it was not until mid-January that she found somebody who listened.

The woman introduced herself as Stephanie and said she would be Mr. Chappell’s counselor at his new group home in Revere. She confirmed that Mr. Chappell had stopped getting his antipsychotic injections but made his mother a promise: “She said: ‘Don’t worry. I’m going to get Deshawn back on track.’

“I thought everything was going to be O.K. because he had somebody who cared,” Ms. Chappell said, her voice breaking.

Two days after that conversation, Stephanie Moulton, a petite, street-smart 25-year-old, was dead, and Mr. Chappell was accused of murdering her. They had been alone at the Revere home, where, her family said, Ms. Moulton generally worked a solo shift. Mr. Chappell beat her, stabbed her repeatedly and then dumped her partially nude body in a church parking lot, prosecutors said.

The killing on Jan. 20 stunned the mental health care community in Massachusetts. The “shattering event,” as one former state mental health official called it, occurred days before Gov. Deval Patrick, a Democrat, released his proposed budget, which would slash mental health spending for the third year in a row. And it raised the timely but uncomfortable question of whether such continuous belt-tightening had played a role in Ms. Moulton’s death.

Many people wondered aloud whether the system had failed both the suspect and the victim. How had Ms. Moulton ended up alone in a home with a psychotic man who had a history of violence and was off his medication? How had Mr. Chappell been allowed to deteriorate without setting off alarms? Should he have still been living in a group home, or did he need the tighter supervision of a hospital?

“People are reeling right now,” Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, a former medical director for the State Department of Mental Health, said after the killing. “Will this case be the canary in the coal mine? Will it signal that we’ve gone too far in reducing client-staff ratios, in closing hospitals, in pushing independence for people who may still be too sick?”

Massachusetts, which compared with other states faces a relatively modest budget shortfall of $1.5 billion, is hardly alone in cutting money for mental health care. State mental health departments, serving vulnerable populations with little political clout, almost always get disproportionately squeezed during tough times. During the current fiscal crisis, many states have sharply reduced both inpatient and community-based mental health care.

Yet Massachusetts has been in the mental health vanguard since it opened the country’s first large public asylum in the early 19th century. It handled deinstitutionalization better than most states, forging a comparatively robust community system — group homes, outpatient clinics, day treatment centers — to replace shuttered hospitals. And it has a Democratic-led legislature, historically progressive on social welfare policy, as well as a governor who has acknowledged his own wife’s battle with crippling depression.

The state mental health commissioner, Barbara A. Leadholm, said she believed her department was providing high-quality care despite the budget cuts it was obliged to accommodate.

“We have to be responsive to what the administration and the legislature feel they can financially afford,” she said, adding that a “major recontracting initiative” had transformed the system positively while cuts were being made.

But advocates for the mentally ill, along with mental health care providers and experts, paint a picture of an underfinanced department straining to meet the varying needs of its clients — 19,900 people like Mr. Chappell with severe and persistent mental illness, many of whom function quite well in subsidized housing with support services.

Over the last two years, the department has increased its reliance on private community providers who say they are underfinanced and struggling to stay afloat. It has closed one state hospital and a small inpatient psychiatric center. It has whittled its client list by almost a thousand. And it has laid off a quarter of its case managers, severing important relationships for thousands of people with serious mental illness and transferring them to younger, lower-paid workers in the private sector.

In the cuts being debated now, Mr. Patrick proposes to eliminate roughly a quarter of the 626 long-term care beds left in the state’s psychiatric hospital system. This unnerves many mental health professionals. Not only do they believe that there are already far too few beds for new cases — “It’s harder to get into a state hospital than into Harvard Medical School,” Dr. Duckworth said — but they also worry about discharging long-institutionalized patients into communities whose resources are clearly strained.

“It’s sort of a cross your fingers and pray approach,” said Scott Bezzini, a mental health outreach worker who is on leave to work for his union.

Hospital, corrections and municipal officials have long complained about people with mental illness crowding emergency rooms, homeless shelters and prisons in Massachusetts, saying mental health budget cuts transfer obligations to them. A quarter of the state’s inmates now need mental health treatment, compared with 15 percent in 1998, Department of Correction data show.

The first time Mr. Chappell secured a state hospital bed — and the treatment that comes with it — was when he ended up behind bars. After a conviction for assault and battery in 2007, he was sent briefly to a prison psychiatric hospital, Bridgewater State. That is where he is now being detained once again.

 

The Arraignment

On the day in late March when Mr. Chappell was arraigned on first-degree murder charges, Stephanie Moulton’s relatives filed grimly into a high-ceilinged courtroom in Boston.

They were unprepared, they said later, for some of the details that would be revealed: the “multiple, deep penetrating stab wounds to her neck,” the “blunt impact injuries to her head, torso and upper extremities,” the pants and underwear “dangling from one ankle.” The victim’s fiancé, Ryan Papazian, face hidden beneath a Bruins cap, bounced his legs as the facts of the case were read.

Seated beside his court-appointed lawyer, Jeffrey T. Karp, Mr. Chappell appeared dazed. He looked backward myopically, and his mother put her index finger to her lips and emphatically mouthed “Shh.”

A court forensic psychologist testified that Mr. Chappell, despite two months of treatment at Bridgewater, was “still very, very psychotic.”

The psychologist, Jeffrey Miner, cited non sequiturs that Mr. Chappell had spouted in a private session. He said that Mr. Chappell, a native of nearby Chelsea, told him variously that he hailed from Texas and rooted for the Washington Redskins and that he wanted “a lawyer from U.C.L.A. with a 3.5 grade-point average.” When Dr. Miner asked a follow-up question, Mr. Chappell responded, “Masseuse.”

“My sense is he is no way competent to stand trial,” Dr. Miner told the judge, recommending that he be returned to Bridgewater to see if his competency could be established through further treatment. The judge agreed. A trial date of April 26, 2012, was set.

Ms. Moulton’s relatives sat frozen, mouths agape, on the edge of their seats. Suddenly, her fiancé sprang to his feet, whisked off his cap and hurled it at the defendant. “Clear the court, clear the court,” the court officers ordered, tackling Mr. Papazian as other relatives rushed forward.

Kimberly Flynn, Ms. Moulton’s mother, shouted: “He kills my daughter, and you’re roughing up my family? He sits there and pretends he’s crazy, and you come down on us?”

Mr. Chappell was hustled away, and his mother fled, shaking. “My heart goes out to them because I am also in the same shoes,” Ms. Chappell said later, explaining that her brother had recently been murdered and that she alternately visited courthouses as the mother of a murder suspect and the sister of a murder victim. “But that was not cool. There’s something wrong with my child.”

 

A Desire to Help, Then Fear

A few weeks later, Ms. Flynn, 46, wearing blue scrubs after her shift as a visiting nurse, sat calmly in her kitchen in a public housing unit outside Boston. She showed off the centerpiece she had designed for a memorial fund-raiser at the Peabody Elks Lodge — a vase filled with marbles and her daughter’s favorite knickknacks: a frog, a butterfly, mini flip-flops.

Ms. Flynn said she hoped to raise enough money to bury Ms. Moulton’s ashes. “I got to put my daughter to rest,” she said. “She’s still upstairs in an urn on her bureau.”

At the kitchen table, Ms. Moulton’s father, a welder, and her teenage brothers wore new tattoos — “Stephanie” written atop a cross adorned with a rose.

Ms. Moulton, the first in her family to graduate from college, got an associate’s degree in mental health and a bachelor’s in social work. She was drawn to the field because she was close to an uncle with schizophrenia and had observed intimately the effects of the illness on his family, said her brother Anthonee Flynn, 18.

“Personally, I told her she was crazy,” he said of her career choice, “but she wanted to help.”

After graduating, Ms. Moulton managed a Victoria’s Secret store for a year before landing an entry-level position with the North Suffolk Mental Health Association, which, like other agencies under contract with the state, offers starting salaries of $12 to $14 an hour.

“With the resources we have, with the dollars in the system, we can’t pay the kind of wages people should get for this work,” said Jackie K. Moore, the chief executive of North Suffolk, one of the state’s largest behavioral health care providers, with an annual budget of $43 million.

Over the last half-century, as Massachusetts eliminated over 20,000 long-term psychiatric hospital beds and many of the public, unionized jobs that went with them, the state developed a network of private agencies, mostly nonprofit, to provide care for severe mental illness.

The community system never had enough money, many experts say, but recent budget cuts, combined with Medicaid reimbursement rates that did not keep pace with rising costs, have seriously weakened it.

“The outpatient treatment system in Massachusetts is dying on the vine,” said Vicker V. DiGravio III, the chief executive of the Association for Behavioral Healthcare, which represents providers in the state.

Providers have trouble finding psychiatrists and other clinicians who are willing to work in the community; they depend on recent social work graduates, who usually move on quickly to better-paying jobs at hospitals or in private practice. They also have difficulty recruiting and retaining quality workers for group homes, and many hired do not have even have the college degree that Ms. Moulton possessed.

“The end result,” Mr. DiGravio said, “is a system where the folks with the least professional experience are serving the clients with the most intensive needs — because the Department of Mental Health serves only those people with the most severe mental illness.”

At North Suffolk, workers in group homes get at least a week’s training, as Ms. Moulton most likely did before starting her job at a residence in Chelsea.

“People go through an orientation,” Ms. Moore said. “They learn about mental illness. They learn ways to de-escalate a situation.”

Initially, Ms. Moulton loved her new job, where she supervised residents, accompanied them to appointments, distributed medication and cooked, her mother said. “Stephanie was like me,” she said. “We have the patience of saints when it comes to patients.”

Then, one Friday last fall, something happened. The residents were receiving small cash allowances, Ms. Flynn said, and one, believing he was owed more than he got, “flipped out.” He screamed, tossed furniture, threw objects. Ms. Moulton, 5-foot-1 and about 100 pounds, locked herself in an office and called for help.

Afterward, she grew frightened.

“She had to take anxiety pills,” her brother said, “and she started carrying around a knife.”

“A knife?” her mother said, looking alarmed. “She did?”

“She didn’t have it on her the day that stuff happened,” he said, referring to her stabbing death. “I found it in her room.”

Ms. Moulton began making plans to pursue a nursing degree. She also asked North Suffolk for a transfer and started working a shift from 3 to 11 p.m. at the home in Revere. Her family said she always worked alone at the home, which usually had seven residents, whom she described as easy and placid.

“She said they were all old people, in their 50s and stuff, so there was nothing to worry about,” Ms. Flynn said. “When this guy was sent in there, she must not have known what she was dealing with.”

 

A Rapid Descent

Tucked away in a recessed corner of the basement cafeteria of Massachusetts General Hospital, Mr. Chappell’s mother kissed an old picture of her son dressed in a white tuxedo.

“He took a girl with a prosthetic leg and arm to her senior prom because nobody else would,” said Ms. Chappell, an operations associate in the hospital’s gastroenterology department. “That was the kind of stuff he’d do before he changed.”

Ms. Chappell, 44, and her husband, a carpenter, raised five children in Chelsea. The second oldest, Deshawn, a stocky 5-foot-7, was a running back on his high school football team and went to work as a deliveryman after graduation. He had been an outgoing, churchgoing boy, and his mother thought he would grow up to be a minister.

Ms. Chappell said she first grew concerned when her son, a snappy dresser, began neglecting his appearance and wearing “his pants hanging all the way down his behind.” But that was a style. It was when he stopped talking about God and started talking about the Devil that her worry deepened.

“He would say the Devil was telling him to do things,” she said. “He would talk about curses and hexes and a lot of things that didn’t make sense.”

Symptoms of schizophrenia usually manifest in men during late adolescence and early adulthood. Ms. Chappell saw in her son what she called “familiar patterns” — her mother suffered from schizophrenia, too, she said.

Ms. Chappell said she urged her son to seek help but had little control over his life. He moved out of her home and, as his condition deteriorated, started getting in trouble with the law.

The arrests began in the summer of 2003 when Mr. Chappell, then 19, was charged with armed robbery and assault. The victim was a homeless man with $96 in his pocket. Mr. Chappell accosted the man twice, slashing his forehead the first time and then punching him in the eye, causing an injury that required surgery, according to court records. The charges were dismissed.

Mr. Chappell’s record also includes drug and alcohol charges; he was apparently drinking and smoking marijuana while his schizophrenia was emerging, which can be a combustible mix.

By the time he turned 21, he was in such agony that he asked for help, his mother said. He told her that the voices in his head prevented him from sleeping and that he was showering constantly because his skin was crawling. He said he felt so angry that he feared he would hurt himself or somebody else, and he asked her to take him to her hospital, she said.

Mr. Chappell was admitted to Massachusetts General for a couple of weeks. That is when schizophrenia was diagnosed and he was prescribed antipsychotic medication, his mother said. Over the next couple of years, though, he did not take his medication consistently because the side effects bothered him, she said.

He was hospitalized in acute-care hospitals at least four more times, including once in a center known for substance abuse treatment. During that time, he was also arrested several more times on assault charges, which were ultimately dismissed.

Because Mr. Chappell’s medical records are private, it cannot be determined if acute-care hospitals tried to discharge him to a state hospital for continuing care but, as sometimes happens, could not find a bed available.

“This guy, with his history, certainly would have spent time in a state hospital 20 years ago,” said Dr. William Fisher, a psychiatry professor at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

 

A Focus on Recovery

Deinstitutionalization was the result of a struggle to end protracted and unnecessary confinement. It was also a way for states to offload considerable expense to the federal government.

Care in “institutions for mental disease” has never been covered by Medicaid; community care is. Indeed, in the view of experts on public psychiatry like Dr. Jeffrey Geller of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, cost-shifting has been “the major driving force” behind deinstitutionalization, “with the philosophy a tag-on.”

Community care, if done right, is nonetheless widely considered the most humane and effective way to treat people with serious mental illness.

But many in the field worry that deinstitutionalization has gone too far, stripping states of the minimum number of long-term psychiatric beds needed to accommodate people during acute stages of illness, as well as those with high-risk behaviors that make discharge dangerous. Massachusetts will have 466 such beds if proposed cuts are approved.

Today only 3 percent of the Mental Health Department’s clients live in state hospitals. For those in the community, the department has shifted in recent years from a model of care that sees serious mental illness as a long-term disability to a “recovery” model, which seeks to move clients into increasingly less restrictive, less supervised and less costly living situations.

“It’s all about getting people discharged as opposed to getting them treatment,” said Jill Homer, a state-employed case manager for three decades, who nonetheless feels that the system has “fumbled through” its downsizing fairly well.

Dr. Marie H. Hobart, medical director of Community Healthlink in Worcester, said she worried that the new approach “pretends” serious mental illness is linear, that people who improve will never suffer setbacks. She said that seriously ill clients were being allowed to leave the care of the Department of Mental Health, with some ending up homeless or in jail.

“In the past, D.M.H. would recognize that this is a person with schizophrenia, a condition that is ongoing and not something that can be cured,” she said.

Jennifer Ives, 37, a client of the department, said she appreciated the new focus on recovery. “It’s saying you’re not going to be like this forever,” said Ms. Ives, who has borderline personality disorder. But the recent loss of her case manager of eight years has made her feel isolated and anxious about “slipping backwards.”

“I was highly upset when she told me she had to terminate my case,” Ms. Ives said. “She helped me put out fires when they were just a little smoke. She was my mediator with the system, and there are real flaws with the system. Nobody knows what the other hand is doing. Nobody ever has time for you.”

One mother of a grown man with schizoaffective disorder said her son’s condition, relatively stable for 15 years, declined when the department started pushing him to become more independent. “We started hearing ‘He can take his medication on his own,’ ” said the mother, who asked that her name be withheld to respect her son’s privacy.

“He lost his therapist,” she said. “He lost his case manager. The professional level of the workers he encountered was lower. And our son was not able to take care of himself. He was not eating properly, he started playing around with his medications, and he just became very, very symptomatic. In the end, we got him checked into a private psychiatric hospital. It was his first hospitalization in 15 years.”

 

Within the System

For young adults with new psychotic disorders like Mr. Chappell, becoming a client of the Department of Mental Health is difficult. “You have to have had a lot of trouble to get into the system,” Dr. Hobart said.

Mr. Chappell finally made it in after his fifth arrest on assault charges resulted in a conviction.

That arrest occurred in November 2006 after Mr. Chappell’s stepfather, who had raised him and occasionally hired him to work construction, dismissed him from a job. Mr. Chappell, using “an unknown hard object,” responded by fracturing three bones in his stepfather’s left eye socket, a police report said. When officers arrived, the stepfather was “holding his head with a cloth and had blood running from his mouth.”

In 2007, Mr. Chappell, sentenced to a year in jail but required to serve only three months, ended up at the prison psychiatric hospital. When his mother visited him there, she said, she was heartened to see the effects of an enforced medication regimen. “This was the son I raised,” she said. “He talked about going back to school and getting a college degree.”

After his release, Mr. Chappell spent nearly a year living with his grandmother before he got off a waiting list and into a group home in Charlestown. That living situation appeared to stabilize him, his mother said, although she thinks he mostly stayed in his room and did not participate in day programs. He got antipsychotic injections every other week from a nurse at a clinic until he apparently stopped going.

Ms. Moore, the chief executive of North Suffolk, would not discuss Mr. Chappell’s case. Asked what her employees did if residents became noncompliant with their medication, she said: “I don’t like to use the word ‘compliant.’ That implies you can force people to take medication, which you can’t.” Still, she said, “Our staff is trained to observe and document, to note and report any changes, any symptomology. We would not ignore it.”

When Mr. Chappell went home for Thanksgiving, his behavior was alarming. “He was talking intensely about people watching him,” his mother said. “He felt too uneasy to leave the house. When Shawn was on his medicine, you could tell. He was quiet. He was not agitated like he was then.”

After that, Ms. Chappell called the home in Charlestown one day and learned that her son had been transferred after fighting, she said. She tracked him to a temporary residence in Chelsea. She called there repeatedly, but nobody returned her calls.

Her son, she said, “felt like they weren’t helping him anymore. He felt like they were bouncing him all around.” He declined to join the family for Christmas because he did not have gifts. He began phoning relatives and “making delusional statements,” said Mr. Karp, his lawyer. “I uncovered many witnesses who describe his deterioration as obvious.”

Over all, the risk of violence from people with mental disorders is considered low. But studies have shown that it can be elevated by various factors apparent in Mr. Chappell’s profile — delusions and hallucinations, a lack of treatment or failure to take medication, abuse of alcohol or drugs. The strongest predictor of violence by a mentally ill person is believed to be past violence.

In early January, Mr. Chappell was transferred to the Revere home. Ms. Moulton was not the only one there who realized he was not taking his medication, Mr. Karp said. But it is unclear what she or anybody else knew about Mr. Chappell’s medical and criminal history. Many providers, doctors and workers say that collaboration on cases is rare in an increasingly fragmented system with fewer case managers.

After Ms. Moulton’s killing, a local newspaper headline said, “Group home blind to man’s criminal past.” But Ms. Moore said “an inference was made” that North Suffolk did not have criminal offender record information on Mr. Chappell because it does not run criminal background checks on all residents. She declined to elaborate.

That Ms. Moulton was left alone in the home with a resident was apparently not unusual. Under new contracts with providers, the state government does not specify staffing levels, and providers are free to allocate employees as they see fit while stretching dollars to cover their programs.

“If providers want to leave a house unstaffed or single-staffed, they can — and they do,” said Toby Fisher, a senior field policy specialist for the Service Employees International Union, which represents many of the state’s mental health workers.

Ms. Moore said: “There are times when there’s only one person on a shift. We have reduced the staffing at some places where we feel the clients are independent enough that they don’t need staff.”

 

That Day in January

On Jan. 20, Anthonee Flynn heard a few staccato raps on the door. “Cops were standing there, asking where my mom was,” he said. Located at work by her fiancé, Ms. Flynn was told there was an emergency. She asked if Anthonee was all right; he was. “I said, ‘Stephanie’s dead, isn’t she?’ ” She imagined a car accident. A state trooper arrived to escort her to a police station.

“He said Stephanie was murdered, that they knew who the man was and that he was one of the patients,” Ms. Flynn said. “I was screaming and screaming and screaming.”

Prosecutors say that shortly after Ms. Moulton arrived to work a day shift, the other residents left to attend programs. She had been scheduled to accompany Mr. Chappell to a counseling session. Another employee stopped by to pick them up and discovered blood in the driveway where Ms. Moulton usually parked her Chrysler PT Cruiser. The car was missing.

Mr. Chappell killed Ms. Moulton inside the residence, prosecutors say.

“The hardest part is not being able to know what transpired between those two,” Ms. Flynn said. “I keep thinking, was she yelling for me?”

After depositing her body in a parking lot, Mr. Chappell abandoned the car and stole clothes to replace his bloody ones, prosecutors say. He then called his grandmother.

His mother, at Massachusetts General, was getting calls from North Suffolk looking for him. “I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “Then I got a phone call stating that somebody saw my son on the news. Everything else is a blur.”

Learning that her son was heading toward her mother’s house in Roxbury, Ms. Chappell started driving there herself. She also alerted the police.

“Yes, I turned my son in,” she said. “I was nervous about how it might go down if I didn’t. I begged the police not to hurt him. When I got to my mom’s, I just hugged my son and I told him I loved him. He looked scared. Then they took him away. ”

 

Looking to the Future

After Ms. Moulton’s funeral drew hundreds of mourners, the mental health commissioner convened a task force to review the system’s safety and training practices.

At the first of a series of statewide hearings, in a cavernous college auditorium in Fitchburg, several panel members expressed discomfort with their mission.

“The overwhelming majority of consumers are not more dangerous than the general population, although there is a very small group that does cause concern,” said Dr. Kenneth Appelbaum, a co-chairman of the task force. “How to go about addressing safety concerns without adding stigma is a challenge.”

Rising to address the panel, Laurie Martinelli, the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in Massachusetts, said the issue raised by Ms. Moulton’s case — and by the subsequent killing of a homeless shelter employee — was not whether people with mental illness were violent.

“The elephant in the room is the state mental health budget,” she said. “Did the murders have something to do with funding cutbacks?”

The “historical budget levels” posted on the department’s Web site show a nearly 10 percent decline in appropriations for mental health from 2009 through 2011. Additional information requested for this article — on midyear cuts, budget supplements and trust fund spending — indicates that the money available to the department probably declined somewhat less, by about 6 percent.

Joellen Stone, a client of the department trained to help others with mental illness, told the panel that the people she counsels are living in “utter poverty — in apartments with bed bugs and rats and drug dealers in the hall.”

“They’re closing hospitals, and people are ending up in nursing homes or substandard housing. It just saddens me,” she said. “If we don’t get funding, we’re either on the street, in prison, dead or rather be dead. And when people are disempowered, that’s when they’re likely to become violent.”

Throughout the spring, the legislature, especially the Senate, showed resistance to the governor’s proposed mental health cuts. Budget reconciliation talks are taking place this month.

In mid-May, Mr. Chappell returned to court, standing taller and looking less puzzled. Judge Carol S. Ball said prison hospital officials now found him competent to assist in his own defense but acknowledged that “there’s a certain amount of in-and-out-ness.” Scrutinizing him from the rear of the courtroom, his mother noticed that he was mumbling to himself.

On the courthouse steps afterward, Ms. Flynn turned toward a warming sun and said she had finally buried her daughter the previous week. Exhausted by her loss, she had taken a leave from her job but could not stop thinking about what had happened in Revere.

She filed a wrongful death suit against North Suffolk and was planning to testify at the Statehouse about worker safety. She wanted answers, she said, and justice.

“Stephanie should be here now, planning her wedding and rolling her eyes at me like she always does,” Ms. Flynn said. “It was just totally unnecessary for her to get killed and murdered on the job when all she was trying to do was help people.”

    A Schizophrenic, a Slain Worker, Troubling Questions, R, 16.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/17/us/17MENTAL.html

Bright, Careful and Sadistic:

Profiling Long Island’s Mystery Serial Killer

April 21, 2011
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ and AL BAKER

He is most likely a white male in his mid-20s to mid-40s. He is married or has a girlfriend. He is well educated and well spoken. He is financially secure, has a job and owns an expensive car or truck. He may have sought treatment at a hospital for poison ivy infection. As part of his job or interests, he has access to, or a stockpile of, burlap sacks.

And he lives or used to live on or near Ocean Parkway on the South Shore of Long Island, where the police have found as many as 10 sets of human remains.

In interviews with serial-killer experts and criminologists, including a former F.B.I. profiler, a portrait emerges of the man who investigators on Long Island believe is responsible for several of the bodies they have discovered in the brush off Ocean Parkway since December. For the moment, he is known in law enforcement jargon only as Unsub, or unknown subject. No arrests have been made, and no suspects have been identified by the Suffolk County Police Department, which is leading the investigation.

Profiling serial murderers is far from a precise science. There are nearly three million people on Long Island, and the man who killed at least four prostitutes who advertised for clients on Craigslist is perhaps but one.

And the experts interviewed are sketching out a possible suspect based only on details of the case that have been publicly revealed, like the burlap sacks that the four women’s bodies were found in and the series of taunting phone calls that the killer is believed to have made to one victim’s relatives.

“This is someone who can walk into a room and seem like your average Joe,” said Scott Bonn, an assistant professor of sociology at Drew University in Madison, N.J., and a serial-killer researcher. “He has to be persuasive enough and rational enough that he is able to convince these women to meet him on these terms. He has demonstrated social skills. He may even be charming.”

One of the most important clues is where the 10 sets of remains were located: a 10-mile stretch of remote, poison-ivy-covered dunes just off Ocean Parkway on Jones Beach Island.

In selecting one large dumping ground, the killer has distinguished himself from Long Island’s last two convicted serial killers, Joel Rifkin and Robert Shulman, both of whom scattered the bodies of their victims throughout the region and the state. The killer’s attraction to a single out-of-the-way area suggests to several experts that he has an intimate knowledge of Jones Beach Island in general and Ocean Parkway in particular.

“He did not stumble upon that location,” said the former profiler, Jim Clemente, who retired from the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2009 as a senior supervisory special agent in the agency’s behavioral analysis unit in Quantico, Va. “He has some familiarity with it.”

Only 4 of the 10 sets of remains have been identified. Those four victims, who were found in December, were all in their 20s and had worked as prostitutes. Each one was reported missing in the summertime — on July 9, 2007; July 12, 2009; June 6, 2010; and Sept. 2, 2010. Investigators have said they believe that the four women were killed shortly after they were reported missing.

The summertime disappearances suggest several characteristics. “There may be a seasonal nature to his connection to the area, or to his fantasy and ritual,” Mr. Clemente said. “It may be the time his wife or kids or parents are away for the summer. There are many possibilities.”

The burlap sacks provide another clue. He could be using them either because they are part of his killing ritual or because they are the easiest cover he can find. Burlap, however, is no longer common, and it might be easier to trace than a plastic bag. “To me, it takes away from his forensic sophistication and criminal sophistication and adds to the possibility that he is more interested in this ritual aspect,” Mr. Clemente said.

Investigators believe that the deaths of the four prostitutes were the work of a serial killer, but they have not publicly declared a connection between the first four bodies from December and the unidentified ones that were found more recently. The remains of a child may be among those discovered recently, raising the possibility that the dunes may have been used over the years by more than one killer.

The Ocean Parkway serial killer is the third known to have preyed on prostitutes on Long Island in 22 years. Mr. Rifkin, a 34-year-old unemployed gardener from East Meadow, confessed to killing 17 women between 1989 and 1993, when he was arrested. Mr. Shulman, a 42-year-old postal worker from Hicksville, was convicted of killing and dismembering five prostitutes after he was arrested in 1996.

Mr. Shulman died of natural causes in 2006 while serving life without parole. Mr. Rifkin, now 52, is an inmate at the Clinton state prison in Dannemora, N.Y., near the Canadian border. He is serving a 203-year sentence and is officially eligible for parole on Feb. 26, 2197.

Besides singling out prostitutes, Mr. Rifkin, Mr. Shulman and the current killer have traits in common. All three are classified by serial-killer experts as organized killers.

Serial killers are often broadly defined as either organized or disorganized. The model of the disorganized killer is Jack the Ripper, the name given to the unidentified serial killer of prostitutes in London in the 1880s.

“A disorganized killer will be much more impulsive and haphazard,” said James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University who has studied serial killers for 30 years. “The disorganized killer is easy to catch. A lot of them don’t get enough victims to be defined as a serial killer. It takes a certain degree of care and carefulness to assemble dozens.”

Organized killers use such care. They often lead seemingly stable lives, and are methodical, intelligent and educated (Mr. Rifkin attended the State University of New York at Farmingdale, and Mr. Shulman had been a student at Hofstra University). And, like the Ocean Parkway killer, they often have a knowledge of police work and forensic techniques.

Some investigators have said the killer might be an active or former law enforcement officer, because his phone calls to the relative did not last long enough to pinpoint his location and were made from Times Square and other crowded sites, which would make it more difficult for the authorities to pick him out using surveillance cameras.

Long Island’s three serial killers might also share similar motives. Fred Klein, the former Nassau County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Mr. Rifkin, said that Mr. Rifkin was driven to kill not out of anger or revenge, but out of pleasure. Before he began killing prostitutes, Mr. Rifkin had been obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock’s 1972 film “Frenzy,” about a serial killer in London, and he told officials he used to masturbate to the scenes in which women were strangled.

“It was a psychosexual sadism,” said Mr. Klein, now an assistant professor at Hofstra Law School. “Most murders, there’s an additional motive to it. You want to eliminate witnesses, or there’s a fight, or you want to eliminate the person for some reason, such as a husband kills a wife or vice versa. Rifkin was killing people for the pure purpose of killing them. He would actually get sexual pleasure out of the murder.”

Serial-killer experts say they believe that the current killer is fueled by similar impulses, as shown by his desire to call the teenage sister of one of his victims — using the victim’s cellphone — and taunt her.

“That gives me an idea that he is a sadist,” said Mr. Clemente, the former profiler. “That would be reflected in his relationship and jobs. He is the one who laughs when a cat gets run over or a kid falls off his bike. He likes the suffering of others, and he really likes it when he can cause it or witness it.”

Mr. Rifkin has offered his own opinions lately about who he thinks the killer is, in prison interviews with reporters. He told Newsday last week that he believed that the killer could be a local resident who works in a job in which no one would be suspicious if he carried burlap bags.

“My guess,” Mr. Rifkin told the newspaper, “is it would be someone like a landscaper, contractor or a fisherman.”

Tim Stelloh contributed reporting.

    Bright, Careful and Sadistic: Profiling Long Island’s Mystery Serial Killer, NYT, 21.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/nyregion/long-island-serial-killer-gets-a-personality-profile.html

At Trial, Accuser Recalls, in Pieces, Night of Rape

April 14, 2011
The New York Times
By JOHN ELIGON

There were certain things that she remembered from that night, and some things that she did not.

She recalled dancing and drinking at a bar in Park Slope, Brooklyn, celebrating a job promotion with friends, but even that was a bit hazy. Her next recollection, she testified in the rape trial of two New York City police officers, was waking up in the back of a taxicab outside her apartment building in the East Village, lying on her side and vomiting.

Then she remembered tugging herself up the red handrail of her apartment building’s staircase, escorted by two men in navy blue suits with radios crackling.

Over the next few minutes, or perhaps hours, she drifted in and out of consciousness, she said. But she did remember waking up, lying face down on her bed, suddenly aware that someone was removing clothing from her legs.

Prosecutors in Manhattan have accused Officer, Kenneth Moreno of raping the woman while his partner, Officer Franklin Mata, stood guard in the woman’s apartment in the early hours of Dec. 7, 2008. At the time that the charges were announced, the accusation that two police officers called to help a drunken woman would assist or participate in her rape was so extraordinary that the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, characterized it as a “shocking aberration.”

On Thursday, the woman took the witness stand in State Supreme Court to recount what she could.

After her tights were removed, she said, she heard “the rustling of clothing and very loud Velcro ripping,” alluding to a sound that prosecutors have said matched that of a bullet-resistant vest being removed.

“I was so intoxicated I couldn’t say or do anything,” the woman testified. “My body was complete dead weight.”

The woman, 29, told the jury that she had blacked out, waking later as she was being raped, the man positioned behind her. Most jurors looked down as the woman told her story.

Prosecutors have revealed no physical evidence linking either officer to a rape, although the officers were caught by a surveillance camera entering her apartment four times. Still, the prosecution’s case may rely heavily on the credibility of a woman who was admittedly drunk at the time she says she was sexually assaulted, and cannot recall large portions of the evening.

The prosecution’s case is also focused on a tape recording she had made — part of a sting set up by prosecutors — of her confronting Officer Moreno days after the attack is alleged to have taken place.

Her testimony, which was graphic at times, came in fits and starts, interrupted as she sought to gain her composure. Clad in a gray blazer and charcoal slacks, she sat upright at first, speaking with poise and confidence into the microphone, though she said she was nervous. She answered questions without hesitation. But in other moments, her lips curled and face reddened, though her straight, dark hair remained unruffled as it sat below her shoulders.

As Coleen Balbert, an assistant district attorney, began asking the woman about the moment she said she had been raped, the woman’s voice began to sink and her body slumped.

After the woman testified to hearing the sound of Velcro, Ms. Balbert asked what happened next. She then sighed heavily.

“Um ... I remember ... sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. She broke down and Justice Gregory Carro, who is presiding over the case, ordered a five-minute recess.

When she resumed her testimony, she said she had passed out while being raped.

When she woke up, still face down, she felt a man’s presence, “and he’s actually in my bed to my left,” she said.

“He was talking to me,” she said. “He said something to the effect of, ‘Do you want me to stay?’ ”

She did not respond, she said, and the man kissed her on her shoulder.

She passed out again, she said. She woke up in her dark bedroom to the sound of two men speaking at the foot of her bed, she said.

“There’s a lot of commotion, and there’s the sound of rustling of clothing,” she said.

She felt hands pressing down on the mattress all around her, as though they were looking for something, she said.

“Out of the corner of my eye there’s a flashlight being flashed all over the bed,” she said.

She woke up the next morning with nothing on but a bra, she said, and immediately sensed that she had been raped. She got in the shower, began crying and scrubbing herself, “just tried to basically take my skin off.”

She noticed that the curtain in her living room was drawn and the blinds in the kitchen were down, although she always kept them open. She said she also noticed that her passport and the pillows on her couch were out of place.

Pressed by Ms. Balbert about how she felt that morning, the woman huffed as she spoke, stopped midsentence and put her hand over her mouth. Tears flowed, she sobbed and Justice Carro called for another break.

Later the woman said, “I couldn’t believe that two police officers who had been called there to help me had instead raped me and left me face down in a pool of vomit in my bed to die.”

Officer Moreno and Officer Mata had initially been sent to her address that night after a cabdriver called the police, asking for assistance to get the woman to her fifth-floor apartment. After escorting her upstairs and leaving, prosecutors said, the officers returned three times. Prosecutors have not specified during which visit they believe the woman was raped.

Although prosecutors on Thursday did not ask the woman if she could identify the officers who led her up to her apartment, she described them both as short with short, dark hair. They appeared to be either Italian or Latino and had New York accents, she testified.

Defense lawyers, who briefly cross-examined the woman in the afternoon and will resume on Friday, have argued that no sex took place and that the officers had returned to the apartment at the woman’s request. The lawyers said Officer Moreno, himself a recovering alcoholic, had been counseling the woman about what they said was her drinking problem. He kissed her on the shoulder, but nothing else, his lawyers have said.

During the secretly recorded confrontation days later, the woman pressed Officer Moreno, whom she described in court as “shifty eyed,” to tell her what had happened. On the recording, he can be heard denying several times that anything had occurred, then admitting to having worn a condom — a false admission, the defense has said, made only to appease the woman.

But the woman, who has since moved to California, had a different interpretation.

“This is going to sound kind of weird,” she testified, “but when he said it, he kind of relaxed and, actually, so did I, because he finally admitted what he did to me.”

    At Trial, Accuser Recalls, in Pieces, Night of Rape, NYT, 14.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/nyregion/at-rape-trial-of-officers-woman-tells-of-hazy-violent-night.html

Serial Killer in L.I. Case

Is Seen as Versed in Police Techniques

April 8, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM and JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN

Whoever killed four prostitutes, and possibly four other people, and then dumped their bodies in heavy underbrush along a beachfront causeway on Long Island appears to have a sophisticated understanding of police investigative techniques, according to people briefed on the case.

A series of taunting phone calls made to the teenage sister of one of the victims — calls that the police suspect came from the killer — were made from in or around some of the most crowded locations in New York City, including Madison Square Garden and Times Square, according to the people briefed on the case and to the mother of Melissa Barthelemy, that victim.

The locations, detectives say, were probably chosen because they allowed the caller to blend into crowds, so that if investigators pinpointed his location from the cellphone’s signal, they would be unable to pick him out of the crowd using any nearby surveillance cameras, one of the people said.

This fact, as well as the killer’s use of disposable cellphones to contact the four victims who have been identified — women in their 20s who advertised their services on Craigslist — suggested to some investigators that the killer was well versed in criminal investigative techniques, gleaned either through personal experience or in some other way, and could even be in law enforcement himself.

“He is a guy who is aware of how we utilize technology,” one investigator said. “Frankly, people are thinking maybe he could be a cop” — either one still in law enforcement or one who has moved on.

“Without question, this guy is smart, this guy is not a dope,” the investigator continued. “It’s a guy who thinks about things.”

Also, the caller kept each of his vulgar, mocking and insulting calls to less than three minutes, according to the dead woman’s mother, Lynn Barthelemy. The caller made about a half-dozen calls over roughly five weeks to the victim’s sister.

One investigator said the brief duration of the calls thwarted efforts by the New York Police Department to use the signal to pinpoint the caller’s location and find him, something Lynn Barthelemy said they told her they tried to do four times.

New York investigators began those efforts about a week after Melissa Barthelemy, a 24-year-old who lived in the Bronx, disappeared around July 10, 2009.

The investigator, and several others, emphasized that the idea that the killer could be an active or former law enforcement officer was just one theory being examined by homicide investigators in Suffolk County, where the bodies were found.

The Suffolk Police Department’s chief of detectives, Dominick Varrone, would say only, “Our investigative team is considering many theories and all possibilities.”

The police commissioner, Richard Dormer, said in a statement late Friday that “no suspect has been identified in the Gilgo Beach homicides.”

Ms. Barthelemy’s body was one of four uncovered over the course of three days in December in the thick undergrowth along Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, in the town of Babylon. All were dumped in burlap sacks.

It is unclear whether the county medical examiner’s office, working with its counterpart in New York City, has determined the causes of death in the four cases.

The discovery marked the third time in two decades that a serial killer of prostitutes had stalked Long Island.

After the snow melted, the Suffolk police intensified their search in the area. On March 29, a Marine Unit officer discovered a fifth set of remains, and two days later, three more sets of remains were found, more than a mile east of where the first bodies were found clustered.

Two officials briefed on the case said it appeared that those additional sets of remains had been dumped many years prior to those found in December, and there were no burlap sacks.

They said there were other differences that set them apart from the four bodies that have been identified, but they would not describe them.

Both of the officials suggested that the differences raised the possibility that remains found in the past two weeks — the police have yet to identify them or even say whether they have determined the gender of the dead — were unrelated to the four Craigslist women.

But they also said the differences could be ascribed to the development of the killer’s technique over time.

On July 10 nearly two years ago, Ms. Barthelemy saw a client and then deposited $900 into her bank account, her mother said. That night she called an old boyfriend, but he did not pick up. Then she disappeared.

Melissa Barthelemy’s teenage sister, Amanda, was preparing to fly to New York from Buffalo and visit with her sister, but the trip was called off because the family could not reach Melissa. Concerned, the Barthelemys pleaded with the New York police to help find her.

Then Amanda began to receive calls, about one each week, from her missing sister’s cellphone. The voice on the other end was calm and bland, and never yelled or laughed, her mother said.

Lynn Barthelemy would not say what was said in those calls. She said the authorities told her not to disclose details so that they could use that information, which they believe only the killer would know, to weed out false confessions.

The family’s lawyer, Steven M. Cohen of Buffalo, said the caller had made remarks that were “disparaging of the sister, because of her lifestyle.”

“We can’t for certain make the leap that the person who called the sister was the killer, although I believe that to be the case,” Mr. Cohen said. “If you accept it was the killer calling, he certainly had feelings of anger towards prostitutes.”

Lynn Barthelemy said detectives had told her they rushed to several locations during the calls, which never lasted more than three minutes, but were unable to identify a suspect.

In one instance, the police learned that Melissa Barthelemy’s phone had been turned on near Massapequa, on Long Island, and that someone had gained access to her voice mail, the victim’s mother said, but that happened only once.

The caller did not ever say that Ms. Barthelemy was dead or suggest that she was alive, Lynn Barthelemy said.

“He kept us hopeful,” she said.

She still wonders what prompted the calls. It was as if he was “trying to finalize things,” she said.


Al Baker contributed reporting.

    Serial Killer in L.I. Case Is Seen as Versed in Police Techniques, NYT, 8.4.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/09/nyregion/09bodies.html

3-Month Nightmare Emerges in Rape Inquiry

March 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY and ERICA GOODE

CLEVELAND, Tex. — A year ago, the 11-year-old girl who the police say was the victim of repeated gang rapes in this East Texas town was an outgoing honor roll student, brimming with enthusiasm, who went on hikes and planted trees with a youth group here.

“She has always been a really bubbly child,” said Brenda Myers, director of the Community and Children’s Impact Center, who worked with her. “She always had a smile on her face.”

But in October, just after starting sixth grade, the girl became withdrawn, Ms. Myers said, and in November, she stopped attending the center’s meetings.

What happened during those months is the subject of a criminal investigation that has sent waves of shock and sorrow through this impoverished town and has provoked anger across the nation.

The police say the girl was raped on at least six occasions, from Sept. 15 to Dec. 3. Nineteen boys and men, ages 14 to 27, have been charged in connection with the rapes, the most recent arrest last Wednesday.

Court documents and dozens of interviews over several weeks with the girl’s family, her friends and neighbors, as well as those who know the defendants, provide a more complete picture of what occurred as well as a deeper portrait of the victim. What begins to emerge is the nightmarish ordeal of a young girl over two and a half months involving an eclectic group of young men, some with criminal records, who shared a powerful neighborhood bond.

In his first interview, with The New York Times, the father of the girl, a 57-year-old carpenter named Juan, said he became aware of his daughter’s abuse in late November, when she arrived home at 3 or 4 a.m. after having slipped out without permission. She was shaking and weeping when her mother opened the door to their small white frame house, he said, and she immediately closed herself in her room.

Later in the day, she told her mother she had been raped after her parents found sexually explicit photos that had been sent to her father’s cellphone, which she had been using. She told her father that the men had threatened to kill her.

Juan, whose last name is being withheld to protect his daughter’s identity, said his wife reported the crime to the police three days later, but in court documents the Cleveland Police Department said it was first alerted on Dec. 3 by school authorities.

Juan said his daughter had been a bright and easygoing girl, adept at schoolwork. As she reached puberty, he said, she had grown tall for her age and had begun to talk about wanting to be a fashion model. Yet she was still a child; her bed was piled high with stuffed animals. “Her mind is a child’s mind,” he said. “That’s what makes me so angry.”

The arrests have raised fundamental questions about how a girl might have been repeatedly abused by many men and boys in a tightly knit community without any adult intervening, or even seeming to register that something was amiss, until sexually explicit videos of the victim began circulating in local schools.

“It wasn’t that anyone was asleep,” said the Rev. Travis Hulett Jr., the pastor of the New Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, which anchors the Precinct 20 neighborhood where most of the defendants live. “You can be awake and see things and still not do anything.”

The Cleveland police and the local district attorney have released little information about the alleged rapes and the evidence, and their silence has allowed rumor and speculation to flourish. Judge Mark Morefield of State District Court issued a broad order two weeks ago prohibiting law enforcement officials, defense lawyers, potential witnesses and relatives of the girl and defendants from speaking about the case to reporters.

According to court documents, the police seized the telephones of three men arrested, and the father of the girl said his family’s phones and computer were taken for evidence, as well. Eighteen defendants have pleaded not guilty; the 19th has yet to be arraigned.

The police interviewed the girl in early December, after school security officials heard rumors about sexually explicit videos circulating among the students. Then an elementary school student told a school employee she had seen pictures of the girl having sex with two young men, one of them a high school basketball star.

The girl, a sixth grader whose parents are immigrants from Mexico, told investigators that one of the defendants called her on Sunday, Nov. 28, during the Thanksgiving break, and asked if she wanted “to ride around,” according to four police search warrant affidavits.

That defendant, Eric B. McGowen, 19, who was on probation for burglary, and two other male teenagers picked her up at her house, and took her to a house in Precinct 20, the affidavits said. The wooded community is a hodgepodge of small houses, trailers and churches, bordered on two sides by railroad tracks and on a third by a prison. Everyone is related by blood or friendship.

The girl was taken to a blue house with white trim and a heart-shaped welcome sign — a house with a troubled history. The head of the household, Rayford T. Ellis, has a long criminal record and is a registered sex offender; one of his sons, Authur Ellis, 27, was arrested this year on murder charges. Neither man is charged in this case.

The police say a younger son, Rayford T. Ellis Jr., 19, an iron worker known as Mookie, shot and killed a teenager at the same house in August 2008. The younger Rayford Ellis was awaiting trial on manslaughter charges when he was arrested in early February on charges that he had raped the girl. (He has fathered at least five children with four young women, according to paternity suits.)

It is unclear from the affidavits if the younger Mr. Ellis was there the night of Nov. 28. But the girl said that a cousin, Timothy D. Ellis, 19, was there, and ordered her to strip, telling her that he would “have some girls beat her up” and would not drive her home if she refused, the affidavits said.

The affidavits said the girl told investigators that she then “engaged in sexual intercourse and oral sex” with several of the men present, among them Jared G. McPherson, 18, a high school basketball player, and Jared L. Cruse, also 18, who has since been charged with robbing a grocery store in the next county.

During the sexual assault, the girl said, she heard Mr. McGowen call someone on the phone and invite him to the house to have sex with her, the affidavits said. Four more men whom she did not know arrived.

The assault was interrupted when Timothy Ellis’s aunt arrived at the house, the affidavits said, and the men took the girl out a back window to a squalid abandoned trailer a block away, where the sexual attack continued. Her underwear was left behind.

According to indictments, one man accused of participating was Kelvin R. King, 21, who was out on bond while awaiting trial on rape and robbery charges. Another was Marcus A. Porchia, 26, who worked at a local mental health clinic. Yet another, Isaiah R. Ross, 21, the son of a local school board member, was also present at the Nov. 28 rape, according to a search warrant affidavit for his telephone.

The November assault was not isolated, court documents say. Mr. King’s brother, Xavier M. King, 17, and Devo Shaun Green, 20, are accused of raping the girl on Sept. 15. Mr. McGowen and two others — Jamarcus N. Napper, 18, and Cedric DeRay Scott, 27 — are charged with sexually assaulting her on Oct. 25. Carlos B. Ligons, 22, is charged with sexually assaulting her on Dec. 1. The last indictment, released Monday, accuses Walter J. Harrison, 26, of raping her on Dec. 1 and Dec. 3. The police released no details about those episodes.

Four of the defendants are charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young child. The rest are charged with a single count of aggravated sexual assault of a child under 14. Both felonies carry a sentence of 25 years to life in prison. In Texas, a child under 17 cannot give legal consent and, as in most states, ignorance of a child’s age is not a legal defense.

Bertha Cleveland, an aunt of Mr. Cruse, said her nephew went to church regularly, held down a job at McDonald’s and had told her he intended to go to college. “Our younger generation is running rampant,” she said. “The devil is in full control.”

Residents of Precinct 20 were torn between condemning the crime and defending the young men. Several expressed doubt that all of them were guilty. The grandmother of Mr. Napper said he was out of town at the time of the assaults.

Xavier King, a high school student accused in the Sept. 15 rape, told The New York Times that he did not know the girl and that he thought he had been arrested because “the people I hang with probably said my name, and if they go down, I go down with them.”

The small house where the girl lived is on a dusty road on the outskirts of town, about 10 miles from Precinct 20. There were chickens in the yard and a trampoline out front, where her father sometimes slept during the afternoons. She lived there with her parents, two older sisters who were in high school and a younger brother.

A 36-year-old cousin of the girl, who lived next door, said her family was in dire economic straits since Juan stopped working. The water and electricity had been cut off at times in recent months.

The house is empty now. Two weeks ago, the family moved to another town after detectives told the parents that they were in danger, Juan said.

The father said he had been worried about his daughter’s safety for months before the assaults. She had been sneaking out of the house two or three nights a week, he said, climbing out a bedroom window. Some nights she would come home as late as 11 p.m. or midnight, saying she had visited girlfriends. He said he and his wife had scolded her almost daily.

Both parents are plagued with health problems. Juan injured his back in November 2009 and has not held a steady job since. A diabetic, he receives disability checks of $700 a month. His wife, 42, was told last year that she had a mass in her brain, and a doctor had said it should be removed, friends said. She suffers frequent headaches and fainting spells.

Yet she put off surgery and continued to work at night at a cashier at an underground gambling parlor, friends said. “She wasn’t interested in living,” said Maria Luisa Lopez, a longtime friend. “She felt very sad.”

Two months ago, when the arrests started, the state Child Protective Services placed the girl, who had also received threats, in a foster home. “They told her it was best that they take her away from this town,” Ms. Lopez said.

A case worker has informed Juan that he and his wife must attend family therapy sessions to regain custody. Juan said he was despondent at the prospect of losing his daughter permanently. He said that she was doing well but that she was still fearful. “You can see she’s not happy,” he said. Then he added, “She will never recover from this.”

    3-Month Nightmare Emerges in Rape Inquiry, NYT, 28.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29texas.html

Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town

March 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

CLEVELAND, Tex. — The police investigation began shortly after Thanksgiving, when an elementary school student alerted a teacher to a lurid cellphone video that included one of her classmates.

The video led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.

Five suspects are students at Cleveland High School, including two members of the basketball team. Another is the 21-year-old son of a school board member. A few of the others have criminal records, from selling drugs to robbery and, in one case, manslaughter. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to a 27-year-old.

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act?

“It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

The attack’s details remained unclear. The police have declined to discuss their inquiry because it is continuing. The whereabouts of the victim and her mother were not made public.

The allegations first came to light just after Thanksgiving, when a child who knows the victim told a teacher she had seen a videotape of the attack on a cellphone, said Stacey Gatlin, a spokeswoman for the Cleveland Independent School District.

The school district’s security department interviewed the girl, 11, who is a student at Cleveland Middle School, and her mother. The security department determined that a rape had taken place, but not on school property, and then handed the matter over to the police, Ms. Gatlin said.

On Dec. 9, the police obtained a search warrant to go through a house on Travis Street and a nearby trailer that had been abandoned for at least two years. An affidavit filed to support the search warrant said the girl had been forced to have sex with several men in both places on Nov. 28 and cited pictures and videos as proof, according to The Houston Chronicle.

The affidavit said the assault started after a 19-year-old boy invited the victim to ride around in his car. He took her to a house on Travis Street where one of the other men charged, also 19, lived. There the girl was ordered to disrobe and was sexually assaulted by several boys in the bedroom and bathroom. She was told she would be beaten if she did not comply, the affidavit said.

A relative of one of the suspects arrived, and the group fled through a back window. They then went to the abandoned mobile home, where the assaults continued. Some of those present recorded the sexual acts on their telephones, and these later were shown among students.

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said.

“Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?” said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?”

Cleveland, a town of 9,000, lies about 50 miles northeast of Houston in the pine country, near the picturesque Sam Houston National Forest. The town’s economy has always rested on timber, cattle, farming and oil. But there are pockets of poverty, and in the neighborhood where the assault occurred, well-kept homes sit beside boarded-up houses and others with deteriorating facades.

The abandoned trailer where the assault took place is full of trash and has a blue tarp hanging from the front. Inside there is a filthy sofa, a disconnected stove in the middle of the living room, a broken stereo and some forlorn Christmas decorations. A copy of the search warrant was on a counter in the kitchen next to some abandoned family pictures.

The arrests have left many wondering who will be taken into custody next. Churches have held prayer services for the victim. The students who were arrested have not returned to school, and it is unclear if they ever will. Ms. Gatlin said the girl had been transferred to another district. “It’s devastating, and it’s really tearing our community apart,” she said. “I really wish that this could end in a better light.”

Mauricio Guerrero contributed reporting from Houston.

    Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town, R, 8.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/09/us/09assault.html

A $20 Loan, a Facebook Quarrel and a Fatal Stabbing

March 1, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and TIM STELLOH

The dispute between the two friends began over $20, money that had been given to buy baby formula and diapers, but that went for some other purpose. Days later, it became a heated public matter, splayed on the two young women’s Facebook pages.

At 5:44 p.m. on Sunday, one of them, Kamisha Richards, 22, wrote that this would be “the last time u will con me into giving u money.” Ten minutes later, the other, Kayla Henriques, 18, replied, “Dnt try to expose me mama but I’m not tha type to thug it ova facebook see u wen u get frm wrk.”

The war of words escalated over Facebook. In capital letters, at 8:52 p.m., Ms. Richards said that she would have the last laugh. Ms. Henriques replied within seconds: “We will see.”

They exchanged more messages, until about 9:30 p.m. on Sunday.

About 24 hours after their last Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards was dead, killed by a kitchen knife to the chest delivered inside an apartment in East New York, Brooklyn — according to the police, the home of Ms. Henriques, Ms. Richards and relatives of both women, including Ms. Henriques’s brother, who was dating Ms. Richards.

By about 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Ms. Henriques had been arrested, after witnesses helped point investigators in her direction, and the suspect “said things to implicate herself,” according to a law enforcement official. “It was witnessed by several people, in the apartment,” the official said.

In retrospect, some of the clues were spread like electronic bread crumbs for anyone to see.

Ms. Henriques was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon, said a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.

Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said the Internet postings added pieces to investigators’ knowledge, though it was not immediately clear if those clues had been gleaned before Ms. Henriques’s arrest.

“Like so many things these days, elements of this case emerged on Facebook,” Mr. Browne said.

To the victim’s relatives, it seemed unreal that the Facebook entries could foreshadow such violence. In fact, Ms. Richards did not consider the exchange she had with Ms. Henriques serious, said her sister, Schneiqua Henry, 20.

“She didn’t pay it any mind,” Ms. Henry said. “She thought it was just another argument.”

Ms. Richards’s stepfather, Dunstan Henry, 42, said she was not someone who was easily provoked to fight. “She’s the type of person that would let you run your mouth off and she wouldn’t say nothing,” said Mr. Henry, who raised Ms. Richards since she was a newborn, after her biological father returned to Kingston, Jamaica.

Ms. Richards graduated from college in May, held two jobs and hoped to enter law school. She had been dating Ramel Henriques on and off for about seven years. Ms. Henry said she lived in the same complex as Ms. Henriques, the Cypress Hills Houses, but in a different apartment.

Ms. Henry said she believed her sister had given Ms. Henriques money in the past, though she said the two had never fought over the loans.

Mr. Henry said Ms. Richards had helped care for Ms. Henriques’s 11-month-old son. “My daughter was taking care of Kayla,” he said. “She gave her $20 to be there for her like a big sister.”

Detectives are investigating whether Ms. Richards had claimed Ms. Henriques’s son as a dependent for tax purposes, and “whether that was an element in the dispute between the women,” the official said.

But that notion angered the victim’s brother, Donell Henry, 21, who said of Ms. Richards: “She didn’t use nobody as a tax write-off. When anyone needed anything in that house, she provided for them.”

What Ms. Henriques used the $20 for was not immediately clear on Tuesday. But those who knew Ms. Richards said that when it became clear that the money had not been spent on milk and diapers, she asked for it back.

In one Facebook exchange, Ms. Richards used an acronym indicating she was laughing hard, and wrote, “girl bye I guess I’ll c u later just bring the money.”

Things quickly deteriorated when the two met on Monday night in an apartment of the complex where the women were living, officials said.

An argument started in the kitchen, and Ms. Henriques, who had her son with her, passed the child to a friend who was there, Ms. Henry said.

At one point, Ms. Richards opened the refrigerator door and saw the baby formula and poured some of it out, and said it was “half of what” Ms. Henriques owed her, the official said.

The argument then continued into one of the three bedrooms in the apartment, where Ms. Richards was mortally wounded.

“The next thing you know, she stabbed my sister in the heart,” Ms. Henry said.

Ms. Richards staggered out into the hallway, and someone tried to apply pressure to her wound, as others called 911. But she was declared dead on arrival at Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, officials said.

On Tuesday, Ms. Richards’ relatives were still making funeral arrangements.

The oldest of five siblings, she had graduated from John Jay College in May with a degree in criminal justice, said Yasmin Payne, 22, a longtime friend. Ms. Richards planned on attending Brooklyn Law School, and took the LSAT in December. She worked two jobs through college, friends and family members said, one as a security guard at JPMorgan Chase in Manhattan and the other as a housekeeper.

At her home in Jamaica, Queens, on Tuesday, Ms. Richards’s mother, Nicole Colter-Henry, 39, said she had raised her family in the Cypress Hills Houses but moved because she was “tired of the projects.”

“I wanted something better for them,” she said of her children as she stood surrounded by photos of her oldest daughter. “I’m never going to see my daughter. All over $20.”

No one from Ms. Henriques’s family could be reached. But later Tuesday, a message appeared on Ms. Henriques’s Facebook page, even as she was in custody.

It said: “I can’t be leave this happen I’m sorry I send my condolences to her family RiP kamisha.”

And as that message was added, many others that chronicled the women’s fight suddenly disappeared.

    A $20 Loan, a Facebook Quarrel and a Fatal Stabbing, NYT, 1.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/nyregion/02slay.html

Central NY Man Admits Killing Ex-Girlfriend, 20

February 15, 2011
Filed at 10:17 a.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS



SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) — A 21-year-old man has admitted killing his former girlfriend while she was home from college for Thanksgiving break and dumping her body in a park.

Syracuse media report that Steven Pieper, of Liverpool, pleaded guilty Tuesday morning in Onondaga County Court to second-degree murder in November's slaying of 20-year-old Jenni-Lyn Watson.

Pieper admitted strangling and suffocating Watson inside her parents' home in the town of Clay on Nov. 19 and hiding her body in a wooded area in a nearby park.

Watson had returned home from Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., for Thanksgiving the day before she was killed. Searchers found her body eight days later.

Under a plea deal, Pieper will be sentenced to 23 years to life in prison on March 8.

    Central NY Man Admits Killing Ex-Girlfriend, 20, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/02/15/us/AP-US-College-Student-Slain.html

The Parent Trapped

February 11, 2011
The New York Times
By KATHERINE ELLISON

San Anselmo, Calif.

I WANT to believe I have little in common with Julie Schenecker, who the police say confessed to killing her two “mouthy” teenagers.

Ms. Schenecker, who was indicted on charges of first-degree murder on Thursday, lives in Tampa, and is married to an Army colonel. I live near San Francisco, and am married to a newspaper editor.

She, blond and tanned, drove her children, Calyx, 16, and Beau, 13, to soccer and track meets. I’m brunette and sun-deprived, and drag two sons to violin lessons and Hebrew school.

We most likely never would have been pals, even on Facebook, where, poignantly, Ms. Schenecker has 394 “friends.” And yet what haunts me even more than the terrible photos of her being led off by the police, her eyes rolled back like those of a spooked horse, is what we’ve shared: a frightening record of anger toward our children.

What strange evolutionary quirk makes adolescents evoke such powerful rage in their mothers? Alone, like Ms. Schenecker, night after night with my argumentative sons while my husband was working away from home, I’ve felt that fury rising from the soles of my feet, at the sight of a carefully made meal thoughtlessly dumped in the sink or, worse, a little brother scratched and bruised.

While my older son, who has both attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorder, is something more than the usual adolescent provocateur, let me be clear that not even in my wildest dreams have I ever imagined shooting him. Still, pushed to my limits, I’ve done things that I know full well have been dangerous and harmful — mostly yelling, but also, during a few explosive fights, pushing and slapping. And abundant research on family violence shows that I’m far from alone.

Uniquely awful as the killings of the Schenecker children were, the all too familiar themes in this story make it urgent that the hectic debate about their mother moves off the pages of social network sites and into our places of worship, doctors’ offices and city halls.

It chilled me to read that the police questioned Ms. Schenecker for slapping her daughter three months before the killings — behavior that I’ve unfortunately shared with millions of other American parents. In a 2007 study of 141 adolescents, published in the journal Development and Psychopathology, 85 percent reported that they’d been slapped or spanked. Moreover, the latest government records show that more than 121,000 cases of physical abuse against minors were reported in 2008.

Even as corporal punishment is declining in social acceptability, about 7 in 10 Americans agreed, in a 2004 survey, that children sometimes need “a good, hard spanking.” This came despite mountains of studies establishing that such tactics do children much more harm than good, increasing the risk of anxiety, depression and addiction. Moreover, it’s easy for spanking, slapping and swatting to escalate — sometimes even to the point of deadly violence.

My husband and I passionately oppose corporal punishment, which helps explain why my blunders alerted me that I needed help. I ended up devoting a year and thousands of dollars to getting such help, from therapists and honest friends.

I spent much of the year learning about A.D.H.D., a condition I soon realized that I shared with my then 12-year-old son. Among its classic symptoms are conflict-seeking and hot-headedness. Humbling as it was, I ultimately heeded friends and professionals who encouraged me to shed my fantasy of being the victim of a raging, impossible child, and own up to the ways I was contributing to our fights.

There were other therapies as well, including neurofeedback and medication for me and my son, financed in part by an ever-expanding equity loan. Today, while we still argue, we’re out of the danger zone, though I can’t stop worrying about how many other parents lack the rare advantages I’ve had to get us there.

The mad housewife is a reliable comic icon, her trials trivialized as boredom and cabin fever. It’s hard for most people to accept that mothers — even maybe their own mothers! — can be unloving, and sometimes unsafe. Which helps explain why killings like those ascribed to Ms. Schenecker, among some 200 American mothers who kill their children every year, always seem so surprising.

It’s easy to write these cases off as freak results of severe mental illness. But most of these women’s stories also include a lot of ordinary stress and social isolation, the fallout from divorce and the dispersal of extended families. Increasingly cut off from real-time conversations, mad housewives find solace in e-communities, where “life” is so much more soothing and predictable than dealing with teenagers. While news reports say Ms. Schenecker was seeking help from real-life counselors in the weeks before the killings, her Facebook page, with its pretty family photographs and homilies, is a portrait of polished denial.

Amid the debate about whether social networks are depriving us of healthier, non-virtual encounters, a University of Texas study last fall claimed that Facebook was not supplanting such interactions. Perhaps that’s true, but one thing I’m sure of, from my own lucky odyssey, is that all the poking and tagging in the world can’t compete with a pair of real-time eyes when it comes to noticing that someone needs more help than she’s getting.

Katherine Ellison is the author of “Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention.”

    The Parent Trapped, NYT, 11.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/opinion/12ellison.html

Man Stabs 3 to Death in Brooklyn, Police Say

February 11, 2011
The New York Times
By JAMES BARRON and AL BAKER

A 23-year-old man fatally stabbed his stepfather in Brooklyn early Friday and killed his girlfriend and her mother later in the day before commandeering a passing car, stabbing the driver, stealing the car and running down a pedestrian, the police said.

The suspect, identified by the police as Maksim Gelman, remained at large on Friday night after leading the police on a trail of death and destruction that stretched across the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn.

The police said that the rampage began with an argument at about 5 a.m. in the apartment on East 27th Street that Mr. Gelman shared with his stepfather, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, 54, and his mother, Svetlana Gelman, 48. What the argument was about, the police did not say, but they said it ended with Mr. Gelman’s repeatedly stabbing Mr. Kuznetsov.

Mr. Kuznetsov, an ambulette driver, was pronounced dead a short time later. By then Mr. Gelman, 6 feet tall and 170 pounds, had fled. The police said he drove away in a Lexus and vanished. The police circulated his picture, and it was posted on a number of news Web sites and Brooklyn blogs.

About 4:20 p.m., someone called the police to report another argument and two more stabbings a few blocks from where Mr. Kuznetsov had been found dead. The police sent officers to the address the caller had given on East 24th Street. There, they found the bodies of Mr. Gelman’s girlfriend and her mother. Their names had not been released as of late Friday.

The police said Mr. Gelman had dashed out of their apartment and jumped into the Lexus. He drove a few blocks along East 24th Street to Avenue U, where he abandoned the Lexus and commandeered a passing car.

The police said he stabbed the 42-year-old driver and threw him out of the car, a dark green 1995 Pontiac Bonneville four-door sedan. The man, who was not identified, was taken to Lutheran Hospital, where he was in stable condition on Friday night, the police said.

Mr. Gelman drove off in the Bonneville, the police said, and several blocks away, at Avenue R and Ocean Avenue, he hit a pedestrian.

That man was also listed in stable condition, the police said. Mr. Gelman sped away in the Bonneville, and the manhunt continued.

“We are actively pursuing him,” the Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.

After dark, officers descended on a six-story apartment house on East 18th Street near Avenue R. Other officers fanned out, and about 9:30 p.m., they discovered the Bonneville in Midwood, on East 15th Street between Avenues H and I. The engine was still running, officers said, as they began combing railroad tracks that run parallel to the two avenues.

Neighbors in the apartment complex where Mr. Gelman lived said they were shocked by the stabbings and by the idea that Mr. Gelman was the suspect. “If you had told me he had done a robbing, I might have believed” that, said Anthony Riggio, 34, the acting superintendent of the complex. “But a stabbing? Not in a million years. I never placed him for that.”

Mr. Riggio’s mother, Kathy, 57, said the Gelmans and Mr. Kuznetsov had lived in their apartment — in a compound of four-story brick buildings where each apartment has two balconies — for at least eight years. She said that Mr. Gelman, who was called Max in the neighborhood and who she believed had been born in Russia, had been an expert skateboarder as a teenager. Anthony Riggio said Mr. Gelman had had some brushes with officials over graffiti.

Mrs. Riggio said Mr. Kuznetsov would sometimes offer her a lift to the supermarket. She said she had breathing problems that made walking there difficult. “He said, ‘No, come, come,’ and gave me a ride,” she recalled.

As for the idea that Mr. Gelman could become so angry that he could go on a stabbing rampage, she said, “From the outside look of it, you’d never know.”

That thought was echoed outside the apartment where Mr. Gelman’s girlfriend and her mother had lived.

“It’s not something you expect from the neighborhood,” said Carlo Mattina, 56, who said he had lived in the area for 30 years.

His wife, Rosa, agreed. “It’s frightening,” she said. “Very frightening.”


Anahad O’Connor and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford contributed reporting.

    Man Stabs 3 to Death in Brooklyn, Police Say, NYT, 11.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/nyregion/12stab.html

Questions Remain in Case of Abducted Baby Who Turned Up 23 Years Later

January 20, 2011
The New York Times
By AL BAKER and NATE SCHWEBER

As news came that a baby girl abducted from a Harlem hospital 23 years ago was alive, an array of people in her life began absorbing how the closing of the case was resolving at least two mysteries.

For one, her relatives and the authorities in New York City know now that the child born as Carlina White on July 15, 1987 — and kidnapped from Harlem Hospital three weeks later — grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., with a new name, Nejdra Nance.

Also, those in Bridgeport are getting answers about the toddler and teenager who they suspected was not her parents’ biological daughter and who, as she grew older, began to increasingly question her true identity.

Meanwhile, a day after the New York City police announced that they had solved the missing person’s case and had helped reunite Ms. White with her biological mother, Joy White, and father, Carl Tyson, detectives were exploring with federal officials the possibilities for proceeding with a criminal case.

“It is an old case, but that doesn’t necessarily shut the door to prosecution,” said Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman.

Kidnapping cases can be brought in state court within five years after a victim reaches adulthood, he said, and no such limitations are presented by federal law.

Investigators have known for days now the names of the people who raised Ms. White, but have declined to discuss the case in detail or name any suspects. They are wrestling with sorting out who took the baby in 1987. Memories have faded; even the detectives who were first on the case have all retired.

At the home on Hamilton Street in Bridgeport where the girl was raised, a relative of the family who lives there was not talking.

But Shatesse Jefferson-Echevarria, 23, a childhood friend of Ms. White, said that friends at school would whisper behind her back that she had been adopted. “She looked very different from her family,” Ms. Jefferson-Echevarria said. “Different demeanor; different face.”

Ms. White harbored the same suspicions as her friends, first because of her looks, and later because she could not get a birth certificate or Social Security number from her parents, the police said. She continued searching for her identity after moving to Georgia several years ago and eventually came across photos on the Web site of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She matched those with childhood photos she had and called the center, which connected her with her mother, said Ernie Allen, the organization’s president.

“It is rare for the victim herself to call,” Mr. Allen said. “Of course, she didn’t say, ‘I’m Carlina.’ What she called to say was, ‘I am not sure who I am.’ ”

On Thursday, Carlina White’s grandmother, Elizabeth White, 71, said she was overjoyed that the child had returned. “She’s got her father’s eyes and her mother’s face, there’s just no doubt about it,” she said in an interview in her apartment in Manhattan.

Carlina White’s mother and father could not be reached.

Kevin Waller, 46, who was at Elizabeth White’s apartment and identified himself as the father of Joy White’s sister’s child, said Joy and Carlina White were in a hotel room, having given relatives directions not to speak with most of the press.

In a senior yearbook of Harding High School in Bridgeport, a photo of Carlina White, identified as Nejdra Nance, is near a quotation: “I’m Out.” And there is also a photo of her as an infant.

    Questions Remain in Case of Abducted Baby Who Turned Up 23 Years Later, NYT, 20.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/21/nyregion/21kidnap.html

Man Is Beaten and Killed in Upscale Hotel

January 7, 2011
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and CATE DOTY

A 65-year-old man was beaten and killed on Friday at a luxury Times Square hotel, the police said.

The police said they were seeking for questioning a 20-year-old man who had been staying with him. The battered, unclothed body of the victim, whose name was not immediately released, was found Friday night in his room on the 34th floor of the InterContinental, a hotel near the corner of 44th Street and Eighth Avenue. Guests at the hotel said they had heard yelling and arguing coming from the room during the day.

According to detectives, the victim and his companion, Renato Seabra, a model from Portugal, had checked into the hotel together about 10 days ago. They said the exact relationship between the two men was unclear.

At some point on Friday, a friend of the victim’s from New Jersey grew concerned and went to the hotel to check on him after spending all afternoon trying to reach him, the police said.

The woman arrived at the InterContinental on Friday evening and approached hotel security officials, who went up to the room and found the 65-year-old man’s body. The woman told the police that she had seen Mr. Seabra — dressed in a black suit and a purple tie — in the hotel lobby before heading upstairs and that she had last spoken to the victim around 12:30 p.m. that day.

Investigators were canvassing hospitals late Friday, thinking Mr. Seabra might have shown up with injuries.

Mr. Seabra, a native of Portugal, was recently one of three finalists on “Face Model of the Year,” a program on SIC, a Portuguese television channel. A profile of Mr. Seabra in his local newspaper said he grew up in Cantanhede, a city in central Portugal, and was a basketball player at the University of Coimbra, near his hometown. In the profile, he described himself as religious and shy.

At the InterContinental — a 36-story tower where the 607 guest rooms feature floor-to-ceiling windows and cost at least $300 a night — hotel guests congregated on the ground floor, some staring out at the gathering news media through the windows of Ça Va, a chic Todd English restaurant. Patrons gathered at the bar, and the pulse of music could be heard through the glass windows.

One guest, Suzanne Divilly, 40, who was in town from Ireland on her honeymoon, said she was staying a couple of doors away from the room on the 34th floor where the killing took place. As she stood outside smoking cigarettes, she recounted having heard a commotion coming from the room earlier in the day — an argument so loud that she and her husband could hear it with their door closed.

Ms. Divilly said they heard several minutes of the argument, but could not make out any words. “We just thought, it’s none of our business,” she said, “just get into our room.”

    Man Is Beaten and Killed in Upscale Hotel, NYT, 7.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/08/nyregion/08murder.html