by Luke Waters
Our prisoner was presented with an impossible choice: testify and put her life—and the lives of her loved ones—in danger from a man she knew would kill her without hesitation, or refuse to testify and face charges herself, perhaps ending up in the same prison as the perp’s associates, who may decide to kill her anyway.
I’ve arrested over a thousand suspects in my time and most of them got less than they deserved, but I never felt lower than I did leading this teenager back to our car. Julie Bryant found herself as the rope in a tug-of-war among the police, the DA, the perpetrator’s family, and the relations of the victim. That was life on the streets. Like anywhere else, being in the wrong place at the wrong time could have serious implications for your health.
Trouble was, in the South Bronx the wrong place could be any hallway, or any store, on any day.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
YOU CAN’T STAY OFF THE GRID
“Sarge, what’s the word? Sign me in or show me at the five-two or whatever, will you? If you need me I can be there in an hour.”
I put the phone down and my feet up, looking forward to a nice lunch with my old Cavan friend Martin Fay and his family, up from Philadelphia, knowing I’ll be signed in and, at least officially, I’m at work as opposed to fifty miles upstate. An hour later my cell phone rings again. It’s the sarge with bad news.
“Sorry, buddy. We got two people shot and one stabbed. One of them is DOA—1496 Vyse Avenue, down at West Farms.”
“Okay, Sarge. I’m just sitting down to dinner. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Gimme two hours.”
The first rule I learned as a squad DT back in the 42 was the dead might not look pretty, but they are always pretty patient. One hour, two courses, and a change of clothes later, I descend the stairs wearing a navy pinstripe from Brooks Brothers and a shirt and tie which I got on sale at Kohl’s. Martin is waiting at the last step with my share of the ice cream.
“Nice look, Luke. Bit late in the afternoon to go to a wedding, though, isn’t it?” Philly Fay mumbles through a gobful of Ben & Jerry’s.
“Very funny. It’s for a funeral, Martin. I’d tell you the name of the deceased if I knew it myself.”
An hour’s drive later, and I pull up to the curb near the crime scene.
It was January 19, 2009, and through the early evening gloom I could just about make out the foyer outside which the attack took place. It was the usual hive of police activity as Patrol marked off the area with tape and Forensics took pictures of a broken broom handle, smudged with blood, on the slowly melting snow. It was carefully placed with other evidence in small plastic bags, their locations marked with bright numbered flags.
I walked over to the back of our Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) van and stuck my head in with a cheery hello—only to be met with a stream of curses. The “ice-cream truck,” as it was popularly known, had recently been purchased by the department and retrofitted with computers, printers, scanners, routers, and a satellite dish. It provided an invaluable link back to the RTCC at police headquarters. Most importantly for the half a dozen cops packed inside, it also boasted a heater on that freezing January evening. Gigabyte Garcia was working away, sitting with a laptop in the back, going through the list of numbers which the 911 operator had received after the fight and subsequent shooting had taken place.
“Buddy, shut the door, will ya? Hasn’t Kenny told you—us Puerto Ricans can’t take the cold!” he said dryly.
“Stop moaning, Ricardo. What have we got?”
“One male DOA. Some other guy shot him after an argument in the street. Victim is a member of the Bloods. Don’t know about the shooter yet. Might have some gang affiliation, but we’re not sure if it’s a hit or not,” said Garcia, handing me a list of complainants to interview.
Even if a 911 caller doesn’t leave their name or number, the Emergency Services system automatically records their phone ID, and my colleague pointed to one number which looked promising.
This 911 caller lived in one of the apartments overlooking the crime scene, so when she picked up I asked her to stay on the line and I stepped out of the van. I raised my free hand above my head to identify myself, while the woman who thought she saw the shooter directed me to a smart three-story apartment block. It was fronted by high metal gates a few yards from where I stood.
Billy Simeon, who was catching out of the 42 Detective Squad, had left the warmth of his car and we rang the bell and introduced ourselves to the owner of the building, a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman named Maria Rivera who lived on the ground floor. She appeared upset at the recent events but directed us to people on the top floor, suggesting that they may be our perpetrators. We climbed the steps to interview the couple concerned, Christopher Maxwell and his common-law wife, Laqunanta Carter, whose mother was Rivera’s tenant.
Christopher and Laqunanta often visited and stayed over with her mom, so they were on first-name terms with the landlady. They knew that Rivera’s thirty-year-old son had been released recently on parole after serving ten years on drug offenses. They fingered him as our shooter, adding that the landlady, and possibly her adult daughter, were also present throughout the attack.
Back in the van, Rick ran Maria Rivera’s name through Real Time and discovered that two days previously she had had an altercation with a handful of Blood street-gang members who were harassing her by banging the gates of her building. They had shouted abuse and threats when she told them to get lost.
Rivera had her life invested in her building and, like any responsible citizen, called in that incident, but when Patrol arrived on scene they told her that, since no crime had been committed, there was nothing they could do.
“Be careful, keep your doors and gates locked, and watch your back with these gang kids, ma’am,” one of the uniforms had advised as they turned to leave.
Rivera’s son, Carlos Valentin, had seen it differently.
“No way. I’m gonna kill these motherfuckers,” the felon vowed to the departing cops.
He proved to be as good as his word.
Maria Rivera had taken the officers’ advice and started to lock the security gates, which made the apartments more secure, but ironically only placed her in even more danger, as it denied the teen gangsters access to the apartments above hers, where they liked to hang out with one of the local kids.
Rivera was now genuinely afraid and did what people do when the police fail to address a threat against them: she looked for a weapon, settling on a long kitchen knife, which she carried when she stepped out a few hours later to visit Willy’s Grocery and Meat Market next door.
The Bloods weren’t deterred by the blade, and inevitably a confrontation developed in the street, during which threats and insults flew once more and weapons were flashed by both sides, as Rivera waved her kitchen knife and one of the Bloods picked up a splintered mop handle.
Valentin heard the commotion and rushed to his mother’s defense, ignoring her pleas to him to return inside, since any violent incident would almost certainly see his parole revoked, but her son followed through on his promise to even the score and instead of pulling out a knife he suddenly produced a .22 semiautomatic pistol and pulled the trigger, hitting an eighteen-year-old Blood named Edward Hogan in the arm.
The Bloods are one of about sixty gangs of various types active in the Bronx, and they all have one thing in common: weakness is despised. Standing your ground and backing up your homeboys is the code you live by or, as Justin McWillis was about to prove, you die by. He ran at the shooter and tried to wrestle the pistol from his hand. In the struggle which followed, Valentin pulled the trigger again, this time shooting his victim in the chest at point-blank range.
Another Blood, Javiel Ramos, then joined in the fight, jumping on Valentin’s back, and was struck from behind with the knife by Rivera, who stepped in to protect her son.
Valentin shook himself free, told his mother not to worry, and ran down the street just as the first cops responding to the 911 calls appe
ared in the distance, while McWillis lay dying, bleeding heavily into the snow, and the other Bloods, including Ramos and Hogan, melted away at the first sign of a blue uniform.
EMS arrived on scene and desperately set to work on the teenager, but the bullet had penetrated his heart. The paramedics’ efforts proved futile as they struggled to keep their patient alive in the back of the ambulance, now racing to the hospital some two miles away. Dr. Suzana Bogdanovska pronounced her patient dead on arrival at the emergency room in St. Barnabas at 5:02 p.m. Justin McWillis was just eighteen years old.
Maria Rivera was a hardworking mother of four adult children, but her son was not the only one we were now investigating. Hogan also put her adult daughter at the scene, so I picked up the phone and outlined what we had to the Brass in another command. Within minutes Lieutenant Zevon from Internal Affairs’ Group 33 was on the other end of the line, keenly interested in the fact that Police Officer Abisay Rivera, who worked as a member of the Citywide Vandals Task Force (CVTF), had been placed at the scene of the murder. Zevon pulled Abisay Rivera’s personnel file—and arrived over at the 42 to confer with Simeon and myself about establishing her involvement. IAB always assumes any officer they investigate is guilty.
Reading through her paperwork, it was clear that Rivera had declared on her application form that her brother was Carlos Valentin, that he was gang-affiliated, and that he was serving a long prison sentence, which was in her favor, since a failure to disclose these facts would probably have seen her fired even if she had no knowledge of our homicide.
We continued to work the case through the night, and the next morning a call came from Dr. Carolyn Kappen, the medical examiner, that the autopsy was scheduled for ten a.m. I drove down to the morgue to see what additional information it might reveal. The autopsy would allow us to brief Kappen on the details of our case, and the results might corroborate any statements made by our witnesses, victims, or suspects. When you are attacked with a knife you instinctively use your hands to block the stabs and slashes, leaving defensive wounds to the hands and arms, and being knocked to the ground will result in bruises and scrapes, so if these marks were not present on the victim we’d know a witness was trying to hide the truth.
Kappen was already busy dissecting the organs, which were weighed before she sliced them into half-inch-thick pieces with a one-foot-long sharp blade known as a “bread knife.”
“Well, there’s your bullet, Luke,” the ME said, picking up the tiny .22 round from a piece of lung with a pair of tweezers.
The ME then moved on to the heart, noting the small entry hole, before she cut it open with a pair of surgical scissors. But we had what we needed, so I thanked Kappen for her time, and she smiled in acknowledgment. There is little or no emotion during an autopsy, no time to reflect or mourn on a life cut short. The ME’s job is clinical in every sense of the word, and it was her responsibility to find out what had caused McWillis to die; it was ours to find out who was responsible.
Simeon and I picked up Javiel Ramos, the Blood who’d jumped on Valentin after he shot McWillis, and took him down to the 42 for questioning. He was still seeping blood from a puncture wound to his back, so EMS were called to patch him up. Not very gratefully, he confirmed only his name, the fact that he and the others were Bloods, and that he and his fellow gangsters didn’t talk to the police. Ramos was released, and we picked up a female gang member who was also present and asked her to help us. Demaris Rodriguez was skinny, as foulmouthed as any of the males, and tough as a bag of rocks, telling us to go screw ourselves.
“Fuckin’ Five-O! Bloods don’t talk, and we don’t snitch,” she replied pleasantly, as I asked a few routine questions. I broke the bad news to her gently.
“Yeah? Listen, sister. I have some information for you. Your Blood gangsta pal—Justin? He’s DOA, Demaris. Shot to death. Don’t you want to help put the person who did it in jail?”
“So? Still don’t care. Yeah, he a brother Blood. Now? He dead,” she said, pursing her lips.
Rodriguez was released.
We went over to the hospital to talk to Edward Hogan, the gang member who was shot in the arm by Valentin. He at least was willing to talk to us, though his disdain for the police was just as strong as his friends’.
“Yo, I got what I deserved, man,” Hogan said, wincing with pain as he lay on the gurney, a drip connected to his injured arm. He confessed that he’d brandished a sharp, pointed pole at Rivera and her son raised the stakes by pulling out a pistol. He confirmed that Javiel Ramos had been stabbed by Rivera when he ran at Valentin, which explained why our recent uncooperative witness was covered in blood when we picked him up.
“Her son, he the one who shot me. Know him from the hood. I ain’t got no complaints, but, yeah, he capped me an’ Justin.”
On the way back to the 42 to review what we had, we got a call from Billy’s boss, Lieutenant Kevin Moroney, who told us that a Detective Jason McWillis out of the 28th Precinct was waiting to speak with us about the murder of his nephew. Unusually, there were direct links between the Job and the family of both victim and perpetrator alike—something I had never encountered in a case before.
The Harlem-based cop’s agitation, and upset, when we met was understandable. He was keen to get a heads-up on our progress and we were sympathetic, polite, and tactful in our chat with our colleague. But we were tight-lipped in terms of details regarding the information we had gathered. As soon as we shook hands and said goodbye to McWillis Senior we locked down the files related to the case in the NYPD computer system, which could be accessed by any detective under normal circumstances. We did this as much for his protection as for the integrity of the investigation, realizing the temptation any of us would feel to intervene in the same position.
Simeon and I sat down with Zevon from Internal Affairs to see whether Officer Abisay Rivera had anything to do with our homicide. We put together a mug shot lineup to show to our eyewitnesses who may be able to place her in the street the previous evening.
Cooperating with IAB isn’t pleasant, but it isn’t optional, either, no matter how most cops feel about members of the Rat Squad. There is an acceptance of rank-and-file officers who serve there for a couple of years, but most of us have a thinly disguised contempt for the senior officers there because their bottom line, like ours, is about numbers: hitting targets and making arrests, and IAB never seem too fussy about how they close their cases. It seemed that they were hell-bent on hanging Rivera, insisting that she drove her brother that night. We were able to prove that she didn’t.
When we showed the spread of images, our witnesses shook their heads one by one, independently confirming that the woman on the scene looked nothing like Officer Rivera—she was out of the picture in every sense of the word, and Zevon from IAB soon followed.
“Good luck with the case, Detectives. Let me know how it turns out,” he said with a wave, donning his hat and coat as Simeon and I nodded in acknowledgment and got back to doing the sort of police work we’d signed on for.
Our attention turned to Carlos Valentin, who was in the wind, but it’s extremely difficult, under pressure and alone, not to pop up on somebody’s radar somewhere.
Valentin had $68.50 remaining on his Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card, a government-issued piece of magnetically encoded plastic which operates in much the same way as a preloaded credit card, allowing recipients to buy food and other necessities by swiping it through a reader in just about any neighborhood store.
Law enforcement loves technology like this. If you ever want to go off the grid, dump your cell phone and don’t use any form of electronic payment, because it leaves a digital path. Investigators with the motivation, time, and resources will use it to find you and secure you for your statement or your arrest.
We ran the numbers for Valentin’s EBT card and discovered he used it to buy groceries twenty miles from the scene of the shooting, at a bodega on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, right next to a subway.
> We now had an approximate location where our suspect might be hiding out, so I called the U.S. probation officer handling his case, David Mulcahy, who produced a T-Mobile number for his client. Detective Simeon and I crossed our fingers that our guy hadn’t had the sense to get rid of the handset. Valentin’s phone was able to “roam” amongst the hundred or so transmission towers that were situated within a four-mile radius of the deli’s address.
Across the USA, various police departments and federal agencies now make over 1.3 million Pen Register Trap and Trace requests per year, and these figures are rising steadily, forcing T-Mobile, Sprint, AT&T, and the other players to train dedicated teams which work 24/7 to keep up with the applications. Once he had seen our paperwork, the Honorable Eugene Oliver, Jr., of the Criminal Division Bronx Supreme Court signed the order for one more. We sent that on to T-Mobile on January 20 and they promptly handed over the records for that phone.
We pinged Valentin’s details to a cell tower location very close to the deli where our suspect had bought his food. It was highly likely that he was somewhere in the neighborhood, lying low close to the train and the grocery store. Our fugitive’s options were limited, and so, too, his options to make money, which meant he would commit further crimes and put others in harm’s way. His circumstances and the risks attached marked him out for special attention. It’s Danny time.
Movies show cops calling in SWAT every time they corner a collar, but in reality Homicide serves its own warrants most of the time. Guns are our last option—pepper spray and the threat of the telescopic baton are usually enough to discourage most suspects. For guys who like to shoot first and ask to see our warrants later, we have a different approach.
I picked up the phone and called the nearest thing the NYPD had to a Wild West sheriff: Detective Danny Rivera, a veteran cop who worked with the Bronx VFS—the borough’s Violent Felony Squad—a small, elite team, who chased fugitives at large in the city and beyond. In many ways they played a role similar to that of the U.S. Marshals. It was one of the most dangerous assignments on the Job and, given the profile of the people they pursued, many of Danny’s team were ex-military with an uncompromising attitude towards the fugitives they tracked down.