Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth (10 page)
“The taller guy came behind me. I thought he wanted to come into the room, so I just moved aside,” the girl later testified. “And then he put the pillowcase on top of my head. They pushed me on the floor. They cut my book bag off, and they was taking, from what I felt, my shoelaces off my sneakers.”
She continued, “I was yelling for help. They told me that I should be quiet and that I shouldn’t act up because if I acted up they would have to kill me like they did the girl the night before because she was feisty. I stopped yelling and gave them my arms. They just tied me up and put a sock in my mouth and took the pillowcase off.”
The monsters told the girl about Romona. “While I was sitting in a chair, they had tape over my mouth and my eyes,” she told police. “He said that the girl’s body was behind me. And he asked me if I smelled it. And so he turned my head so I could smell it. I don’t know. It was a funny smell. I don’t know exactly what a dead body smells like.”
After raping the schoolgirl, Pearson and Hendrix fell asleep. Their victim managed to free herself, licking the adhesive off the duct tape that covered her mouth and loosening the ropes that bound her.
“I saw the taller guy by the futon [asleep] with a gun in his hand, and the shorter guy right by the door with a knife,” the girl said. “It was like a big kitchen knife. It wasn’t a steak knife. I tippy-toed out of the room.”
And finally, someone called the cops.
Police didn’t connect the fifteen-year-old’s rape story with the disappearance of Romona Moore until an anonymous tipster called Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, with chilling information.
“He told me that he heard a girl screaming a few nights ago. Then he told me something about Snyder Avenue. I was overwhelmed,” Carmichael testified. “I was hearing him, not hearing him. He was being really specific. He said they wrapped her up in plastic, and I think they killed her.”
The caller was the uncle of Ramondo Jack, the visitor who’d seen Romona in her final hours alive. Jack, who never contacted the police, eventually told his uncle what he’d seen, and the older man called Carmichael to tell her where to look for her daughter’s body.
Carmichael notified the police, then set out for the place the tipster had indicated, an abandoned house on Kings Highway. She got to Romona’s body minutes before the police arrived.
All this happened on May 11, 2003. Mother’s Day.
The most veteran, crime-weary detectives assigned to the Romona Moore case were stunned by the violence she had suffered.
“They shattered her jaw. Completely almost knocked it off her head,” said Detective Wayne Carey.
“Her whole face is gone between the maggots and everything else,” said another detective at the crime scene.
According to the medical examiner’s office, the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head and chest, the result of being assaulted with a hammer.
“They had a hammer and a saw, and they used it on Romona. Well, all of us were starting to feel sick,” said Detective Hinrichs of the Brooklyn South homicide squad. Hinrichs is the NYPD’s most decorated officer.
“Getting killed is one thing,” he said. “But when you start to think what could have happened to this girl—what did happen. All of us have worked hundreds and hundreds of cases and had never seen anything this horrible.”
* * *
As Carey and Hinrichs began the grim task of working with NYPD forensics experts to find blood, teeth, and bone fragments to serve as evidence, Caribbean community leaders began taking the cops to task over how the case was handled.
For Carmichael, the problems began the minute she reported her daughter’s disappearance.
“It was total disrespect. All I got from the police was that if my child is out there and she don’t want to come back, you know, she don’t have to come back. No one came. No one called,” she told ABC News. “They had already said there was nothing they could do. And there was nothing they would do because she was twenty-one.”
Patrick Patterson, Romona’s uncle, said no amount of arguing by family members could convince cops to mount an immediate, sweeping search for Romona.
“They just brushed us off,” he said, “telling us, ‘Look, she’s gone somewhere with some male companion, she’s an adult.’ We kept on pleading with them, telling them she’s not the kind of person who would do such a thing. We pay taxes like everybody else. Why is there a double standard?”
By double standard, Patterson put his finger on a longstanding grievance in black communities: The police and New York media often give saturation coverage to missing-person cases when the suspected victim is young, white, wealthy, and living in Manhattan. In neighborhoods like East Flatbush, the treatment is very different: Pictures of missing black girls do not get splashed on the front pages, and police task forces do not instantly spring into action.
The police, of course, see things differently—and have their own complaints about a lack of cooperation from the community. NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said Brooklyn detectives did all they were supposed to do when Romona was first reported missing.
“We would have had Romona alive and this [second] girl never attacked if these people would have picked up the goddamned phone,” said Hinrichs.
Things came to a head during an angry demonstration across the street from the 67th Precinct. “You sent fifty officers to Romona’s funeral. Not one officer looked for her. Not one!” shouted a young woman protestor. “All we wanted you to do was look!
Look for her!
She was right there, look for her! Her mother’s only child. Shame!”
“There’s an old saying in the [Police] Academy,” said a rueful Detective Ken Silvia, Hinrichs’s partner. “If you want to be a hero, go join the Fire Department.”
Recriminations quickly took a backseat to the search for Romona’s killers. It didn’t take long to find Hendrix: He was already in jail on Rikers Island on an unrelated charge. Hendrix quickly named Kayson Pearson as his accomplice. But Pearson was nowhere to be found.
Hinrichs’s team launched a manhunt, banging on dozens of doors all across the city, especially in Brooklyn and Queens. A tip led them some hundred and forty miles north of New York City to the state capital, Albany, where Pearson had once been busted on drug charges.
While looking for Pearson’s brother, a low-level Albany dope dealer, the cops found his wife—Kayson’s sister-in-law— who was on the outs with the Pearson family, saying she’d been raped and beaten by her husband. She gave the cops an earful, including the fact that the fugitive Kayson had sent her an e-mail asking her to send his Social Security card, birth certificate, and other identification to an address in Georgia.
That sent cops racing to the airport to catch the first available flight to Georgia. They had no authority to make an arrest out of state, but Georgia cops accompanied them to the small house where they were sure Pearson was hiding. He wasn’t there.
Flying back to New York—and closing in on a hundred hours without sleep—cops followed a fresh tip to a house in Yonkers where Pearson was staying with an eighteen-year-old girl he’d recently met. (The deadly charm had worked once again.)
Cops staked out the building and intercepted the young woman as she returned home. They showed her a picture of Pearson. She confirmed that he was inside and gave them a key to her apartment.
The capture was violent. Pearson had barricaded himself inside the bedroom, pushing the bed against the door. When cops burst in, Pearson lunged at them with a knife. A Yonkers cop shot him twice in the leg before he was taken into custody.
Back in Brooklyn, Hinrichs and his team were still shaking their heads.
“If you told me it’s two young kids snatching girls at random off the street and raping and killing them, I’d think you’re crazy,” said Hinrichs. “You know, this shit happens in fucking Idaho or some shit.”
Like everything else about the case, the trial was dramatic, violent, and sickening. Pearson and Hendrix each accused one another of murder, leading the court to pick two juries to hear the case—one to judge whether Pearson was guilty, the other for Hendrix. It made for long, complicated proceedings: It took twice as long as normal to find twenty-four jurors; every time evidence came up that might unfairly prejudice one set of jurors, the proceedings would stop and twelve people would be hustled out of the courtroom until the evidence was heard, after which they shuffled back in.
On January 19, 2006, several days into the trial, Pearson showed up in court dressed in white and wearing a yarmulke. Ever the charmer, he’d told his lawyer, Mitchell Dinnerstein, that he planned to convert to Judaism.
“We even recited some Hebrew blessings,” Dinnerstein later said.
It turned out to be just another con job by the murderous Pearson. A few minutes into the proceedings, members of Romona’s family noticed Pearson and Hendrix winking at each other. Both men saw they were being noticed, and accordingly brandished Plexiglas shivs, the nasty homemade blades inmates fashion out of jailhouse debris. The monsters had secreted the knives in their underwear before coming to court. Now they used the weapons to make a bloody bid for freedom.
Wheeling on Dinnerstein—the man he’d prayed with just minutes earlier—Pearson slashed him across the face. At the same time, Hendrix leaped over the rail separating witnesses from spectators, pouncing on a court officer and grabbing for his gun.
All hell broke loose.
There was blood everywhere. Dinnerstein’s shirt quickly became soaked in red. He would later need stitches to close the gash in his face. A fifty-eight-year-old court officer, Sergeant James Gorra, sprinted toward Pearson, who kept trying to stab Dinnerstein.
“I saw a weapon, and when he got close I gave a forearm as hard as I could and grabbed him. I couldn’t let him get behind me because the judge is behind me,” Gorra said later. “He hit me with the shiv twice, and then I flipped him over my side and then he hit me the third time. We were rolling around. I remember screaming out, ‘He’s going for my gun!’”
Albert Tomei, the sixty-six-year-old judge hearing the case, was at first puzzled by the chaos.
“While I was watching all this, I heard, ‘Gun, gun, gun!’” he said. “As soon as I heard that, I said, ‘I’m outta here!’”
Judge Tomei tried to leap from his perch on the bench and get to safety. “I’m not very good at jumping,” he said. “I missed the first time.”
Hendrix missed too. Officers swarmed over him, kicking him to the ground and hosing him down with pepper spray before he could get his hands on a gun.
Spectators fled the courtroom. Jurors dove to the floor. Romona’s mother, Elle Carmichael, was rolling on the ground, crying hysterically.
“They could have killed everybody in that room!” she screamed. “Hang them right now by the neck!”
Minutes after the escape attempt started, it was all over. Hendrix was wheeled out to an ambulance on a gurney, his face covered with an oxygen mask. He gave reporters the finger.
“In all my time on the criminal bench, it was the most frightened I’ve ever been,” Tomei later told colleagues. But there in the courtroom, amid the pandemonium, he was more blunt, looking at Dinnerstein’s soaked bloody shirt and voicing the feeling of everyone present.
“Holy shit!” said the judge.
Tomei had no choice but to declare a mistrial, which he did the following week. The juries that watched the escape attempt would be hopelessly prejudiced against Pearson and Hendrix. The judge also excused Dinnerstein from the case, assembled two more juries, and resumed the trial in February.
Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi, the prosecutor assigned to the second trial, squeezed Elle Carmichael’s hand, then began explaining to the jurors what had happened to Romona.
This time, Pearson and Hendrix were banned from the courtroom and made to watch the proceedings via video feed to the Rikers Island lockup. On the rare occasions they were brought to court individually to testify in person, each man’s arms and legs were shackled, their hands encased in mitts and surrounded by twenty officers.
“Any outburst on your part, any showing of your hands or shackles on your part in order to create a mistrial, will not result in a mistrial,” Justice Tomei told Pearson.
The trial dragged on for weeks, but the outcome was never in doubt. Both juries convicted the monsters on all counts.
At sentencing, Judge Tomei told Pearson and Hendrix he would not call them animals.
“That word is not appropriate because animals do not torture each other,” he said. “You are a deadly human virus … a deadly vessel of human terror.”
Then he sent them to jail forever.
“You’re going to be consigned to a place where there is no love, there is no compassion—[a place that is] cold and lonely. And you’ll be consigned to that place for a very, very long time,” he said.
Elle Carmichael sued the city for more than a million dollars, claiming that delays in searching for her daughter—along with the fact that the police closed the case while Romona was still alive—contributed to her death.
But for Carmichael, money is the least of her concerns.
She moved from the home she shared with her daughter and went for months of psychological counseling. She carried a picture of her smiling daughter as a kind of talisman to ward off thoughts of Romona’s final terrible days.
“The one question I always ask is,
Why did it happen?
I feel like at my worst times, when I feel most helpless, that’s the question I ask,” she told a reporter. “It puts me into a trance sometimes, so I try to avoid that question. But I still wonder,
Why did this happen?
”
The killers have their own chilling answer to that question.
“We did it for fun,” Pearson said at his second and final sentencing, when he got an extra twenty-two years for the bloody escape attempt. “It was fun to see a system that has so much power and control lose it in a second. The judge—he’s the one with all the power—was running away, bumping his knee. That was the most fun I’ve had all my life.”