by Luke Waters
The original call was that the body of a child had been found, possibly thrown from a roof. The full picture is a little different, and we soon confirm that our dead child is actually a seven-pound, full-term female newborn infant of black/Hispanic descent, only minutes old when dropped to her death, and currently awaiting autopsy at Jacobi Medical Center.
Andy Hernandez and Jorge Chico out of the 49 brief us on arrival, and a Level One Mobilization is in operation, which means a frozen crime scene, as uniformed cops from the local precinct struggle to keep not just reporters but also curious bystanders and residents twenty yards from the front entrance.
“What do you think, buddy?” I ask Bobby Grant as we examine a bloodstained towel found close to the spot where the body landed. My partner stands in the early morning December sunshine scanning the building from top to bottom, while Mike De Paolis chats to Maulicci and Short, two CSU detectives who have just arrived to swab and are making use of the good light to photograph all around them.
“You know what, Luke? I’m thinking whoever tossed the kid was above the first floor, or the body wouldn’t be marked, and was probably up higher, considering the injuries,” Bobby, the sharpest DT in our office, continues thoughtfully.
My partner is not only New York’s finest, he’s also New York’s furthest. The NYPD has strict rules on how far we can live from the city limits, making New Jersey and Pennsylvania out of bounds for MOS, but Grant’s wife and family live two hours away—two hours by Delta jet, that is—in Atlanta, Georgia, a city famous for Coca-Cola, the Olympics, and Gone with the Wind, which is precisely where you will find him as soon as he has worked his overtime, though our high flier keeps an apartment in New York for the times when he unexpectedly has to catch a case, instead of the next red-eye out of JFK.
If the bosses down at the Puzzle Palace ever find out what he’s been doing, Bobby will probably be facing a little chat with the chief, but he’s winged it for a few years now, and, so far, his luck has held.
From the top of the building we get a different perspective on our tiny victim’s first, and last, moments of life, though my own tentative glances over the edge of the roof barrier offer no further insight into the mind, or identity, of a person who tosses a newborn to her death.
Crackheads and those who supply them will stop at nothing to feed their habit and extract money owed. Between the public revulsion at this crime and the manpower at our disposal, we’re confident that we will persuade someone to come forward and finger the perp.
Teams of DTs knock on the doors of the apartments in the building, working their way through the list one floor at a time in the usual canvass for witnesses, but two hours later we’ve got nothing to show for our efforts.
All local precincts provide a couple of detectives for an investigation like this, and any officers available are called in to help out in some way. The Emergency Services Unit also assists in searching through garbage incinerators, swapping submachine guns for rakes and yard brooms as they sift through the garbage from the incinerator.
Overhead, one of the department’s helicopters hovers above the rooftops, providing intelligence to the mobile command post, a catchall term which describes a range of vehicles, from Mercedes vans to articulated trucks, in which the Brass coordinate the efforts on the ground with the help of a bank of computers and technicians.
Clothing, a towel, and tissues near where the body was found are individually marked with numbered yellow plastic “flags,” each of which is photographed and bagged for transport back to the crime lab at headquarters, but right now I am more concerned with the expressions on the faces in the crowd than DNA samples. Sometimes your perp is amongst curious onlookers who throng the crime scene, so I watch for anyone who stands out, with another eye for anyone who deliberately signals us from the crowd.
My eyes crisscross the faces several times before I realize that a number of different people are pointing in the same direction, which seems to be the window of an apartment on the fifth floor, so I walk towards the entrance only to find my progress halted by uniformed cops and noisy, frustrated residents packed into the small lobby, while on the stairs a middle-aged black woman sits, sobbing, head in hands.
I go down on one knee to introduce myself and ask her name.
“I’m Michelle Williams, Apartment 5F. I think … I think my daughter might be the one,” the woman sobs.
“ ‘ The one’?” I echo.
“The one who … you know … who had that baby, Detective. I think it was my Latisha. I just phone her, and she crying. My God, until now I don’t even know she is pregnant.”
“So, where can we find—Latisha? Where can we find your Latisha right now?”
“She told me she in class. She’s only fourteen years old.” The radio, still in my left hand, drops slowly towards my waist as Bobby’s eyes roll towards the ceiling.
“No way, buddy!” he whispers, with a scornful scowl. “A fourteen-year-old carried a child full term and then gave birth, all without the mother knowing anything? And not one of the neighbors we spoke to noticed, either? Gimme a break! We’re wasting our time here.”
At this stage Michelle Williams is the only lead we have, so although I agree with Bobby’s assessment we escort her to our car, leaving Tarsnane, De Paolis, O’Neill, and the local DTs to continue the canvass for witnesses while we take the woman up to MS 144, Michelangelo Middle School. Their motto is admirable, “Where today’s children prepare for tomorrow’s world,” but we are totally unprepared for the scenes which will unfold in front of us in the headmistress’s office in a few minutes.
“I’m certain you are on the wrong track with this, Detectives,” Principal Katian Lotakis says confidently, while a social worker is sent to take the child from class. “I know the student, and she certainly does not look pregnant. She’s good in class—she got an A for her essay yesterday—and she took gym this morning—hardly likely if she’d just given birth,” she says with the stare school principals reserve for pupils—or police officers—who waste their time. The atmosphere in that office changes from skepticism to incredulity ten seconds after Latisha Binns appears at the door.
Although only three months past her fourteenth birthday the teenager stands at almost six feet tall and is over 160 pounds in weight, but as her mother rises to greet the teen, her daughter’s response is that of a frightened child, a tearful reply that leaves us all utterly stunned.
“Latisha, are you the one?”
The youngster looks at her mother, turns to look at us, and simply replies, “Yes.”
“You had a baby, beside my room?” the older woman asks, wiping bitter tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse.
“Last night. When it was born, I … I was afraid you’d hear it, Mom. I didn’t … I just didn’t know whadda do,” Binns blurts out. “So I … I pulled away the cord, picked it up, and I threw the baby out the window to stop it crying.”
Bobby Grant, as sharp a cop as I ever worked with, looks at the teenager in openmouthed amazement. He utters just one word. “Jesus!”
I am so taken aback that I’m frozen in my seat, unable to respond to Binns’s confession. I have three kids and have witnessed the pain of childbirth and the time it takes for a woman to recover with the help of nurses, midwives, and pediatricians. Here is a junior high school student who has just come from gym, claiming to have had a baby twenty-four hours earlier, without so much as a paracetamol.
*
Time seemed to stand still in the room, and I had no idea of how much of it passed, seconds or a minute, before Bobby and I led our suspect back to the car accompanied by her mother. We took her to Jacobi for medical attention, the same hospital where the baby lay cold on a slab in the mortuary. Our drive to the hospital was short, fast, and upsetting, as both mother and daughter were crying in the backseat of our Buick, Latisha’s shrieks growing louder as the full realization of what she had done hit her.
“I’m going to jail now. I’m s
orry, I’m so sorry,” she moaned, adding that she became pregnant after being raped on her way to school.
“Bullshit,” muttered Bobby as we weaved through the traffic.
As the doctors tended to our prisoner we got permission from her mother to have the apartment at Burke Avenue searched. Once the doctors had taken care of Latisha we tactfully questioned the fourteen-year-old on the details of her pregnancy, the birth of her child, and the reasons why she threw her baby out an upstairs window. Next Pete Tarsnane and I drove back to MS 144 to speak to Principal Lotakis once again, who gave us a copy of the school yearbook, which we took back to the hospital to see if our prisoner could identify the father of the baby from class photographs.
It emerged that Michelle Williams was a religious woman who, concerned for her daughter’s future, had stopped her from playing with many of the other kids in her neighborhood. Her mother made sure that she concentrated on her studies and sports. A year earlier Latisha, unknown to her mother, had developed a crush on a Hispanic boy at school, and back in Jacobi she immediately picked his picture from the yearbook and named him as the father of the dead child.
Grant and I followed up on the earlier claims of rape, only to discover that the youngsters had had consensual sex after all. The boy, age fourteen at the time of conception, told us they had only had intercourse once, which proved enough to get the then-thirteen-year-old Latisha pregnant.
Our suspect told us how, having given birth, she cut the child’s umbilical cord herself and placed the severed material, along with her pajamas and other bloodied clothing, in a plastic bag. After killing the baby, the teen cleaned herself up, dressed, and left for school as usual, passing by the Gun Hill Road McDonald’s en route. She told us that she dumped the bag in the trash can and, sure enough, later that day a police dog uncovered the piece of cord and bloodstained clothes in the rubbish at the fast-food outlet. The evidence was photographed and placed in a special biohazard bag before CSU then moved on to the family apartment, in which they found bloodied bedclothes, carpet, and other material which tested positive for the girl’s DNA.
Emotions can run high in cases like this, but we were very aware that we were dealing with a child and were tactful and professional while still focused on solving the crime. Every DT on the case was shocked by the news, and also amazed that Latisha Binns managed to hide a full-term pregnancy, and give birth, without her mother, classmates, or schoolteachers suspecting the truth.
You could argue that a teenage mother, exhausted after giving birth in silence and emotionally distraught, panicked and tried to rid herself of her unwanted infant by the quickest means possible, giving no thought to the consequences. On the other hand, Binns could be depicted as a coldhearted killer, who not only treated her helpless daughter like garbage but tried to cover her tracks by dumping evidence far from the scene of the crime—and was so unmoved by her actions that she sat through class just hours later as if nothing had happened.
The next day, the Medical Examiner’s Office called Detective Andy Hernandez confirming that the baby was alive when she hit the ground and telling him that the case was now to be reclassified as a homicide.
Our prisoner was charged with one count of manslaughter and one count of murder in the second degree, which for a crime like this would normally result in decades in prison upon conviction.
The case was heard in family court, away from the glare of the media and the public, and as we gave evidence, one by one, the reaction of all present in the courtroom was identical to that in the principal’s office at MS 144 a month earlier, as even the judge struggled to understand how the defendant hid her pregnancy so well, sitting exams and taking gym class right up to and after the birth.
Despite the understandable sympathy towards Latisha, the accused was found guilty on both counts, but her earlier predictions that she would go to jail proved incorrect. The accused girl sidestepped imprisonment and instead was paroled, walking free from the courthouse, as she would remain as long as she kept on the right side of the law.
Although the death of Baby Binns left all in Bronx Homicide deeply shocked, the sad reality was that cases like this were all too frequent, and long before Principal Lotakis’s personal letter to NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, commending us personally for our sensitive handling of the case, the details had already started to fade.
Less than a week after the death of Baby Binns, an infant was found by a passerby near the crossroads at Crotona Park in the Bronx, still alive, thankfully, with his umbilical cord attached. A day later another newborn was found dead, deposited like just another piece of commuters’ rubbish, at a Long Island train station.
Eventually it became clear he was smothered to death by his mother—a thirty-four-year-old nanny—his body placed in a shoe box.
As a cop you become desensitized, detached from death. If not, you won’t be able to do your job as a link in the chain from cradle to grave. Detective work isn’t about emotion, it’s about facts, but cases involving children test your objectivity and dispassion no matter how long you have been a cop.
The worst case of all is where you attend the autopsy of an infant.
*
A few months after we closed the Baby Binns investigation, I caught a case that will stay with me for the rest of my life: a potential multiple homicide as a result of a catastrophic fire at 1022 Woodycrest Avenue in the Bronx, an area popular with new immigrants trying to get a first foothold in the USA.
On March 7, 2007, FDNY responded to a three-alarm emergency call in the building, and although it took their trucks less than three and a half minutes to get to the address, they arrived to a scene of utter devastation. Two families, both new arrivals from Mali, shared an apartment in which a fire had broken out. The victims were rushed to various hospitals locally for emergency treatment, along with four injured firefighters and a paramedic who came to the immigrants’ aid.
Some of these victims had been badly burned in the blaze and others had internal injuries from jumping out of upstairs windows to escape the flames and fumes. We later discovered what occurred was a result of a heater being turned over on a mattress at about eleven p.m., while the children inside were fast asleep.
One by one the victims were being transferred from local hospitals to Jacobi Medical, a level one trauma center and the best-equipped facility to deal with major emergencies. I decided to take a look at the scene, but there was nothing much we could do, so we left it to the fire marshals and drove over to Jacobi to set up a command post for our investigation.
The medical staff were some of the most experienced in the country and a lot of gunshot victims in the Bronx owed their lives to the men and women who worked there. We were still getting organized when the bodies of the kids, aged from just one year up to eleven years, started to arrive in a fleet of ambulances.
With each one, the supervising physician caught my eye and shook his head, and I silently whispered a little prayer. By this stage one of the mothers had arrived at the hospital to receive the news that her four sons, one-year-old Bilaly, Abudubucary aged five, eight-year-old Mahamadou, and Bandiougou, who at eleven was the oldest victim, had all died of smoke inhalation.
The woman stood in the corner, doing a deal with God to spare her daughter, Diaba, aged just three, who at that moment was in the back of an ambulance racing through traffic to the ER, but as soon as the bus carrying her arrived it was pretty clear that all our prayers were in vain.
“This little one looks bad, Doc,” one of the paramedics said as the gurney was rolled in, its three-year-old occupant foaming at the mouth as blood rushed from her ears.
For all the professionalism and the detachment, when it came down to it, neither the doctor nor I had the heart to break the news to the child’s mother as her last child was pronounced DOA.
As dawn broke on another day, we had eight dead children, as well as several adult victims. Fatamata Foumare, forty-five, lost her life in the blaze, along with her children Dj
ibril, aged three, and seven-month-old twins, Sisi and Harouma. One child, their seven-year-old sister Hassimy, survived.
Facing the bodies of eight dead adults, you don’t even flinch—it’s just another routine day in the Bronx—but this case, and any with a child, was different. The names and faces of these tender children who died will stay with me always.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE SLEEP OF THE JUST
Detective William Fisher is not happy. In fact, right now he is totally fed up with life in general, and the Job in particular. He’s missing sleep, shut down on overtime, and to make matters worse the double stabbing case which has just landed on his desk is looking like another routine homicide.
Or, as Willie puts it, a bag of shit. A detective needs stimulation.
“You know what this is, buddy?” he asks, arms folded, feet propped up on his desk in that corner of the 49 Detective Squad he calls home.
“A bag of shit, Willie?”
I nod approvingly, my chin dropping onto my chest, as my eyes blink, then slowly close involuntarily. Twenty hours without sleep will do that to you.
“Any start on the DD5s, buddy?” I ask, trying to pretend I don’t know the answer.
When it comes to paperwork Willie believes in outsourcing the workload.
“Just having a quick nap, then I’ll make a start. Hey, any word of a spot opening up at Homicide, Luke? You know I’m trying to join you guys and get away from this 49 squad.”
I shrug my shoulders, reach for a Detective Unusual form, and slide it into the printer, as my partner slips into unconsciousness once again.
An hour earlier I’d arrived with the rest of my team at Bronx Homicide for the start of my eight a.m. shift and checked with the overnight detail, only to learn that we were starting into a possible double homicide, with one victim DOA, lying on a slab at Jacobi Medical, and the other hanging on grimly to life in the intensive care upstairs.
