by Luke Waters
“The second guy, Frank Cuevas, is likely, Luke,” said Scott Patterson, yawning as he reached for yet another coffee. His shift was over, but his day and mine were only beginning.
“Who’s up on this one?” Kenny Umlauft called from his office door as one of the other cops picked up a pen to log the case into the ledger. “I’m catching, Kenny,” I replied, looking up from the newspaper the night-watch guys had left on my desk. “Anybody seen Barry?”
We were still one short and Umlauft was grinning, well aware that Detective Barry Sullivan was not known for his love of early starts, as our sergeant reminded him when he walked in, immaculately dressed as ever but “lookin’ a bit shook,” as me ma would say.
“Hiya, Barry. Bit early for you, eh?” said Umlauft, looking at his watch in mock horror.
“God, not today, Kenny. Please, not today,” Sullivan whispered with a groan.
“Okay, so what we got?” I asked DT Brendan Mallon, who was cursing his coffee as it burned his tongue while he started printing from the nearest computer. We wallpapered the folders with paperwork, following the basic twelve-step investigation process, every step of which had to be documented and accounted for, from our first response to the scene, to the position of the body, to the canvass of witnesses, the interviewing of 911 callers, and the victimology, as we called it, which is a complete and detailed biography of our victim.
“Not much. DOA is a Hispanic male named Christopher Velez. ’Bout three a.m. this morning he and his homey, this Frank Cuevas, are playing pool up at Park Billiards—you know, that big sports bar on White Plains Road? Anyway, they go outside, and some guy drives up on the sidewalk, clips one of ’em, and a fight breaks out. Usual BS argument. He-said-you-said, yada-yada-yada. Driver ends up stabbing both of them. Willie Fisher is catching it out of the 49. He has two witnesses down there now, Luke.”
We worked as a team, without ego, each taking a task, with the ultimate aim of wading through the case and getting another one squared away. It’s the nature of detective work.
Sean Murray knew more than most about getting results, and although he hadn’t moved from his seat, his mind was already working through the details. If Bronx Homicide had a baseball team, Sean would be the safe pair of hands, the player you’d call up to the base when you needed a home run. No matter how high the case files were piled on his desk, he never complained when the CO handed him another, which he did whenever he needed a result.
Murray was an Irish emigrant like myself, but he was raised far from Dublin, in the rural west of the country, and was married to a girl from the Aran Islands. Reaching Galway from the islands meant crossing choppy open water in a ferry, or, a generation earlier, a currach rowboat, so the spirit of meitheal—lending a helping hand to a neighbor—was vital, and it had migrated with him from farmland to the city street, ensuring that Sean would never let you, or the victim, down.
“Just thinking out loud, Luke … the witnesses said that the driver was from St. Andrews, up in Yonkers, right? And the guy drove a weird-looking little box-shaped blue car—ten-to-one that’s a Scion. Can’t be that many of ’em around the streets. Maybe Brendan and I will take a little drive over there and have a gander to see if we can spot the yoke. C’mon, Mallon! I’ll let you drive if it makes you happier.”
Ten minutes after Murray and Mallon drove over to Yonkers, I was listening to Willie’s woes over in the 49, nodding sympathetically as he whinged about his lot in life, before we sat down to take statements from the two distraught witnesses, James Equiziaco and Oneal Smith, who explained the lead-up to the events of a few hours earlier.
The two men, along with the deceased Velez and critical Cuevas, were all in their midtwenties. They were regulars at the Park Billiards Café and Sports Bar, where they played a few frames of pool and chatted up the women on Ladies’ Night, a scene played out in every town and city across the country. At the next table that night, Eddie Rodriguez was doing much the same thing with his friends, and when the club DJ asked if anyone was from Yonkers both groups were quick to declare their allegiances.
“Hey—you guys from Yonkers as well?” Rodriguez said.
“Yeah. You, too? Where’bouts?” someone replied from the other table.
“St. Andrews, man. How ya doin’?” Rodriguez responded, saluting his neighbors.
“For real. Small world,” Velez said with a smile.
The players went back to their game, and after a few minutes Rodriguez went outside to sit in his car and light a cigarette, paying little attention to the man who had followed him to the back door and, likewise, was lighting up. Rodriguez started up the car. It was time for him and his friends to head home, so he pulled up on the sidewalk to get closer to the door, in the process narrowly missing the other smoker, who took exception to almost being snookered by the blue Scion.
“Yo! What’s your problem, man? You nearly hit me!” the pedestrian’s voice called angrily from the darkness.
It was Christopher Velez, the neighbor he had chatted to earlier. Rodriguez rolled down the window, and the insults flew.
Someone stepped inside to tell the other players that a fight was about to break out, and soon the space was filled with people—most of them were drunk, or close—who egged on both parties. At this stage the whole incident was barely worthy of the cops’ attention, but then one of Velez’s group stepped forward and kicked Rodriguez’s car—he angrily objected and was punched through the open window as he tried to get out.
A knife was produced—we never could establish by whom—and in the struggle which ensued, Rodriguez swung at both Velez, who dropped to the ground, fatally wounded, and Cuevas, who was seriously injured.
Rodriguez was also cut in the fracas and had already left the scene by the time cops out of the 49th Precinct responded to the 911 call to find Frankie Cuevas screaming with his hand against his bleeding chest. Outside a nearby Laundromat, Christopher Velez sat in his car dying from a fatal wound to his heart. Cuevas was lucky. EMS stabilized their patient before rushing him to Jacobi, where the staff have dealt with hundreds of stabbings. Cuevas was tough and pulled through, but fortune is finite, as he would soon find out.
Once we took the statements from the witnesses we left Equiziaco and Smith in the hospital awaiting news on their injured friend and we headed back to the squad room. I had just started to type up their account when my cell phone rang, the sound momentarily rousing my partner, who was soon fast asleep across the desk again, snoring deeply, a smile etched onto his face.
Willie was grabbing forty winks, and pocketing eighty-five dollars an hour overtime, too. If we had been in Bronx Homicide right then, Kenny would be drawing little dollar signs on his eyelids with a dark green Magic Marker, because by the time we’d clock out, we would be up about a thousand dollars on the day apiece.
“Luke, it’s Sean. Myself and Mallon are up in Yonkers, outside an apartment at nineteen Grey Place. I think we have our guy’s car.”
Sean explained that he’d run the plates on the dark blue Scion, and it came to a Joanna Cruz, so he’d rung Yonkers PD to see if they had any information on her.
“Funny that you should ask,” Detective Trainer had said over the phone, after Sean introduced himself. “Her name came up this morning. She has a boyfriend. Let me see … Ramirez? Where did I put that report? … No, scratch that, it’s Rodriguez, Detective Murray. Eddie Rodriguez. We interviewed him a few hours ago down at St. Joseph’s ER. Guy was stabbed. Told us someone tried to stick him up at a gas station.”
It was a real break, and I sent a couple of cops over to relieve Murray at the address. I accessed Eddie Rodriguez’s photograph from our files, copying details of his height, weight, color, and other information into the department’s Force Field software, which produces several dozen pictures of similar-looking individuals. From these I selected five, plus our suspect’s image, so we could show them to our witnesses waiting to see Cuevas, who was still in intensive care.
Right then W
illie was doing a pretty fair impression of a corpse, too, but his loud snores were a dead giveaway that he hadn’t clocked out just yet.
“Huh? Wh-a-a-t?” said Fisher, blinking as I stood over his chair, in which he had been flopped for the last couple of hours, shaking his shoulder.
“Time to go, buddy. We have to interview our witnesses. Looks like Sean Murray has found our perp.”
“Ugh, great. Right behind you, a-a-a-g-g-g-h-h-h!” said Fisher.
We headed across the car park to Jacobi, and took great care to separately show James Equiziaco and Oneal Smith a different version of the printout, making it harder for them to tip each other off about whom to pick out. Each of them immediately identified Rodriguez on their copy as the man who’d stabbed Velez and Cuevas.
On the drive over to Yonkers I briefed sleeping beauty Willie on what had been happening for the last few hours so we were both up to speed when we arrived at Joanna Cruz’s apartment. We had backup from several cops from Yonkers PD and a couple of guys from the 49.
Our knock at the door was answered immediately, and when we identified ourselves, Joanna Cruz ushered us in to meet her boyfriend, who was sitting on his bed having a Chinese takeaway meal. The atmosphere was cordial and relaxed and he readily agreed to come in to the station with us and explain how he got injured. No mention was made of the double stabbing, the seriously injured man in Jacobi, or our homicide victim chilling in the morgue. There would be plenty of time for that later.
Rodriguez wasn’t too pleased when he realized we were on our way to the Bronx and not Yonkers and was even less impressed when he realized we were not buying the story he’d concocted to explain his cut hand to the other detectives who were called by the ER staff—standard procedure when someone comes in off the streets nursing an injury.
I have never investigated a serious stabbing where the attacker has not cut himself in some way in the melee. Even if your target is unarmed he will try to grab the weapon, and in the struggle the blade will often cut both the perpetrator and the victim. Rodriguez’s injuries were consistent with the statements of Equiziaco and Smith.
Our suspect eventually decided to be cooperative, and at about one a.m. admitted that he’d stabbed both men. He agreed to make a written statement of his involvement, explaining that he’d had no choice, clearly intending to claim self-defense should the case come to court. If this had been a simple assault his stance might have made sense. With a good lawyer and a sympathetic judge and jury he might even have walked on probation, but he was not aware yet that one of the men he’d attacked was dead. He was looking at a possible charge of homicide and a lifetime in prison.
I called Larry Piergrossi at the Bronx DA’s office and explained what we had, and he agreed to come over with a technician and set up a video recording of Rodriguez’s statement, for the record, authorizing me to formally place our suspect under arrest for murder in the second degree and another charge of attempted murder. We explained this to Rodriguez and broke the news to him that Velez was dead.
At first he seemed unable to take it in, but his incredulity soon turned to rage, and he started ranting and raving that he had been tricked and cursed me, Fisher, the DA, and the system in general as the seriousness of his situation started to dawn on him.
The crucial points were that he’d made a statement of his own free will, and that he did stab both men, but in his position I would probably have felt the same. Our prisoner’s lawyer, Howard Levine, arrived at the 49, and we left them alone to confer while we grabbed a couple of hours of sleep.
My eyes closed as soon as my head hit the couch in the TV room; three hours later, still wearing the same clothes, I was back in the game. I drove over to an address in Crotona Park to speak to the nearest thing the Bronx had to a casting agent. Robert Weston was the sort of guy who was always on the clock, which was one of the reasons so many detectives reached out to him when they, like me, needed five “fillers.”
“And this time, try to get me some guys who actually look like our suspect, will you, Robert?” I said, giving him a detailed description.
“Whatcha mean? I ahways do, Detective,” he grumbled. Years earlier Weston had been having lunch when a cop walked up and asked him if he wanted to make a few dollars sitting alongside some other citizens, and their suspect, in a lineup for a witness. It had been the start of a new career. Soon he was not only appearing himself but rounding up bodies who would get ten dollars apiece, with twenty going to Weston for setting it up. Lineups are a pain to put together, and Robert’s number was soon on the speed dial of half of the investigators in the department.
A few hours later, in the presence of Rodriguez’s lawyer, both our witnesses positively picked our prisoner out from the other five as the man who’d stabbed both our victims. This identification, added to his statement, should have been enough to convict him.
Still, somehow there were a couple of further twists and turns in the case. The first one occurred almost six months later when the GMC Envoy in which Frank Cuevas was traveling at speed along East Tremont in the Bronx clipped the curbside, sending the SUV sailing through the air, where it met a thick steel pole in a traffic island. The post opened the two-and-a-half-ton truck like a key on a sardine can, decapitating one of the passengers and cutting several others in two.
Then it seemed that our homicide case might be pleaded down to a lesser charge, particularly when the ADA in charge of the case, Cynthia Lindblum, got a call from Rodriguez’s lawyer, Howard Levine. He said that he had new information about another man whom his client claimed was responsible for killing Christopher Velez—a Latin Kings gang member named Rafael Alvarez.
Eddie told Levine that Alvarez, a longtime friend, had admitted to him that it was he who had finished off Velez while Eddie drove himself to St. Joseph’s. Alvarez had visited him in Rikers to apologize for how it had turned out, offering to pay his family five thousand dollars.
The claim was intriguing, if it was true, so when Cynthia passed on the information I followed up. I started by obtaining a copy of the prison visitors’ log from the Department of Corrections, which lists the name and date of birth for all visitors to Rikers, including a unique ID number which is used every time someone comes by to see one of the prisoners. Sure enough, Rafael Alvarez was listed in the log, and when I ran his details through our computer system I discovered that he was currently on probation. Alvarez had already been arrested a number of times for charges including threatening people with weapons, and he was listed as a member of the Latin Kings. The Kings had originally started as a sort of benevolent society in the 1940s to protect Hispanics living in Chicago; by the 1990s they had spread as far as New York City and were now just another violent street gang heavily involved in drugs.
I prepared a “wanted” card for Alvarez, so if he was stopped by any local cops a note would appear telling the officer that Detective Waters in Bronx Homicide wanted to speak to the man he or she had pulled over. It would be of little use out of state, and we had no idea where Alvarez was at this stage.
I paid half a dozen visits to his apartment and his girlfriend’s place, but to no avail. I reached out to his probation officer, Ronald Levy, who offered what help he could, but the guy was nowhere to be found, which fitted with Eddie’s claims that Alvarez had something to hide.
Bronx DA Robert Johnson was anxious to pursue a conviction against Rodriguez and we still had two eyewitnesses as well as our suspect’s signed and recorded confession, so we proceeded with the prosecution, and on June 14, 2009, two years after the fight in the pool hall car park, the People of the State of New York vs. Eddie Rodriguez, Indictment Number 1553-07, came before Honorable Judge Barbara Newman.
From the very start the accused seemed confident of beating the rap, a demeanor shared by his attorney, who shouted and displayed flashes of anger in the opening days which did little to endear him to the jury, or the judge, who told him on several occasions to calm down.
I was called to the
stand to testify and was questioned by ADA Lisa Davis, for the People, with whom I had run through the questions in detail in the lead-up to the trial.
Next it was Howard Levine’s turn to cross-examine me, and he adopted an aggressive stance, becoming fixated on, above all things, my pronunciation of his surname.
He said to-may-to, I said to-mah-to, but as I kept slipping up his face slowly started to resemble one.
“It’s Lev-een, not Le-vine, Detective!” he said in exasperation, as I mispronounced his name again. I apologized once more and explained that growing up in Ireland it was pronounced the way I kept saying it. “Fine, Detective Watt-airs …” he responded, sending the jury into hysterics.
I remained completely impassive, because whether Eddie Rodriguez was innocent or guilty was not up to me: it was up to a jury of his peers. And despite his confidence, the way this was going there was a very real possibility that he would end up being taken away to start what amounted at his age to a life sentence behind bars, which was no laughing matter.
Judge Newman smashed her gavel, calling for order, and glared at the defense attorney before lecturing him. All of this was doing little for the accused, a fact confirmed when, a couple of days later, after a short adjournment, the verdict was finally handed down.
Eddie Rodriguez got twenty-five years for the homicide and fifteen for the attempted murder, to run consecutively. He went berserk, insisting he was innocent and demanding to know why I had not found Alvarez.
“He knows! That Irish detective knows I didn’t do it!” he screamed, swearing loudly as he was taken away by the courts’ officers.
We went over to Cynthia’s office, where the mood could not be more different, and she congratulated all of us on a job well done, as much amazed as delighted by the verdict.
“Great result,” she cooed. “Forty years! Forty years, you guys! I can’t believe it!”
It was an impressive conviction for any prosecutor but left me feeling far from wanting to celebrate. The system did not screw Eddie Rodriguez. He stabbed two men, and one of them died shortly afterward, a fact he admitted to in a written statement, but to this day I would feel far happier had I had a chance to grill Alvarez and establish if there was any truth to the allegations that he had also attacked the victim, as our convict claimed.
