Nothing but the Truth

by Tim McLoughlin

The coffin factory on Herzl Street is layered in four spraypainted gang graffiti, making it difficult to determine exactly who is in charge: Syc or Cripp 2XSS Gang or 2-S Deuce or Royal Deuce.

  At the end of the block, the elevated subway tracks of the 3 train provide shelter for a colony of hard-faced individuals who will sell you dope or themselves.

  One of them, a fellow named Daisy, said, “Yeah, I heard of the Morgue Boys.” So, were they guilty or innocent? “Man, it don’t matter,” said Daisy. “It’s Brownsville.”

  PART II

  JOHNNY-ON-THE-PONY

  In which two teams compete. One team crouches into a single-file line, each person holding the waist of the person ahead. Members of the second team try one-by-one to hop atop the “pony” and to stay on for a certain amount of time before they’re shaken off.

  FUN-TIME MONSTERS

  BY ERROL LOUIS

  East Flatbush

  All of us had worked hundreds and hundreds of cases but never seen anything this horrible.

  —Detective Mike Hinrichs, NYPD’s most decorated officer

  Kayson Pearson and Troy Hendrix, already convicted of first-degree murder, spent their final moments in court in one final show of murderous bravado.

  “I have no regrets,” said Hendrix.

  “Me and my brother, Troy, we’re the fun-time monsters,” said Pearson. He was smiling.

  Pearson was still grinning when New York State Supreme Court Justice James Starkey ordered the pair to serve another twenty-two years in prison on top of the crushing murder sentence they had already received—life plus twenty-five years.

  The sentence meant that even if some legal fluke nullified their life sentences, Pearson and Hendrix would spend fortyseven years behind bars. Neither man is eligible for parole.

  It’s about as much prison time as you can get in a state like New York that has effectively abolished the death penalty. (New York has not executed anyone since 1963. The state still has a death penalty law on the books, but in June 2004 it was declared unconstitutional by the state’s highest court. There are no prisoners on New York’s death row.)

  As of this writing in late 2007, Pearson and Hendrix are being held in solitary confinement—locked down for up to twenty-three hours a day. They will almost certainly die behind bars. But it’s not an excessive punishment, considering the vile and vicious things they did.

  On April 24, 2003, Pearson and Hendrix abducted a pretty, petite twenty-one-year-old college student named Romona Moore off the street in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. She was walking along Kings Highway, a well-traveled road, around 7 o’clock that evening.

  It’s not clear exactly how Pearson and Hendrix got Romona off the street and into the basement of 5807 Snyder Avenue. The most likely scenario is that they simply attacked and dragged her into their lair—a move that might have been risky, given how many cars travel along Kings Highway and its side streets, but not impossible.

  It’s likely, too, that the monsters employed a wicked charm in luring Romona to the vicinity of the small house where they attacked her. Both men, it turned out, were good at sweet-talking young women. They had a knack for appearing normal and friendly just long enough to put their prey at ease—before erupting in savage violence.

  Pearson was twenty-one, Hendrix was nineteen. They knew nothing about the young woman they would butcher, although she lived only a few blocks from Hendrix.

  Romona, the only child of Elle Carmichael, arrived in Brooklyn at age four when her mother moved from Guyana, part of a tide of Caribbean newcomers who turned East Flatbush into a bustling black neighborhood full of ambitious entrepreneurs and hard-working civil servants.

  The deal was simple, and understood from the slums of Kingston to the hills of Trinidad: You could trade status in the Caribbean for opportunity in the States. It was common to find men and women who had been engineers, administrators, or bankers in the Caribbean working as maids, cooks, janitors, and cab drivers in Brooklyn, often with the prickly impatience of people eager to regain their stations in life.

  They bought homes, started families, joined churches, and saved their pennies. Some kept two passports, and thereby dual citizenship, sending their children to stay with relatives in Jamaica, Trinidad, Haiti, Barbados, Grenada, or Guyana every summer—all with an eye toward a triumphant retirement someday back on their sun-drenched islands. What began as a small Caribbean colony in Brooklyn at the turn of the twentieth century grew by leaps and bounds over the decades; by the 1980s, East Flatbush was an island community with its own robust civic associations, political clubs, restaurants, and grocery stores.

  The proud islanders who built the community never let the West Indian lilt leave their voices. But many grew to love their new home, and either sank roots in Brooklyn or joined New York’s age-old, working-class pilgrimage to the suburbs.

  Romona was part of this immigrant journey, growing up with five cousins in the heart of Caribbean Brooklyn. She was dark-skinned with a bright, warm smile. One of her professors at Hunter College called Romona “very proper and very formal” in class. “She was the type of student who you would feel wouldn’t answer your questions but suddenly would come with a very smart response,” he said.

  In her third year at Hunter, Romona didn’t have a special boyfriend, although she did have plenty of friends, along with a 2.8 grade point average. She was studying psychology and preparing to vault her family forward with a career in medicine. Romona was going places.

  All that came to a halt on April 24, when Romona went to visit a male friend in the neighborhood and trade some music CDs. From there, she planned to walk to a Burger King on the corner of Church and Remsen Avenues, about a block from her home.

  She never made it.

  After grabbing her off the street, Pearson and Hendrix held Romona prisoner in the filthy basement apartment for at least three days. They stripped and bound her, putting a heavy chain around her neck and connecting it to her hands behind her back. Then they took turns beating, raping, and sodomizing her between bouts of swilling booze and smoking marijuana.

  The basement was a house of horrors. Police found rubber monster masks hanging in the apartment, along with pinup photos of women in chains.

  In that same room, Pearson and Hendrix burned the young woman with cigarettes—three circles just under her eye in a triangle meant to look like a dog’s paw, a sign of the Bloods gang the monsters claimed to belong to.

  Pearson and Hendrix weren’t hard-core gang-bangers: In fact, Brooklyn is a world away from cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, where highly organized sets hold and defend turf. More likely, the pair were playing at being tough guys, knowing just enough gang lore to think burning Romona’s face might be a cool thing to do.

  Later, at trial, the burns didn’t get much attention; the focus was on other brutalities inflicted by Pearson and Hendrix. They mutilated Romona while she was alive, hacking at her hands and feet with a saw.

  “Classic sociopaths,” is how Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes would describe the pair.

  At least one person saw Romona’s agony unfolding.

  Ramondo Jack, a childhood pal of Hendrix’s, had moved from Brooklyn, but was in town visiting his uncle and other relatives in the old neighborhood when he ran into Pearson and Hendrix. The pair brought him into the basement, poured a few drinks, and displayed their handiwork. They showed off Romona like a trophy, pulling back a sheet to display the innocent woman they had defiled and brutalized and chained like a dog.

  “He lifted up the covers and I saw this female laying there,” Jack later told a reporter. “She had a bruise on one of her hands and one of her feet. She had bandages on one of her hands and one of her feet. And she was bleeding from the middle of her face. And one of her eyes was swollen. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

  “Say hi, bitch!” Pearson ordered Romona, according to Jack.

  “Her voice was low—teary. One of ’em tried to saw one of h
er hands and her foot,” Jack later told a jury. “They both had smirks on their faces, like no cares.”

  Romona Moore, three days into her ordeal, bloodied and beaten, quietly begged Jack to help her. The psychology major even kept her composure enough to try and play on Jack’s sympathy.

  “You seem nicer,” she told the last outsider to see her alive.

  Romona was wrong: Jack was not nicer. A nice person— hell, a normal, compassionate person—would have walked out of the makeshift torture chamber and immediately called the cops. Not Ramondo Jack. He’d moved out of the tough Brooklyn neighborhood years ago and started a family in Maryland. But he clung to the idiotic, immoral code of the street and its first commandment, Thou Shalt Not Snitch.

  “I left,” he would later tell the jury. “I went home. I wasn’t happy about it. I was bothered.”

  Just not bothered enough to tell anybody who could help.

  And so Ramondo Jack put the incident out of his mind and went shopping, he told cops.

  He will go through life knowing he lacked the spine to make an anonymous 911 call that might have saved a desperate girl’s life. Jack’s refusal to act reflects a shocking moral collapse in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, in which witnesses to vicious, inexcusable crimes keep their mouths shut and refuse to notify police or cooperate in any way.

  For a few witnesses, silence is borne of the legitimate fear of being harmed by drug dealers or other urban predators. But for many others, like the cowardly Ramondo Jack, silence is immoral apathy—a desire to appear cool and tough like the neighborhood gangsters, but in reality a weak-minded refusal to take responsibility for stemming the violence and chaos that have claimed countless lives and even entire neighborhoods.

  The syndrome was on display in Baltimore in 2004, where drug dealers brazenly sold an underground video titled Stop Snitchin’. The video featured dealers flashing guns and openly threatening to kill anyone who might dare to testify against them. Startled cops used the video to round up and prosecute the dealers, but not before Stop Snitchin’ and a companion Tshirt became runaway hits in inner-city neighborhoods from coast to coast, including Brooklyn.

  “The most frustrating thing is while you’re pulling your hair out of your head looking for the girl, these people directly across the street know—saw and know that a girl’s being tied up and held in the fuckin’ basement,” said Detective Mike Hinrichs, who took charge of the Moore case. “And nobody calls the police. Where are their heads? So far up their asses, I don’t know.”

  About the only thing Ramondo Jack did for the doomed girl was to gently chide her captors.

  “I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you all?’” he said.

  Pearson and Hendrix just shrugged, and told him, “It’s already said and done. There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  Pearson and Hendrix were uneducated losers, the product of families so failed and broken that Hendrix’s grandmother did not know, or never cared to ask, about the makeshift torture chamber in her own home. Not even when Hendrix and Pearson lured a second woman off the street and raped her in the Snyder Avenue basement near Romona’s dead, battered body.

  On the morning of April 28, 2003, the second victim, a fifteen-year-old student, arrived at school too late and found the doors locked. Hendrix was hanging around the building.

  “He said, ‘Do you want to come and hang out with me and chill with me? It’s just one block in between the school and the house,’” the girl later recounted.

  With that deadly snake charm the monsters could turn on, Hendrix persuaded the teenager to come with him. When the pair got to the basement on Snyder Avenue, the girl saw Pearson, the taller of the two, standing near a futon bed.

  “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.