Leonidas Brito never made it to Santo Domingo
December 9, 2009
Leonidas Brito was a quiet neighbor. The 52-year-old rented a single bedroom on the ground floor of 416 East 173rd Street, a building of crumbling and mismatched orange and red brick with black fire escapes snaking down its front wall.
Guillermo Neiras, 24, who lived in the apartment directly above Brito for several years, said in a recent interview that he rarely heard the small older man moving around below.
Neiras and most of the other residents of the three-story building in the Bronx knew, however, that Brito was planning to visit the Dominican Republic in January 2005. His family and neighborhood friends had given him gifts to take down to their loved ones in Santo Domingo, and Brito had about $3,000 cash to take as well, said Detective Bobby Grant in a recent telephone interview.
Brito was nearly ready to go by Saturday, Jan. 8, two days before his departure. According to court documents, he had his bags packed, he had his airline tickets out and he had made plans to meet the next day with his sister-in-law Arisleyda Polanco for a last-minute errand; he wanted to buy a pair of sneakers for his son, who still lived in Santo Domingo.
“We were supposed to get together Sunday and he didn’t show up,” Polanco later testified. When they didn’t hear from Brito all day on Sunday, Polanco and the rest of Brito’s large extended family began to worry, as did Luis Guichardo, one of Brito’s close friends. “We were looking for him in the hospitals,” Guichardo testified, adding that Brito, not a very robust man, often fell ill.
414 and 416 East 173rd Street. Photo Credit: Frances McInnis
Monday, Jan. 10 – the day Brito was supposed to leave – dawned clear and mild for January, with the temperature hovering in the mid-40’s. Guichardo and Brito’s brother Rafael got up early and went to 173rd street to investigate Brito’s disappearance. In the dim, grey-carpeted hallway outside Brito’s door they could hear the television blaring in his room, but the door was locked and they did not have the key, according to Guichardo’s testimony. The building superintendant found a ladder for the men and Guichardo climbed up to peer in the window. He saw Brito lying motionless on his bed, covered in blood.
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Jose Carrasco was nearly 20 in January 2005. The clean-shaven man was tall and lanky, with hair that stuck up wildly, according to the policemen who later took his statement. He had two tattoos on his hands: one that read “Juliana,” the name of his young daughter, and the other for his mother, Santa Medina, he explained in court.
Carrasco lived with his mother and his brothers Franklin, 22, and Jonathan, 23, in a small, second floor apartment at 414 East 173rd, the building immediately west of Brito’s, according to court files. Living quarters were cramped; Jonathan’s girlfriend Jeannette Diaz had been evicted two months before and was also staying there with her two young children. Carrasco slept with his brother Franklin and his mother in the bedroom, and part of the living room was converted into a bedroom for Diaz, Jonathan and the kids.
Carrasco worked at J&R Supply Refrigerators at 172nd Street and Webster Avenue, according to his testimony; he said he was paid about $300 cash each week to do deliveries, cleaning and other odd jobs. He had another job, however. In a statement to police on Jan. 11, 2005, he said that he also committed robberies with a home invasion crew he met though his 16-year-old cousin Fabian Rochel. Police identified the rest of the crew by their street names: Cartelo, a thin man with a scar from an old stab wound on his right hand, Ochoa, a stocky man with an afro and a goatee, and Sandy, a forty-year-old bald man with a raspy voice who acted as leader and enforcer. “Over the last five months I have done six home invasion robberies with these guys,” Carrasco told police, explaining how they had stolen drugs and money from homes and stores in Manhattan.
Carrasco also told the police that he was not treated well by the other crewmembers. On one occasion, he said he “got cheated out of my money and did not receive anything.” On another, he only received 1.2 kilograms of a 20 kilogram drug grab. On four of the robberies, he was the lookout and he claimed, “that way they could tell me they got less than they did.”
But Carrasco played an important role in the group’s hit on January 8th. The target was an older man about to leave on a vacation to the Dominican Republic. It was Carrasco’s job to get the key to the man’s apartment because he lived in the building next door.
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Although he lived in the South Bronx, Brito’s life revolved around the Dominican Republic. His 41-year-old brother, Felix, said in a recent interview that when Brito moved from Santo Domingo to New York in 1992, he left behind a wife and five children – four daughters and a son in their late twenties and early thirties. For the next thirteen years, he worked to bring his family to the United States, making do with a nine-by-12-foot bedroom to save money on rent. He made yearly trips to Santo Domingo to visit his wife and children, as well as his mother and two brothers who still lived there.
At the time of his death, Brito was working at Embarque El Malecon, Felix’s company in the Bronx, which shipped furniture and goods exclusively to Santo Domingo. He had, however, done many different jobs, said his niece Luz in a recent interview. He had previously worked in construction, and had helped out in her father’s restaurant business in New Jersey. Brito had worked from a young age; his father had died in an accident when he was very small. As the second eldest of 10 children, and the oldest boy, Luz said, much of the responsibility for the family’s welfare fell to Brito.
Luz remembers Brito’s antics at family parties, usually at Felix’s house. “He was hilarious,” she said. “With him it was always something new. He wanted to be a doctor for a while. And then he talked about God for a while.” Brito, Luz said, loved music, and during family get-togethers music and dancing were staples. “He would try to dance,” she remembered, laughing, “and it was very funny.”
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On the January day in 2005 when they found Brito, Guichardo and Rafael became frantic when they saw his limp body on the bed. From upstairs, Neiras heard voices shouting in Spanish, “Hey! Hey! Wake up!” Someone started screaming.
Guichardo and Rafael called 911. A crew of firemen from Engine Company 42, seven blocks away, were first on the scene according to court records. They broke down the door to the apartment, testified firefighter Jason Davis, one of the first inside. The apartment was deserted but through the bedroom door, which was ajar, Davis could see Brito’s bare foot.
The bedroom, police reported, was in disarray. Some of the suitcases had been opened and Brito’s belongings were spilling out. Blood was spattered over everything. Among the items strewn about, several policemen saw a piece of paper stamped with a bloody footprint showing a Puma sneaker logo.
Brito lay on the bed in his underwear, covered in blood and with a belt around him like a lasso, pinning one arm to his chest, according to police testimony. Paramedic Marvin Jackson went into the room and checked for a pulse, but there was none. An autopsy would later show that Brito had been stabbed 46 times in the head, neck, torso, arms and legs. He was stabbed through his left cheek, through the carotid artery in his neck, through his voice box and into his liver. The 155-pound man had bled to death.
Robert Grant was called in from the Bronx Homicide Task Force to investigate, arriving just before noon. “We started piecing things together,” Grant said. “And then we received an anonymous 911 tip.” The tipster said that Jose Carrasco was the murderer and gave his address and apartment number.
Grant went next door accompanied by Lieutenant Kevin Moroney of the 43rd Precinct and Detective Jose Morales of the Bronx Major Case Squad and spoke to Carrasco’s mother, Santa Medina, with Jeanette Diaz interpreting.
Grant wanted to see what Carrasco had been wearing the previous day, and Diaz brought out some items in a small black supermarket bag: a sweatshirt and a pair of Puma sneakers. In the bedroom, Grant also saw a black leather jacket with white stitching and what appeared to be blood stains on the lining. According to Grant’s testimony, he needed a search warrant to take get the jacket so he left at about 3 p.m. for the Bronx courthouse, leaving Morales to watch the apartment.
After Morales had been waiting 45 minutes, the phone rang and Diaz picked up. Jose Carrasco was on the other end. Morales checked the caller ID, and radioed in the number. Five minutes later, Moroney picked up Carrasco at a phone booth at 168th and Walton Avenue, and had him handcuffed in a police car.
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Like Brito, Carrasco was born in Santo Domingo and was raised by a single mother. He came to New York in 1998, where he was placed in special education classes at Community Intermediate School 147 on Webster Avenue in the Bronx because he couldn’t read or write, his mother testified. Carrasco rarely attended school and dropped out before completing the eighth grade, according to his testimony. “I couldn’t concentrate very well,” he said in court through a Spanish translator. “I didn’t learn very well and the kids would make fun.” His signature on a document in the court file looks as if a child wrote it: half-printed, half-handwritten, the letters formed with hesitant loops.
Neiras said that Carrasco was likeable as a kid. They had played basketball together on the corner of their block while they were growing up. “He was very athletic, a good ball player,” said Neiras. Their friendship, however, dissolved after Carrasco went to juvenile detention for a crime he committed in 2003, for which the record has now been sealed.
Carrasco began to unravel in juvenile detention. According to the testimony of Dr. Sanford Drob, a clinical and forensic psychiatrist who assessed Carrasco’s mental fitness, Carrasco attempted suicide at age 16 after hearing voices telling him to kill himself. He was taken from Juvenile Detention to Ellis Hospital in Schenectady where he was diagnosed with depression with psychotic features. Over the next few years Carrasco was treated, first as an inpatient, and then as an outpatient in a series of different hospitals, including Bellevue in Manhattan, and the Brooklyn Children Psychiatric Center. Doctors diagnosed him with a series of other mental illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder. Carrasco’s medical records, Drob testified, were rife with descriptions of abuse he said he experienced as a child at the hands of his grandfather and his uncle. “Some of the things that were described are pretty horrible,” testified Drob. “Things like being tied to a tree, stripped naked and having bees or insects placed on his genitals.”
In his testimony, Carrasco said that he had been taking four different medications for mental illness in early 2005, including the anti-psychotic Risperdal. He said he had stopped taking the medication a day or two before being arrested, just around the time of Brito’s murder.
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Maria Frias met Jose Carrasco three days before New Year’s Eve, 2004 at a party in East Harlem. The 24-year-old was about to start an undergraduate degree in social work at Lehman College and was living with a friend in Washington Heights. “We started getting along and I ended up going with him that night to his house,” Frias later testified.
Carrasco called her the next day, and the day after that, and every day for a week. “At first it was cute,” she said in court, “but then after a while it started — like, he was being very persistent, so it just, like, wore me down. It was kind of annoying.” Finally, Frias agreed to another date on January 6th: they went shopping on Webster Avenue, where Carrasco bought a do-rag for his hair, and she bought some headbands at a beauty supply store. He called her again on January 8th to invite her to the movies and to a hotel. In court, she remembered her response: “Yeah, fine, if he paid my cab fare.”
When Frias arrived at 173rd Street, Carrasco approached his friend Jonathan “Phillito” Medina, who lived in the basement of the building next door. “He asked to borrow my keys so that he can go to my apartment with his girlfriend,” Medina testified. Once he had the keys, Carrasco told police, he called his crew on a Nextel walkie-talkie phone and gave the signal: “tato frio,” which literally translates as “cold brother.” Frias and Carrasco went to Phillito’s room, where Frias took her coat off and sat down on the bed. They put on a pornography video, and smoked marijuana, but Carrasco soon left Frias smoking and watching TV. His crew was waiting outside.
Carrasco told police that he went back down to Frias after only a few minutes, leaving the door to the building and apartment open for his friends. After fifteen minutes, he went back upstairs to check on the robbery. He told police this version of events:
“I step halfway in and I see Sandy stab the man while Ochoa is searching the room. The guy was leaning against the wall. The man did not have a shirt on. I could not tell if he had on pants because Sandy is big and he blocked my view. While Sandy was stabbing the man, I grabbed his jacket and told him to ‘Hurry up, your [sic] taking too much time.’ He was stabbing the man with a long thing blade folding knife.”
Carrasco said he then went back into the basement and told Frias he wanted to leave, that he was feeling uncomfortable.
Frias remembers those crucial fifteen minutes differently, according to her testimony. She said she was watching television alone in Phillito’s room when Carrasco returned. “He barged in…covered in blood,” she testified. She said Carrasco made a slashing motion around his neck, and gasped, “Lo maté, lo maté,” which she translated for the courtroom: “I killed him, I killed him.”
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After Carrasco confessed to murder, Frias said in her testimony, he tried to ensure he wouldn’t get caught. He led Frias up to the roof of another building on the block, number 410, “making sure I was right behind him,” Frias testified. He took her to the ledge. “He asked me in Spanish, will I betray him, and I said no because I. . . out of fear,” she later testified in court. According to Frias, Carrasco put the bloody grey sweater he had been wearing, a steak knife and a screwdriver into a garbage bag he had taken out of the bins in front of the apartments. He handed her a wad of cash to hold, and told her to call a cab.
The short cab ride ended at the Paradise Motor Inn, on Boston Road, a two-story brick building with 29 rooms and a cheerful yellow sign featuring a palm tree. Following Carrasco’s orders, Frias paid the hotel clerk for a six-hour stay with the cash he had given her to hold. As she handed the bills over, she noticed they were smeared with blood. “ I give it to the clerk, hoping he would, you know, figure – ask some questions or anything and he didn’t,” she said in her testimony.
Inside room 11, Carrasco got into the shower, still wearing a pair of red and blue velour sweatpants and his grey, red and white puma sneakers. “He was just throwing water on it, I guess trying to clean off the blood,” testified Frias. Once he was out of the shower, he cleaned the money as well. Then, “he said, ‘It’s time to go to sleep, and he slept on the side where the door was at,’” Frias remembered. “He wrapped his body around me and we fell asleep.”
A call from the hotel clerk, telling them that their time was up, woke Carrasco and Frias early Sunday morning. Frias said they took a cab back to the apartment on 173rd street, and Carrasco dumped the garbage bag of clothing and weapons on the way. Finally, Frias, looking for an excuse to leave, managed to get away by volunteering to go shopping with Jeanette Diaz. Carrasco gave her $100 to buy something for herself, and they said goodbye. She wouldn’t see him again until she testified against him in State Supreme Court in the Bronx nearly four years later.
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Carrasco’s trial began on November 6, 2008. On December 8, after six days of deliberation, a jury convicted Jose Carrasco of murder in the 2nd degree and robbery in the 1st degree. Maria Frias’s testimony was crucial for the prosecution, said Assistant District Attorney Gary Weil in an interview. Weil also relied on forensic evidence that the bloody shoeprints taken out of Brito’s room matched the sneakers from Carrasco’s apartment. Carrasco was sentenced to 25 years to life by Judge Elizabeth Foley. He is serving the sentence at Clinton Prison in Dannemora, New York where he has been taking classes to learn to read and write and to improve his English. “I am innocent,” he wrote in a recent letter. Referring to his pending appeal, he wrote, “With the help of God…the appeal judges will see it is unjust for me to be in prison for something I didn’t do.”
Leonidas Brito’s wife and children no longer plan to move New York, said Luz and Felix. After his death, they held a humble funeral service in the Bronx and Brito’s body was sent back to Santo Domingo for burial. Luz said that the family, both in the Dominican Republic and in New York, misses him. “They are always remembering him,” she said, whenever they get together to eat and laugh and dance.
East 173rd Street seems quiet now. Although the neighborhood was buzzing about the murder in 2005, few people in the area now know what happened, said Neira, and he no longer thinks about it very much. The Carrasco family moved out of 414 to a building on Honeywell Avenue, less than a mile-and-a-half away. Phillito’s basement apartment is now vacant, and a new tenant has moved into Brito’s small room. There is no sign of the violent events that took place there nearly five years ago.
