Flonarza Byas was an unlucky man
Maurice Parks was attacked by a group of muggers, and then encountered Flonarza Byas on this sidewalk. Photo credit: Lauren Kirchner
Maurice Parks’ voice in the recording sounds panicked and small.
“Hey, hey. I’m on 139th Street. Three guys just tried to mug me….”
The 911 operator asked for his exact location, but Parks could barely breathe.
“St. Nicholas…I think I was stabbed….ah…they had knives… ah…phone number is uh…”
Before he could go on, the phone call abruptly ended with unintelligible shouting from another voice — not his — then loud static and then silence.
By the end of the call, just 47 seconds had gone by. And Maurice Parks had gone from victim to suspect in the death of Flonarza Byas.
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Hear the 911 call below, and read the transcript here.
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Thursday, January 10, 2008, was unseasonably warm. Maurice Parks, 39, walked home through the misty fog, a few minutes before midnight. He walked uphill on the sidewalk along St. Nicholas Park in West Harlem to his home at 580 St. Nicholas Avenue, a 92-unit apartment building between W. 138th Street and W. 139th Street. He had just gotten off his shift as a subway conductor, and was still wearing his navy blue MTA uniform. According to his attorney, Anthony Ricco, Parks was “literally across the street from his house. Another 20 yards and he would have been home.”
Across St. Nicholas Avenue, walking downhill, four young men were “looking for a vic,” as one of them would later testify. Hector “Juks” Cruz was out on parole after being jailed for selling drugs in the Bronx shortly after his twentieth birthday. Sharif Simmons, 22, Leandro Ventura, 15, and Edwin Bonilla, 18, walked with him. Bonilla would later testify that it was his first night out with this crew, and that it was time for him to prove that he belonged. “They had a little gang,” as Ricco later put it. “They had to get blood, that was part of their mentality.” Cruz carried a small knife. They spotted Parks walking on the other side of the street, and passed him before crossing over, so they could double back and sneak up on him from behind.
Parks is 5’7,” about 150 pounds, and he was listening to music with headphones, Ricco said. He might have seemed the perfect target. What the teens did not know was that under the MTA uniform, Parks was incredibly fit, a black belt in karate who could do an “iron cross,” lifting his body up on a pole and stretching out parallel to the floor. And he, too, was carrying a knife.
The group surrounded Parks, punching him in the back of his head while pulling his bag from his shoulder, Ricco said. As Bonilla testified at trial, Cruz hooked his arm around Parks’ waist and stabbed him in the abdomen several times. Parks pulled out his knife and fought back, according to court documents, “swinging wildly at his attackers…to defend his life.” He jabbed one of his attackers in the gut twice, and the attacker retaliated, slicing into the fingers of Parks’ left hand.
The muggers scattered, three of them running across St. Nicholas and running east down 139th Street, rifling through Parks’ bag and dropping things as they ran: a set of keys, a pair of shoes, a pair of conductor’s gloves, a knit hat, all of which were later entered into evidence at trial. Parks chased them for a block or two, but, overcome with pain from his bleeding stomach, he stopped. Video footage from a security camera on his own apartment building across the street showed his dazed, labored trek back to the park side of the street. According to Ricco, Parks wanted to find his keys and go back home. He soon realized how hurt he was, and called 911.
Meanwhile, two blocks to the east, Hector Cruz sat bleeding on the corner of W. 139th and Eighth Avenue. One of his crew called 911 as well, telling the dispatcher that their friend had been robbed and stabbed. Detective James Quilty of the 32nd precinct was one of the first to respond to Cruz’s call for help, and he arrived on a grisly scene. “I saw Cruz lying in the street with his intestines hanging out of him,” he recalled in a recent interview. “I mean, he was gutted.”
Cruz’s friends pointed out to Quilty where their supposed attacker had gone, gesturing towards Morningside Park. Quilty could see lights and hear sirens everywhere he looked. Officers from several precincts, as well as nearby transit cops and housing cops and robbery units, were rushing to both scenes, remembered Lieutenant Rob Gibbons of the 32nd precinct. “It was crazy, everybody was coming out at once,” he said in an interview in December of 2009.
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Photo credit: Lauren Kirchner
Even though Cruz and Parks were only two avenues apart, they straddled the border of two precincts, the 26th and the 32nd. According to Quilty, the fact that radio calls to each of the precincts go out on different radio frequencies added to the confusion. As the 26th and 33rd on one side both responded to Parks’ 911 call down by St. Nicholas, the 32nd precinct on the other side responded to Cruz’s 911 call two blocks east, but the two groups of responders did not know what was happening at the other crime scene.
As Parks struggled to catch his breath and tell the 911 dispatcher where he was, a man in a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt approached him from the same direction his attackers had gone. The man’s face beneath the hood looked Hispanic, like his attackers, and Parks thought he was one of them. Parks used his knife again by reflex. “Mr. Parks, not waiting to see the glint of steel or to be stabbed again, testified that he again used his knife wildly in fear of his life,” wrote Parks’ attorney in a court memorandum. Witnesses would later testify that Parks chased the 28-year-old man for several yards while slashing at his face, arms, chest and back. Screams are briefly audible on the 911 call. Parks stabbed Flonarza Byas eight times in the front of his body and seven times in the back.
Detective Kevin Rivera of the 33rd precinct was one of the first to come upon Parks, court records show. As Rivera got out of his car, Parks froze, holding the knife and “hovering over” Byas’ body, Rivera would later testify. Rivera pointed his gun and ordered Parks to drop the knife and lie face down on the street. Parks shouted that he was the victim, that he couldn’t lie down because of his stab wound. He slowly lay down on his back, and was immediately handcuffed. Quilty soon arrived with the teens, who identified Parks as the man who had stabbed Cruz, while Parks identified Ventura as one of the kids who had stabbed him. Ventura was then arrested, and both Parks and Byas were taken by ambulance under police escort to Harlem Hospital for treatment of their wounds. Parks’ condition would soon stabilize, according to court documents. Byas would die within the hour.
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Jeovanni Byas, 38, was far from his West Harlem home when he got the phone call about his brother. It was 4:00 a.m., he recalled in a recent interview, and he was walking to an early-morning service at Elim International Fellowship in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. A police officer had apparently called several numbers in Flonarza’s cell phone to try to find his family, and someone finally reached Jeovanni. When Jeovanni got back up to the 26th precinct, officers told him not only that his brother was dead, but that he had somehow brought the violence upon himself.
“When the officers said that he had been involved in some kind of incident, I knew that was wrong,” Jeovanni says, shaking his head. “Knowing how my brother was, bringing harm to anyone? Uh uh. He probably saw what happened, and was trying to help.”
Jeovanni pronounces Flonarza’s name “Flor-nan-za.” He says his brother was named after their Aunt Flora, with whom he shared a birthday. When he was little, Flonarza complained about his “girl’s name,” so his mother, Dyanne, told him to go by “Kenneth.” No one in the family remembers why she chose that name, but his brother went by “Kenny” his whole life, until college when his friends called him “Byas.”
Jeovanni is the oldest of a tight-knit family of Dominican descent: three boys and two girls, raised by their mother in South Jamaica and Far Rockaway housing projects in Queens. Flonarza was the middle child, the youngest boy, and Jeovanni describes him as “a burst of energy.” He was so energetic and distractible that it made him accident-prone; he always burned food each time he tried to cook, and when he got his first car, a burgundy Acura, everyone was afraid to ride with him because he wouldn’t stop talking and singing along to the radio long enough to watch the road. He could talk his way out of any situation by making you laugh until you weren’t mad at him anymore, but at the same time, he was incapable of telling a lie. Jeovanni remembers how his siblings would say, “Don’t do that in front of Flonarza, he’ll spill the beans!”
As he got older, Jeovanni says, his brother grew more and more religious, especially after living for a year with relatives in Mississippi. In one conversation, Flonarza told Jeovanni that he had come to see him as a father figure. Jeovanni remembers finding a newfound respect for his chatty little brother, who had grown to an introspective young man. Flonarza graduated from Interboro Institute with a degree in accounting, where he met his fiancée, Stephanie Diaz. He worked for a wig company on Broadway and had just balanced its books for the previous year when he died. Jeovanni remembers visiting the company shortly afterward and seeing with a pang of recognition his brother’s handwriting on their files.
Jeovanni was soon vindicated in his defense of his brother’s motives that night. Police found $200 cash in Byas’ pockets, and a bank deposit slip that showed he had more than $33,000 in his account, records show; this was not a man in need of money. And in a fateful twist, Byas had gotten a ticket just 20 minutes before his death for walking through the park after dark, proving that he could not have possibly taken part in the mugging.
Maurice Parks was attacked before he could make it home to 580 St. Nicholas Avenue. Photo credit: Lauren Kirchner
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Mona Parks can’t reconcile the son she knows with the depictions of him she’s read in the newspapers. In the cruel shorthand of tabloid headlines, The Daily News described the trial as the “Revenge-Slay Case,” and reduced her son to, simply, “Killer”. The headline of one article detailing his martial arts training was “A Fighting Machine: Training beat muggers, but 1 good guy died.” Another, based on an interview with a NYPD spokesman about Parks’ history, was headed “He Longed to Be a Cop: Whipped Muggers, but nixed by Academy.”
“One of the things that they focused on was his not passing the police exam, instead of giving him credit for trying,” Mona said in a recent interview. Maurice had applied to be a police officer several times in the 1990s but was never accepted. “Now people are looking at him like he’s some kind of monster,” said Mona. “He doesn’t deserve that.” Maurice doesn’t walk around looking for trouble; he has always helped people, which is why he wanted to be in law enforcement. “He is a well-trained martial artist,” she said. “But he’s a sensei,” she added, referring to his high level of expertise and self-discipline in karate. “It’s not like he loses his temper.”
To Mona, Maurice is still the smart, gentle boy she raised in the Soundview neighborhood of the Bronx. She remembers being surprised by his early desire to be a vegetarian: “When he was four years old, he wouldn’t eat meat. No chicken, no hotdogs. He would ask me, ‘Is this made from an animal?’ And to get him to eat I told him ‘No, it’s made in a factory.’ Otherwise he would just look at it, saying, ‘The poor little chicken.’”
As he got older, she said, he committed himself to a strict vegan diet. He took food to homeless people under the Bruckner Expressway overpass near the house where he grew up. He spent time with his children, now 12, 14, and 16, and competed in martial arts tournaments. “Maurice does the right things,” she said. “We can’t believe this has happened. It’s just very, very unfortunate.”
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After the stabbing, Parks was suspended from the MTA without pay, and he remained in the hospital for 13 days. In those first weeks, he was interviewed repeatedly by police officers, detectives, and members of the district attorney’s office, according to court documents. With his help, police were able to arrest Cruz, Simmons, and Bonilla.
Parks would later testify that at no time was he read his Miranda rights or given access to a lawyer, nor did he even know that the District Attorney’s office was building a case against him. He was shocked when, months later, he was arrested for murder. Court documents show that he was arrested on August 28, 2008 with bail set at $25,000. His trial in Manhattan Supreme Court began on May 11, 2009.
In a recent interview, Ricco recounted that his main lines of defense were that, in Parks’ mind, he was acting in self-defense, and that he was under “extreme emotional distress” because of the shock and pain of the gang’s ambush. Ricco deliberated about whether to bring up that Parks had been mugged once before, in 1994 in Queens. In that case, he struggled with the gunman and the gun went off, wounding his would-be mugger. Charges against Parks were dropped when it was determined that he was acting in self-defense. Ricco explained that while it might have been useful to show the effect of that trauma, it could make jurors see Parks as “going for the overkill.” But Judge Carol Berkman decided it would be too prejudicial, and sealed the 1994 case.
“Maurice is a complicated person,” Ricco said. “Society would say he has a chip on his shoulder.” Ricco says he can relate to Parks; they are both black men who grew up in similar situations in Harlem and the Bronx, respectively. They both have had to learn how to deal with hardship and anger, and have faced difficult moments where they could have reacted with violence or walked away.
At trial, Parks took the witness stand in his own defense. It did not go well. “He was horrible. He was one of the worst witnesses I have ever seen,” said Ricco. “He spent the whole time trying to justify what he did, rather than explain it.” Ricco remembers one of the prosecutors telling him after the testimony that Parks could have just said two words: “I’m sorry.” As Det. Quilty recounted, “He didn’t show any compassion, no remorse. He just said, ‘I did what I had to do.’”
It was Parks’ choice and his right to take the stand in his own defense, says Ricco. It was also his right to reject the District Attorney’s offer to plead guilty to manslaughter, which he did, insisting that he hadn’t done anything wrong. “He was a man who didn’t want to get hurt again,” Ricco said. “And a person who doesn’t want to get hurt, where’s the one place they really don’t want to go? Jail.” Ultimately, though, Ricco was able to get the lesser charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide included in the case, so that the jury would have those options when determining his verdict.
Court records show that the trial lasted for ten days. After two days of deliberation, the jury rejected the lesser charges and declared Parks guilty of intentional murder in the second degree. Judge Berkman gave Parks the least possible sentence, 15 years to life, and sent him to Attica.
“Because Maurice reacted the way that he did on the street, and his callousness on the witness stand, does that mean that he committed intentional murder?” Ricco later said in an interview. “I don’t think so. The jurors thought so.” Ricco thinks that perhaps the jury, made up of only two minorities out of 12, had trouble relating to Parks and the acute trauma of that crucial moment. “That terror is something you can’t understand until it happens to you,” he says. “In the end, I think they saw in Maurice a bitter black man with a knife, who could have stopped, and didn’t. But I think they were wrong.”
As for the “little gang,” Bonilla cooperated with the investigation and testified against the other attackers, court records show. But as of January 2009, he was still on trial for his participation in the crime. Ventura was also on trial as a juvenile violent offender. Simmons was convicted of robbery in the second degree and was sentenced to five years at the medium-security Fishkill Correctional Facility in Dutchess County, New York. Cruz was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 15 years at Eastern Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Ulster County. Bonilla, Simmons and Cruz were all prosecuted by the same Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted Parks, David O’Keefe, who declined to comment for this article.
Quilty, who testified at Parks’ trial, summed up his impressions of the case: “Just a matter of bad timing all the way around, unfortunately. And the only guy who should have paid for it is only doing 15 years,” he said, referring to Cruz. “That Cruz, he’s just a straight-out robber, another juvenile delinquent.”
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Mona Parks says that she and her son feel “betrayed.” He told her, “I didn’t have anything to hide, and so I spoke with the DA, and they used it against me.” The sentence seemed incredibly harsh to Mona. She says that Maurice is having a hard time in Attica, a maximum-security prison almost 400 miles away. He tells her he can’t exercise, his stomach is still “deformed,” and his requests for vegan food are not acknowledged. “There’s a kind of kosher soup with no meat, so he tries to trade for that,” she said. “But he needs more protein.”
Mona is hopeful that when they appeal his case, he will prevail. “He’s a good kid, he has a lot going for him,” she said. “I just know this is not the end.”
* * *
For Jeovanni Byas, the hardest part of the trial was hearing witnesses give their account of the stabbing itself; he says that only through the strength of God was he able to hear those details. He still misses his brother, but he is not angry. “In our family, we don’t believe in afflicting pain on someone who has afflicted pain on us,” he says. “What we are looking at is a point of healing for our loss and for theirs,” referring to Parks’ family. “We lost a son, but the community lost another father. We are quietly keeping that family lifted up in prayer every day.”
Jeovanni says he does not fault Parks for seeming cold at trial; he understands that many men have a hard time expressing their emotions, especially regret: “I saw a lot of pain and hurt, because someone brought him harm. Even though you can’t see it on the outside…being a man, you can see it.” He knows Parks has a lot of time now to face that regret, and that it will be a lonely experience. “Whatever and whomever he has to forgive, be it himself or anyone else, that door needs to start opening.”
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