An Execution over an Argument
Colin Fleming
January 13, 2010
Photo Credit: NYPD
Annette Riley and Assistant District Attorney Leah Takantzas were getting ready to leave for the day. The closing arguments were finished and the jury in Bronx Supreme Court had started deliberating. Takantzas and Riley had their coats on when the court officer came into the hallway. The jury had reached a verdict.
It was January 27, 2006, more than two years after Annette’s son Sean was shot in her sister Margaret’s house in the East Bronx on Dec. 8, 2003. The first trial had ended with a hung jury. Now this jury had come back after no more than 40 minutes. For Takantzas, this was not a good sign.
In spite of her nervousness, Takantzas said in an interview that she tried to reassure Riley, urging her to have faith in the jurors and the system. But even as she gave “the faith speech,” Takantzas was shaking, not knowing whether Latee Robinson, the man accused of murdering Sean, would be convicted.
The court clerk addressed the jury, “As to count number one, charging the defendant, Latee Robinson, with the charge of murder in the second degree, how do you find the defendant, guilty or not guilty?”
Robinson watched, still and emotionless, Takantzas said.
“Guilty.”
With that word, Takantzas said “the skies opened up.” Moments later, in what Takantzas called “an odd serendipitous moment,” outside the courtroom the jurors walked past Annette in single-file. Overwhelmed with gratitude, Annette collapsed to her knees and threw her hands in the air, thanking the jurors. Takantzas said the jury, unable to speak to Annette, instead responded with waves and smiles. One juror was in tears.
***
On Dec. 6, 2003, Margaret Lofton’s small house at 856 East 215th St. in the Bronx was crowded. Margaret, 54, a petite and timid woman known for welcoming others to her home, was housing her friend Alfred Pennill, 58, and three of his daughters, aged 12, 14 and 15, in her living room. Pennill would later testify that he had financial problems at the time and that Margaret had agreed to take him in and help take care for his children.
Margaret’s son Fabian, 15, lived upstairs. He was a kind, soft-spoken boy with his mother’s build. He lived upstairs with his baby brother Sincere, and his big, tough, venom-tongued 34-year-old cousin Sean Riley.
When Latee Robinson, a 25-year-old from Harlem who had spent much of his life locked up, came over that night, there was no fuss at the door; he was invited in. Latee’s mother Lucille, as she said in a recent interview, was “best friends” with Margaret when the two lived in an apartment building at 1085 Anderson Avenue.
Though Lofton said that Sean and Latee “never hung together” and didn’t like one another, there was no real trouble between the two that evening. She said that on that snowy night the two even played cards and drank beer together. Lofton said that Sean left the house late that evening to go to visit his girlfriend. Robinson, who said later in a videotaped statement to police that he was sick and didn’t want to take a subway back to Manhattan, asked if he could sleep over. Margaret agreed.
As Robinson would later testify, the next morning Lofton had “went out somewhere,” and, feeling cold, he asked Fabian to get him a sweater. He got him one, later testifying that at the time he didn’t know the sweater was one of Sean’s.
When Sean came back to the house, he wasn’t happy to see Robinson still there. When he saw Robinson ask Fabian to get a cigarette from Margaret’s room, he was furious. Robinson later testified that Sean told him, “not to be asking a little boy to go upstairs and get him a cigarette.”
Fabian would later tell jurors that Sean then noticed Robinson wearing his sweater and told him to take it off, which he did. Sean, a 256 pound man standing five foot nine inches tall, whom even Fabian admitted to the jury was “intimidating,” lashed into Latee.
“This is not a shelter,” Sean said, according to Fabian’s testimony.
As Sean screamed at him, Robinson simply sat in his chair silent and stonefaced, refusing to show fear, he later told police.
After the argument, Sean drove Latee to the train station and dropped him off.
Fabian testified that later that day Sean took him and Sean’s nine-year-old son Sean Jr. to the movies.
The day was Dec. 7, 2003, Sean’s 34th Birthday.
***
Robinson told police that he went back to Harlem on Sunday, and started asking his friends if they knew where he could get a gun. In the courtyard outside his home in a housing project on E112th street that evening, Robinson found what he was looking for: a .22 caliber pistol from a friend named Dee.
But Robinson told police that he “gave it right back to him.”
“I don’t like small guns,” he said. “It ain’t stop anybody no more.”
So the next day Robinson set out to find something bigger, which he told police he found through a friend of a friend named Dus. Robinson gave Dus $45 of his welfare money to rent the revolver and agreed to return it when he was finished. Robinson told police that Dus warned him that the gun was already “dirty” with “bodies on it.”
“Fuck it,” Robinson said.
***
As Judge Robert Torres noted at his sentencing, Robinson had already spent “much of [his] life involved with the criminal justice system.” In 1994, according to court documents, Robinson, punched a person in the face, then took off with the victim’s money and pizza. He pleaded guilty to robbery in the first degree. In 1996 he was convicted of selling heroin. In 1998 it was crack. And when he was picked up by police for Sean Riley’s murder, Robinson was on parole on a drug charge.
“He was… probably someone with no future,” said Latee’s former defense attorney, Ira Brown, in a recent interview. Robinson was “very slow,” Brown said. “You had to explain everything [to him] 50 times.”
But Robinson’s mother, Lucille, explained his criminal history as a consequence of “bad luck.” “All these people that be out there selling for months and years and don’t get busted,” she said in an interview in December of 2009. Lucille explained that her son was arrested after only dealing for a day or two. “We probably got some voodoo working on my family,” she said laughing.
But Lucille also insisted that her son was a “sweetheart,” and a “people lover” who would listen to anyone with a sad story. She recalled fondly how “someone was always hollering at [her] window… [or] door for him,” and how people would yell “Tee, Tee” when he walked outside. His problem, she said, was that he “trusts people too much.”
Like Ms. Robinson, Annette Riley also loved her son very much. At Latee’s sentencing on March 3, 2006 she told the court, “I would of [sic] took that bullet myself… I would of give my life for my child.” Annette was also the sole caregiver for his son Sean, Jr. But things were not always easy between her and Sean.
Margaret Lofton said in a recent interview that Sean left Annette’s home to live with her when he was 14 or 15. During her testimony, Annette said she gave him her blessings when he left, but Margaret said that he left because the two “didn’t get along too well.”
Lofton explained that although she was able to get along with him, things were far from perfect. She said that Sean was “very mean,” and so rude to her friends that many of them simply stopped coming to visit. He didn’t work so she gave him money. Lofton also said that Sean would take her car without asking, and let tickets, which he would never pay, accumulate. Lofton said that Sean had even once taken her medicine and hidden it: what she called “petty stuff.”
“I told him all the time to go back to his mother,” she said. But he never would.
Lofton even got an order of protection against her nephew to which Sean responded by telling her he “wasn’t going nowhere.” When she finally called the police about him, he ducked out of the house, then came back after they left and apologized. Lofton said she allowed him to return.
“I just wanted him to straighten out, “she said. “But he was hard to talk to.”
Fabian’s relationship with Sean was much less complicated. In a recent interview, Fabian said Sean was like his “big brother.” Together they listened to rap, fixed bikes in the garage, and boxed in the backyard. Sean even taught him how to drive. Fabian also credited Sean with keeping him focused on his schoolwork and out of trouble.
“A lot of people didn’t know Sean,” he said. “He was the nicest person I could say I could ever meet.”
But Fabian also admitted that Sean was “overprotective” and didn’t like people getting too close to the family. People didn’t like him, Fabian said, because he “couldn’t hold his tongue for nobody.”
It was a problem that Ms. Lofton had often worried about.
“We were expecting something to happen to him because he was so rude,” she said. She just never expected it to happen in her own home.
***
After Robinson got the revolver from Dus, he went to see two of his friends in the Baychester area of the Bronx, he later told police. After hanging with them for around an hour and discussing “old times,” Robinson walked out into the dark and headed towards Margaret Lofton’s place with a gun on his hip.
Lofton invited Robinson in and brought him to the kitchen. The Pennills were fast asleep in the living room, and Sean and Fabian weren’t home.
At around 9:30 PM, Ron Warner, Fabian’s father and Lofton’s former lover, testified that he rang the bell, came in and went to the kitchen to say hello to Lofton and Robinson. Warner said that when he saw Robinson, he was furious.
Robinson, sitting on the stool next to the sink with a gun in his lap, said he wanted to kill Sean, Warner testified.
“After that, I said: ‘With what?’ And he said: ‘With my hammer.’ I said: ‘What hammer?’”
Robinson then pulled out the revolver and shoved it in his face. Warner told the jury that he gently batted the gun away and tried to calm Robbinson down.
“There’s no reason to kill anybody for a stupid argument,” Warner said.
Robinson, he said, just looked at him.
Warner said that he continued trying to talk him down, even warning him that he might have to “do hard time,” but Robinson said he didn’t care.
According to Warner’s testimony, Robinson did put his gun away and started watching television again.
Convinced that Robinson was now calm, Warner left and headed for the store. On his way out he bumped into his son who was just coming home. Fabian testified that his father told him to be careful: Robinson had a gun.
Fabian said he then walked into the kitchen. His mother was cooking, watching TV and drinking beer. Latee, gun in hand, was moving from the bathroom to the stool by the sink, where he sat down and started watching TV.
Robinson told Fabian and Lofton that he was going to kill Sean. Fabian also said that Robinson told them that the killing “wouldn’t be on his conscience.”
When he heard this, Fabian went upstairs and pulled out his Gamecube box, where he thought he stashed Sean’s cell number, but he couldn’t find it. Fabian told the jury that when he got downstairs his mother pulled him to the side, assuring him that Sean wasn’t supposed to come home that night. To the surprise of both of them, Sean did come home.
Fabian was eating his mother’s shrimp when the doorbell rang. It was Sean. When he opened the door, Sean walked right past him. Fabian testified that he was so scared that “he couldn’t really say anything.” Sean walked right into the kitchen, with Fabian following behind.
As he was walking he said, “I told that nigger to go home,” according to Margaret.
According to Fabian’s testimony, Sean saw Robinson with the gun in his lap and asked him to step outside.
“What are you gonna do with that?,” Sean said, according to Fabian’s testimony.
“This is what I’m going to do,” Robinson said.
Then he lifted the revolver to Sean’s left cheek and pulled the trigger. After witnessing the murder, Fabian immediately ran upstairs to check on his baby brother.
Sean, meanwhile, lay dead on the kitchen floor, his face spewing blood, his pants covered with shrimp, as indicated by police photographs.
As Robinson left, Lofton said that he warned her, “you don’t know nothing. You don’t see nothing.”
***
At the sentencing, a still-grieving Annette Riley told the jury, “You may not see tears on the outside, but on the inside I am floating with tears. If they would come out, y’all would float in here with the tears I cry everyday.”
She told them she wished she could give Robinson the electric chair, and begged for the harshest sentence possible from Judge Robert Torres.
He was given 25 years to life.
