Samuel Encarnacion asks the key question
Samuel Encarnacion is escorted to his sentencing, laughing. Photo Credit: El Diario
Ofelia Torres, then 16, lay down to play with her new Red Nose Pit-bull puppy in the Bronx apartment she shared with her 18-year-old boyfriend. Her mother and boyfriend Samuel Encarnacion had given her the dog, named Moochie, that week. As she waited for Encarnacion to return home at 8 p.m., her cousin Johnny Torres sat in the next room on the night of Jan. 19, 2005.
At 2:50 a.m., responding to a 911 call made just four minutes before, EMT Scott Hernandez and Detective Lawrence Walsh walked into apartment 8J of 1435 Harrod Avenue and found “bloody paw prints from the puppy that went up and down the hallway,” Walsh would later testify. Ofelia Torres was sprawled by the door, bleeding, repeatedly stabbed and barely breathing. Her condition was “as serious as you can get,” Hernandez later testified. Her 19-year-old cousin was face-down in a pool of blood. Hernandez checked Johnny Torres’s vital signs and found no pulse.
Suffering from severe lacerations and puncture wounds, both were transported to Jacobi Medical Center three miles north, where, according to his death certificate, Johnny Torres was pronounced dead of stab wounds to the jugular vein, carotid artery, lungs and kidneys. Ofelia Torres was rushed into surgery.
When the case came to trial in November of 2007, Bronx Assistant District Attorney Susan McElwreath asked Dr. Sheldon Temperance, a Jacobi emergency room doctor, “Had you ever seen anything like that in your practice of medicine before?” Temperance, who had been practicing medicine since 1984, replied, “not that I could recall.”
What was unusual about Ofelia Torres’s case was the sheer number of stab wounds. “My residents stopped counting them because they were too numerous to count and document,” Temperance added. Doctors estimated she was stabbed between 20 and 50 times.
There were stab wounds from her neck down to her buttocks and on her chest, abdomen and arms, and her left pinky finger had been severed. On the operating table, according to court documents, Temperance removed her spleen and her left lung, and repaired her colon and kidneys. “I was quite certain that she was going to die,” he told the jury.
During the operation, Torres’s body became dangerously cold and her blood ceased clotting. To stall the surgery and allow her body to regain strength, Temperance performed a damage control thoracotomy for the first time in his career: he laid plastic over her open abdomen and chest, then packed the cavities with gauze. Torres received more than a gallon and a half of transfused blood, and when her body warmed, he removed the gauze and sutured her wounds. It saved her life. Her surgeries continued the following day, during which Dr. Richard Garvey reattached her finger. Torres was hospitalized for almost two weeks while she recovered.
Before ushering her into her first operation, according to the trial transcript, Temperance asked Ofelia Torres who had hurt her. She replied, “Samuel Encarnacion.”
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Samuel Encarnacion and Ofelia Torres had been dating almost a year and moved in together in the Bronx, where she had grown up, according to court documents. She and her three brothers had grown up poor, her brother Adam Torres, 24, said in an interview in December of 2009. They moved around a lot, and she began to get into trouble. About a year before the incident, Ofelia Torres was arrested for drug dealing and was sent to a juvenile center, according to her mother Nancy, but she could not recall the facility’s name or specifics of the arrest. Though Ofelia had dropped out of school after the 7th grade, her mother said she tested well enough to take 10th grade classes at the center. Ofelia Torres declined to be interviewed for this article.
Ofelia is “loveable” though she “has a temper,” her mother said in a phone interview. Her brother described his sister, who goes by the nickname Mooky, as “tough,” and someone who “knew how to push people’s buttons.” Hector Rodriguez, a neighbor from 1435 Harrod Avenue, remembered her as “a pretty little girl” who would sit on the red bench outside the building and wait for the sun to come up. She would often sit and chat with her elderly neighbors, he said, or rap with her friends and write lyrics, a favorite pastime of hers, her brother said.
Photos show her to be petite with a round face, full lips and large, captivating eyes – known for her beauty, her brother said. She had several boyfriends before Encarnacion, Adam Torres said, adding that she told each one, “If you’re going to be with me you gotta be hard. Even the toughest guys couldn’t put up with her.”
Encarnacion could. “When we met him he wasn’t a bad guy,” Adam Torres said. “I actually liked him. I don’t normally say hi to my sister’s boyfriends, but he was doing good for himself. He wasn’t getting into trouble.” Encarnacion was enrolled in Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in Queens, he told Detective Jack Peters during police questioning. Whenever he took Ofelia Torres out, he brought her back home on time and was respectful to her mother. “He was in love with her,” Adam Torres said. “He was nuts about her.” Encarnacion had Ofelia’s name tattooed on his neck, and she had Sammy written on hers. “My sister said he was protective, he was jealous, but what guy isn’t?” Adam Torres said. “They were in love.”
Rodriguez recalled Encarnacion being respectful to others, but he was extremely jealous and violent when it came to Ofelia. “He didn’t want to let her talk to no one,” he said while standing outside his building in Parkchester. “He used to slap the hell out of her. She would cry herself off and go upstairs.” He remembered Encarnacion waiting on the street corner, watching Torres and with whom she spoke.
Encarnacion’s behavioral problems stretch back to childhood, according to a psychiatric evaluation completed for the court by Dr. Melissa Kayne before trial. He was born in the Bronx on June 17, 1986, and lived with his mother. His parents separated when Encarnacion was 11. He attended Special Instructional Environment classes designed for children who are “severely emotionally disturbed,” the program description reads.
The police were familiar with Samuel Encarnacion. “The defendant’s parents report they have called the police numerous times because Mr. Encarnacion behaved in an aggressive and violent manner,” the evaluation reads. “The defendant reportedly tried to strangle his mother and assaulted his cousin who tried to come to her aid.”
At age 11, Encarnacion was admitted to Four Winds Hospital, according to court documents, for impulsivity, oppositionalism and hyperactivity, and was diagnosed with Conduct Disorder, symptoms of which include destructive, violent behavior and repeat violation of rules. Two years later, he was readmitted to the hospital for extreme aggression at home and at school.
After his arrest in 2005 and subsequent threats to hang himself, Encarnacion was admitted to the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward on Jan. 21, and complained of hallucinations. Doctors, however, found he was feigning symptoms of mental disturbance and he was transferred on March 16 to Rikers Island with the diagnosis of “Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance of Emotions and Conduct, Dysthymic Disorder” (characterized by chronic mild depression), “History of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, History of Conduct Disorder and Malingering Psychosis” (tendency to fake illness).
Five days later, according to the psychiatric report, he was readmitted after overdosing on hoarded medication but was medically cleared at Elmhurst Hospital and deemed to have no medical or neurological injuries. He left with additional diagnoses of Suicidality, Cannabis Abuse and Antisocial Personality Traits.
Dr. Kayne noted a burgeoning Personality Disorder with Antisocial and Borderline features, which is characterized by constant violation of laws and social norms, disregard for the well-being of others, manipulative behavior, lack of remorse, aggressiveness and poor impulse control. Even so, she deemed Encarnacion mentally fit to stand trial.
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Johnny Torres, Ofelia’s cousin, had many homes in his life. His mother, Olga Candelario, gave birth to him on June 25, 1985 when she was 19 years old. “I wasn’t ready to raise a child,” she said, sitting in her Highbridge apartment. Johnny Torres was raised by his grandmother in Castle Hill until the age of eight, when he began living with his mother.
Candelario recalled her son’s school days. “He never missed a day of elementary school,” she said. He earned several awards for academic excellence and good behavior, and particularly liked science and reading. One year, she bought him a toy science kit for Christmas, and he would brew bubbly concoctions in the living room.
As he approached his teenage years, Torres began to rebel, his mother said. He started hanging out with friends she did not approve of, and stayed out well beyond his midnight curfew. He dropped out of Stevenson High School after 10th grade. “If you’re in my house, you have to live by my rules,” Calendario remembered telling her son when he was 15. He left home. “I felt really bad that he ran away,” she said. “I was trying to be a mother to him, set rules, but he felt because I wasn’t in his life before, I didn’t have the right.”
Johnny Torres moved in with his girlfriend, Andrea Cavigliano, and her mother in their Pelham Park apartment, and a year later their daughter Angelica was born with the same round eyes and big smile as her father. “He was still a teenager but he knew he had to be a role model,” Candelario said. Torres began searching for employment and worked first as a stock boy at Macy’s, she said, and then in construction. A photograph framed in his mother’s apartment reveals a tall, slender young man with a square jaw at a construction site, goofing around and dancing with friends.
Though he and Cavigliano continued their relationship, Torres moved in with his cousins. He began discussing his plans to pursue his GED, and participated in the open mic at the Pentecostal Church of God. Listening to Tupac Shakur and writing rap lyrics and poetry was a passion of Johnny Torres’s, and from time to time he would submit his work to the now-defunct poetry.com.
Johnny Torres “was very sweet,” his aunt Nancy Torres said in a recent phone interview. He helped her cook, clean and carry the laundry. At the time, Adam Torres was the only member of the household who was employed, and after a while, supporting his family plus his cousin on his Music Factory CD store salary proved too difficult. On Jan. 19, 2005, he asked Johnny Torres to leave. Looking for a place to sleep, he turned to Ofelia Torres. She said he could stay.
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On Jan. 19, 2005, Herman Meisler, living at 1435 Harrod Avenue at the time, opened his door sometime past 2 a.m. to Encarnacion pounding on the door, according to court documents. Encarnacion told his neighbor to call an ambulance. The 911 call came through at 2:46 a.m.
At 2:50 a.m., officer Kevin Brosnan stood outside the Bronx River housing projects, unable to enter, he testified in court. While desperately dialing neighbors, they saw a young Hispanic man lingering in the lobby and waved him over. The man took one step as if to leave but opened the lobby door instead, and told police his girlfriend and her cousin had been stabbed by a black man.
Officers escorted Encarnacion first to the housing bureau Police Service Area 8, then to the 43rd police precinct, to question him regarding the night’s events. After a brief conversation with Detective Jack Peters, Encarnacion confessed to the stabbings. Peters read him his Miranda rights at 6:52 a.m. and took his statement.
Encarnacion told police that after returning home on Jan. 19, he got into a fight with his girlfriend. Johnny Torres, witnessing the argument, told his cousin she should end the relationship. “After this I lost my senses and blacked out like somebody put a big cape over my mind,” his statement reads. “I don’t remember how I got a chance to get the knife but when I came to….my girl is on the floor, Johnny is down.”
After giving his statement, Encarnacion expressed remorse and insisted on writing his girlfriend a letter. “Baby I ask you to please, please forgive me, ma,” it read. “I need you, I want to see you, and if I don’t, when you get this letter, know that I am feeling your pain. Right now I feel so bad I can’t think. I never felt like this. How can I do that to my baby is the questions I ask myself. But it wasn’t my fault, baby.” On the envelope he drew a heart, a flower and a frowny face with tears.
Prison bars did not stop Encarnacion from calling his girlfriend’s house – two to three times a day, starting the day after the stabbing and continuing for a year, Ofelia’s mother Nancy Torres testified. He would ask Nancy if she believed he was guilty, and when she said yes, he would break into tears. Often, after she recovered, Ofelia would pick up the phone, and her mother began to notice a change.
“She was like, I still like him. That’s what she said,” Nancy Torres testified. “When she met Sammy I couldn’t control her.” After several phone conversations with Encarnacion, Ofelia Torres began telling her family it was her cousin who stabbed her. “I put her in the hospital,” her mother said in court. “And when she came out of the hospital she said that Sammy wanted me to say that.” Ofelia Torres was admitted to the Bronx Lebanon Hospital Psychiatric Ward for a week in 2005, according to court documents, three months after the stabbing occurred.
Though she later said Encarnacion had indeed stabbed her, she was unwilling to testify during the trial, anxious to face her ex-boyfriend and relive her ordeal. Her videotaped grand jury testimony was played for the court instead. “When I told him I didn’t want to be with him, he, he, he was like, oh, for real? You don’t want to be with me….if I can’t have you, nobody can have you.” She then testified that he went to the kitchen, grabbed a butterfly knife, and began stabbing her. “Then after he stabbed me,” she continued, “my cousin tried to help me, Johnny Torres, tried to help me, and he, went right there in the little hallway, he stabbed my, my cousin to death.”
Jan. 19, 2005 was not the first time Torres had tried to break up with Encarnacion, nor was it the first time he threatened her with a knife. The day before the stabbing, “she came to the apartment and said that Sammy put the knife to the neck. She had scratches on the neck,” her mother testified. “I was telling her not to go back, and she left. She said Mommy, if I die, remember I love you. And she went back.”
Ofelia Torres now has a 19-month-old son, Terrain, who has his mother’s nose, Nancy Torres said. For a while Ofelia Torres struggled to find work, hindered by lingering injuries: with only one lung, she becomes winded easily, her brother said, and though her pinky was reattached, she has trouble typing.
Today, she is living in Jamaica, Queens with her son in a program geared for mothers and their children, though Nancy Torres could not recall the name. Through the program, she recently started a new job and is preparing to find an apartment of her own. Most of her energies, though, are focused on her son.
“She’s a real good mother,” Nancy Torres said. “She’s doing a real good job.”
Since the trial, she has not spoken to Encarnacion, and had a larger tattoo placed over the tattoo of his name.
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On Dec. 19, 2007, Judge Elizabeth Foley of the Bronx Supreme Court issued a warrant to bring the unwilling Encarnacion from his cell before the court to hear his sentencing. Several court officers wearing protective gear – rarely used, according to former ADA McElwreath – escorted a laughing Encarnacion into the courtroom.
“He was probably laughing for fear,” said Olga Candelario. “He knew his days were ending. He tried to be a big man.”
When given the chance to address the court, Encarnacion insisted his rights had been violated, and he maintained his innocence.
A jury found Samuel Encarnacion guilty of murder in the second degree, attempted murder in the second degree and two counts of assault in the first degree, and Judge Foley sentenced him to 40 years to life. He is currently serving his sentence in Great Meadows Prison in Comstock, NY. The case is under appeal, and according to an Appellate Court clerk, is scheduled to be heard January, 2010.
Nancy Torres spoke at the sentencing, as did Johnny’s aunt Sandra Noriega. “How do you explain to a little girl that her father is not coming home again, ever?” Noriega said before the court. “How do you explain that there will be no father to take care of her throughout her life?”
Olga Candelario, emotionally overwhelmed, had her sister read a prepared poem. As she sat at in her living room this December, fidgeting with the file that held her son’s death certificate, she recited the words between sobs, tears streaming down her cheeks. “If tears could build a stairway and memory a lane, I would walk up to heaven and bring you back home again.”
Through broken sobs, she told of phone calls with her son, after he left home. Holding the receiver up to the stereo, he would dedicate to her the Boyz II Men hit “A Song for Mama.” Candelario glanced up at the rose marble urn she keeps above her living room cabinet, draped with blue prayer beads. “Wherever I go I want my son to go with me,” she said. “The day I die I want the ashes to be buried with me.”
Johnny Torres left behind a journal of poems and packets of letters, now being saved for the day his daughter is ready to read them. “It was almost like he knew what was going to happen,” Candelario said.
His daughter Angelica is now eight years old and lives with her mother and grandmother, though she spends many holidays with her father’s family. “Every once in a while she wants to see her daddy,” Candelario said, gesturing at his urn. “I say, ‘You can hold him and talk to him. His spirit is around.’ Her daddy is always going to be watching over her.”
