After a 1,700-mile search, a detective gets a killer
By Alan Neuhauser March 11, 2010 _They heard him before they saw him. An approaching storm, short, stocky, and strong, clomping up the stairs in work boots to their third floor apartment in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.
Edelmiro “June” Cesareo, 31, was home – far earlier than expected. He worked evenings as a maintenance man at a youth community center in Manhattan. Normally, he did not return until after 11 p.m. But on June 8, 2004, according to court documents, he was back at 9:30.
Inside the apartment, Loreen and Yasmin Merchan, as well as Ashley and Christy Guzman were gathered in the kitchen, talking and joking over a late dinner of pork chops, rice, and beans. As they heard Cesareo climb the stairs and open the front door, their smiles disappeared, the laughing and conversation stopped. Cesareo entered a silent kitchen.
“If you’re hungry, there’s food in the microwave,” Loreen said, addressing her common-law-husband. She did not look up from her plate.
“I’m not hungry,” Cesareo said. He walked to his bedroom and shut the door.
Loreen, Yasmin, Christy, and Ashley knew a fight was coming. Loreen and Cesareo had been arguing all morning – all week, really. In fact, the couple hadn’t stopped arguing since they had moved-in together seven years before.
Cesareo, they learned, was jealous, possessive, and savagely abusive. He banned Loreen from wearing make-up or styling her hair. He discouraged her from saying hello to others on the street. And when she disobeyed, he raged. He yelled, he threw ketchup and mayonnaise at the couch and walls. He tore clothes and broke electronics. He punched and kicked Loreen. And, most recently, he threatened to bury her body where no one would find it.
Police arrested him twice on domestic violence charges – each time after Loreen’s daughter, Ashley, called them. And each time, Loreen refused to press charges.
This new apartment at 187 Throgs Neck Boulevard was supposed to be a new start, Cesareo later testified, free of the acrimony of their previous fights. But since they had moved there four weeks ago, nothing had changed.
Cesareo and Loreen’s latest skirmish was over Yasmin, Loreen’s older sister (and Ashley and Christy’s aunt). Two weeks earlier, Yasmin had started sleeping at the family’s apartment. Yasmin told Christy, 13, and Ashley, 15, that staying in the Bronx – instead of her home in Connecticut – meant an easier commute to her job in Queens. And while this was true, Loreen’s children (they were her daughters by a previous boyfriend) knew the real reason– Yasmin had moved there to protect Loreen.
“Loreen,” Ashley later testified, “was scared.”
That night, June 8, 2004, Cesareo and Loreen started arguing in their bedroom. In the kitchen, over the clattering of plates and the running water from the sink, Ashley and Christy could hear their mom and Cesareo yelling. Yasmin, meanwhile, sat on a white loveseat in the living room, listening to her sister and Cesareo.
“That’s my sister, I have no problem with her staying in the house,” Loreen said, according to Christy’s testimony.
After several minutes of shouting, Loreen burst from the bedroom. She started cleaning the house, scrubbing furiously at the dining room table and straightening the couches. “When she would get mad, she was just start cleaning the house,” Ashley later testified. “She really didn’t want us to know that she was upset with June.”
But Cesareo followed, hurling threats and accusations. Yasmin, still seated, joined the argument, Ashley testified. “I’m going to call the DA,” Yasmin warned Cesareo, “and tell him what you had been doing.”
By living with Loreen, Cesareo was violating a court order of protection she had taken out against him. In addition to assaulting Loreen, he kept drugs in their bedroom, Ashley said in an interview in December 2009. And by Cesareo’s own admission in court, he kept an unlicensed firearm in his closet.
When Yasmin threatened Cesareo, he whirled to face his sister-in-law. According to New York Police Department Detective Jerome Schwartz, who later investigated the case, Cesareo told her, “I should kill you.”
Cesareo and Loreen soon returned to the bedroom and continued arguing. Ashley, curious to hear what they were saying, went to the bathroom, located across the hall from her mom and June’s bedroom. “I heard a lot of – a lot of noise in the room,” Ashley later testified. “I thought something was going wrong.”
Ashley opened the bathroom door, and her mom hurried past, clutching a phone and walking quickly toward the balcony. As Ashley stepped into the hallway to walk to her room – the one she shared with Christy and, now, Yasmin – Cesareo walked into the hallway behind her. They both headed toward the living room, Ashley turning abruptly to go into her bedroom. But as she turned around to shut the door to her room, she froze.
In his left hand, Cesareo held a pistol – small, black, and ugly. As Ashley watched, he loaded the gun, putting a 15-round magazine into the bottom of the plastic grip. With the pistol pointed, Cesareo started edging down the hall toward the living room.
“Where’s Loreen?” He asked. When no one answered, his voice grew hard. “Where’s Loreen?”
Ashley could only see Cesareo, but she heard Yasmin.
“You a punk,” Yasmin said, according to Christy and Ashley’s testimony. “If you a man, you wouldn’t do this. You ain’t gonna do this. You don’t have the balls.”
“Oh, you don’t think I’m going to do it?” Cesareo replied. He started to shout.
“Loreen!”
Ashley testified that she heard her mom come in from the balcony. She heard the glass door slide, and her mom’s footsteps on the wood floor. She saw Cesareo’s arm move, and she heard her mom’s voice, scared.
“June, no; June, don’t.”
Bang – the first shot, a firecracker inside the house.
Ashley slammed and locked her bedroom door, and scrambled under her bed, the edges of her pink and white-striped comforter falling back down around her. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she testified.
As she huddled there, “I just start hearing shots,” she said.
Five, then two. And after a pause, two more.
Then, silence in the apartment. The front door slammed. And someone – Christy, it must be Christy – started screaming. Without warning, someone started pounding on the bedroom door.
“I thought it was him,” Ashley testified. ” I thought he was coming to kill us all.”
Instead, it was Christy, trying to get her big sister’s help, trying to find someone, anyone, trying to escape the horror that had engulfed their apartment and their lives.
Christy had seen it all. Alone in the living room, the apartment silent, Christy had stood stock-still, frozen, surrounded by the carnage that had occurred only moments before.
“In 15 seconds,” said Bronx Assistant District Attorney Bruce Birns, who prosecuted the case, “those kids had to grow up.”
* * *
Five days later and 1,700 miles away in Puerto Rico, Cesareo was also trying to hide under a bed – but with much less success. He didn’t fit, his stomach wouldn’t let him.
Lying on the ground, his arms outstretched in front of him, he looked up at the two police officers standing over him, their guns drawn.
“Oh, shit, Schwartz,” he said, “it’s you.”
Detective First Grade Schwartz was a legend in the NYPD. Known as “The Sheriff,” he had pursued suspects as far as California and Michigan, always returning to New York with an arrest. He speaks with the authority and drawl of a life spent as a city cop, pronouncing Schwartz without the R, and punctuating each sentence with a firm, bold-faced period. By the time he retired in January 2009, he had served 38 years as a cop, 20 as a detective, 16 of those in the Bronx’s 45th Precinct. On his last day, the department sent him off with speeches, the Emerald Society Pipes and Drum Band, a police helicopter flyover, and a handshake from Commissioner Ray Kelly.
But Schwartz and Cesareo also knew each other personally. In March 2004, Schwartz said, he arrested him after a particularly violent fight between Cesareo and Loreen at the couple’s first apartment, located at 2511 Frisby Ave. in Throgs Neck.
Days after returning from a trip to Disney World, the two got into a dispute over who had bought some electronics. Cesareo, in a rage, smashed a new printer to the ground, punched Loreen in the face, and dragged her down the hall on her knees, pulling her by the strap of a new camera that she desperately tried to take from him. Loreen came away from the fight bloodied and bruised. All of it occurred in front of Christy and Ashley. During Cesareo’s murder trial in 2007, he attributed the bruises on her face in March 2004 to “bad acne.” But Christy and Ashley testified about what had really happened.
Schwartz was the arresting officer in that incident. He charged Cesareo with two counts of assault and a harassment violation. But Loreen dropped the charges, despite Schwartz urging otherwise.
Three months later, Schwartz found Yasmin dead and Loreen gravely wounded in Loreen and Cesareo’s apartment. He was not surprised. “Look, he’d beaten her many times in the past,” he said. “He had a mean streak in him, this fella.”
Meanwhile, inside the apartment, in the living room, “it was a bloody mess,” Schwartz said. Yasmin “was shot point-blank range with a nine-millimeter,” Schwartz testified. “It opened her up like a watermelon.” She lay facedown in front of the loveseat.
In the middle of the living room, EMTs worked on Loreen, trying to control her bleeding. When they took her from the apartment and rushed her to the hospital, a pool of blood spread long tendrils across the hardwood floor. Shattered glass and four stubby wooden legs – the coffee table through which she had fallen – lay splayed and scattered around the center.
When Schwartz and his detectives had arrived at the scene, they quickly learned that Cesareo was on the run. The family’s downstairs neighbor, Quincy Vazquez, told officers (and later testified) that he had seen Cesareo running from the house, his undershirt stained red with blood. Schwartz suspected that Cesareo’s sister, Carmen Arroyo (not the New York State Assemblywoman), might be hiding him at her apartment in Manhattan. But mere hours after the murders, Cesareo made a single, crucial mistake. He made a phone call.
“He messed up,” Schwartz said in a telephone interview. “He made one call. But he knew enough to throw his phone away right away.”
After learning that Cesareo had fled, Schwartz placed a trace on Cesareo’s cell phone. From that single call, the police traced him to Puerto Rico. With a ticket bought in cash from the JetBlue counter at JFK airport, police later discovered, Cesareo had managed to beat a “no fly” order that Schwartz had issued to the Port Authority police. By the time police at JFK received that order and responded, Cesareo was already on a plane.
Schwartz and his partner on the case, Detective Barry Sullivan, took the next flight to San Juan. On the plane, they talked strategy. “We knew his mother was going to have cancer surgery, and that he hadn’t seen her in a while,” Schwartz said. “So we figured that was a good bet.”
Two U.S. Marshals met Schwartz and Sullivan at the airport, and drove the detectives to the Marshals’ compound in downtown San Juan. There, they met six other Marshals and members of Puerto Rico’s Federal Police. Schwartz learned that the police already knew of Cesareo’s arrival.
Cesareo, it turned out, had a darker history than the detectives knew.
Schwartz knew that Cesareo was still involved with drugs. During his murder trial in 2007, Cesareo claimed that he had stayed drug-free since June 1998, when a rival drug dealer shot him in the back as he sold drugs in East Harlem. But when police searched his Throgs Neck apartment in June 2004, Schwartz later testified, they found an open Tupperware container filled with uncooked rice – a common method for storing drugs. Schwartz said in an interview that rice kills the odor from drugs.
Police also found “some very expensive clothes,” Schwartz said, as well as “jewelry, a DVD player” and a home-theater system – items that someone making a maintenance man’s salary would have trouble affording.
The Marshals and police agreed with Schwartz’s plan for a stakeout of Cesareo’s mother’s home. The next day, the team headed to Veronica Nieves’s home in the mountains.
The house, a large, beige structure, was on a mountainside in the Puerto Rican rainforest. Set back from a one-lane gravel road, it stood a mile or two outside what Schwartz called in a telephone interview “a known drug town,” the name of which he could not remember in either the interview or his court testimony.
“When Junie [Cesareo] told Loreen he’d bury her body where the police wouldn’t find it,” Schwartz said, “he wasn’t kidding. It was as backwoods as you could get.”
Five-hundred feet above the house, amid smaller trees and shrubs, Schwartz and Sullivan watched the house and surrounding property. They wore t-shirts and dungarees, sweltering in the tropical heat and swatting at mosquitoes swarming about their heads. Marshals and police watched the property from other vantage points, and provided the detectives with food, water, and breaks from the stakeout.
The police had learned that Cesareo was traveling in a blue Toyota. And on the third or fourth day of the stakeout, Schwartz said, the detectives and Marshals spotted an old, dark-blue Toyota sedan driving “real, real, real slow” down the gravel road. The car turned into the driveway and continued toward the gate. But seconds after the car turned, a police car – “the first police car we’d seen since arriving,” Schwartz said – came down the gravel road. It was sheer coincidence. But the driver of the Toyota, apparently spooked, threw the car into reverse, flew back across the driveway, and sped away down the gravel road.
“Alright, Barry,” Schwartz said, turning to his partner, “now we’re going to start knocking on doors.”
The detectives, Marshals, and police reconvened in front of Nieves’ house. Her boyfriend or husband – Schwartz said he was not sure which – answered the front door. He was heavyset and short, 5′ 7″ or 5′ 8″, with short dark hair. He escorted the group to the back of the house, where Nieves lay in bed with bandages and an IV.
She did not speak English, Schwartz said. Using one of the Marshals as a translator, Schwartz started a bedside interrogation.
“At first, we tried to do it the nice way,” Schwartz said. “She didn’t look in good shape, neither. I didn’t want to push her over the edge.” But Schwartz did not get the answers he needed. He understood that Cesareo could escape Puerto Rico soon, and he pushed harder. Fifteen minutes into the interrogation, he lost his patience.
“You tell her,” he yelled at a Marshal translating the interrogation, “Junie’s either going back to the U.S. with me, or he’s going in the ground in a box. Either way, we’re going to get him.”
Nieves started to cry, but she did not answer, Schwartz said. Her companion, however, had seen enough. He called Schwartz aside, and told him in English that Cesareo had a sister who lived in a suburb five miles away. He suggested the officers try there.
The sister, a schoolteacher, “swore she never saw him,” Schwartz said. The neighbors, however, claimed otherwise.
“The whole town knew who he was,” Schwartz said. By canvassing the neighborhood with photos of Cesareo, Schwartz and the team learned that the sister lent Cesareo a motorcycle. They also learned that he had holed-up in a safe house some 30 miles away, in a project in the city of Arroyo.
Schwartz and Sullivan approached the police with what they had learned, eager to go to the project and apprehend Cesareo. But the officers balked. “The police, they were like an army,” Schwartz said. “There were 20 to 30 of them with us. They had machine guns, shotguns, body armor, armored cars. But when we told them where he was, they said they needed special permission from their comandante. And he wouldn’t grant it.” He said the Puerto Rican police found the area exceedingly dangerous, an area where several officers had been killed.
Schwartz and Sullivan had other ideas. “There was not a question in our minds that we would go,” he said. “When I was a transit cop, back before they merged with the NYPD, there were times two cops could hold back 100 people.” So with just two Marshals, Schwartz and Sullivan headed to Arroyo – Schwartz and a Marshal in the lead in an SUV, Sullivan and another Marshal following in a Ford Taurus.
The project it turned out, was far different than the officers had expected. “The Puerto Rican police look at it as the worst ghetto in the world,” he said. “But these projects were very nice! They had decks, patios, glass doors. In the Bronx, when you’re in the projects, you know you’re in the projects.”
Still the Marshals and detectives could sense hostility. As they drove, the Marshal behind the wheel of the SUV asked Schwartz to hand him his MP-5 submachine gun. “They know who we are,” the Marshal said, according to Schwartz. “They know if we go down the block, we’re taking one of their family members away.”
When the officers finally stepped from their cars in front of Cesareo’s house – Schwartz and Sullivan gripping their service pistols, the two Marshals holding their submachine guns – no one moved, no one ran or hid. “That was surprising to me,” Schwartz said. “Even in our projects, if you jump out of a car with machine guns, people will leave the area, take their kids. But I remember there were some men there with kids, it didn’t phase them.”
Sullivan and a Marshal took the front door, Schwartz and the second Marshal climbed a fence to the backyard and patio. Each pair entered the house at the same time. As they swept each room and headed upstairs, they found a woman who had been cooking, standing with her head pressed to left her arm against a wall in the kitchen.
“She was a pretty Spanish woman,” Schwartz said, “paid to feed Cesareo and service him with any sexual favors he wanted.”
The woman, her head still facing the wall, did not say anything. Instead, she pointed with her right hand toward a door, waving her finger toward what appeared to be a bedroom.
While the Marshals kept an eye on the woman and the rest of the apartment, Schwartz and Sullivan took the door. Sullivan reached and turned the knob, and together both men turned into the room, shouting “Police!”
There, on the floor, was Cesareo.
“I knew you’d get me in the Bronx,” Cesareo said, according to Schwartz’s testimony. “But I didn’t think you’d get me here.”
* * *
Two or three days later, after an extradition hearing, Schwartz and Sullivan escorted June back to the United States. Mid-flight aboard a commercial jet, Schwartz received a call. Loreen, an officer said, had died at the hospital. Cesareo would now face two counts of murder, and two counts of manslaughter.
Bruce Birns, the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted the case, delivered his opening statement April 25, 2007. A veteran of Bronx Criminal Court, he occasionally plays a defense lawyer on Law & Order.
During the trial, Cesareo claimed that on the night of June 8, he suffered extreme emotional disturbance. He acknowledged that although he killed Yasmin and Loreen, his actions were beyond his control.
“I just felt helpless, stressed out,” he testified. “I knew something terrible happened…. I knew that the gun went off, but I didn’t know that they were shot.”
Birns vigorously attacked Cesareo’s claim, calling it a “zombie defense.” He argued that Cesareo did not mindlessly shoot Loreen and Yasmin, but instead made ten distinct choices – each of which, had he chosen otherwise, would have spared one or both women’s lives.
Cesareo’s strategy, however, swayed the jury. After a two-week trial, the 12-member panel found that Cesareo had, in fact, killed Loreen and Yasmin while under extreme emotional duress, thus acquitting him of murder in the first and second degree. The jury did, however, convict him on of both counts of manslaughter in the first degree. It also found him guilty of criminal possession of a weapon in the second degree, criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, and two counts of endangering the welfare of a child.
At sentencing, Cesareo’s emotional disturbance defense failed to influence Judge John Carter, who presided over the trial. In a pre-sentence memorandum to Judge Carter, Birns had recommended the maximum possible sentence. Judge Carter agreed. Quoting at length from Birns’ pre-sentencing memo, he sentenced Cesareo to 25 years in prison for each count of manslaughter, and 12 years total for the other six counts – 67 years. Cesareo is currently serving his sentence in Green Haven Correctional Facility in Dutchess County.
Following the sentence, Ashley and Christy were relieved, Birns said in a telephone interview. That night, Birns took Ashley, Schwartz, Schwartz’s wife, his trial assistant, and the two victim advocates who had worked with Ashley and Christy to dinner at the Dinosaur Barbecue in Manhattan. The mood, he said, was happy. But as he and Schwartz also recognized, “June had messed that whole family up,” Schwartz said.
“It don’t feel like it’s been five years,” Ashley, now 21, said during an interview at an apartment in West Harlem in December of 2009. “This is the season that gets hard. Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years – the time you’re supposed to spend with your family. I really don’t have anybody.”
Christy, who twice declined to be interviewed for this article, lives near Ashley’s former apartment. She is now 19. Ashley said that she sees her sister everyday.
Cesareo is appealing his case. He and his appellate lawyer declined to be interviewed and Cesareo’s trial lawyer, Paul Brenner, did not return repeated calls to his office and cell phone.
“Sometimes, I lay in bed and I just crumble up,” Ashley said. “I’m scared, because I don’t want to go through my life depressed.” But one day in the future, she said, “I would like to go meet up with June. Go and ask him, ‘What made you do this?’”
