DNA the difference in Moscatelli murder

By Diya Chacko

May 3, 2010

An armed guard presses a hidden button, and two separate doors slide open to reveal a large room with yellow walls and plastic chairs. The room is on the second floor of the Downstate Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Fishkill, NY. Continue Reading

Shattered lives when an ex-boyfriend turns to murder

By Sarveen Abubaker

Christopher Mariconi and his sister Daniele. (Picture from family website dedicated to Christopher Mariconi)

Jenae Aragosa sat with a bunch of college friends at Nacho Mamas on 113th Street and Broadway that evening, chatting and enjoying her drink. There was something about the 5’11” bartender that caught her eye. Before she could put a finger on it, she had exchanged phone numbers with Trevor Frederick and agreed to see him again.

It was early November 2002. The 18-year-old had just moved to New York City from her parents’ home in Schenectady two months earlier to study accessory design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Soon the stirrings of a new romance spiced up Aragosa’s life on the West 27th Street and Seventh Avenue campus. Continue Reading

In a flash, the life of an elderly bartender is gone

by Emma Silvers

The rain started early that Sunday, and showed no signs of letting up. It was overcast and muggy, but it was also José Quinones’ day off from the veterinary clinic in Union City, New Jersey, where he worked as a technician, and he didn’t want to let the weather prevent him from enjoying his freedom.

Sundays and Tuesdays were his biking days, when the 31-year-old would meet up with a crew of other road bikers and head into New York City, riding along the Hudson River or through Central Park, often going downtown and riding across the Brooklyn Bridge before heading back to New Jersey. Quinones didn’t like the bike paths in New Jersey; they were fewer and farther between than in New York, as he would later explain in Manhattan Criminal Court, and they were never as clean.

But on Sunday, August 27, 2006, the rain was too heavy for biking, so Quinones decided to drive into Brooklyn instead, to visit a friend. His cousin, José Diaz, came along for the ride.  The two left New Jersey just after noon in Quinones’ black Toyota Camry, and would later explain that they decided to go north and use the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, planning to take city streets downtown to avoid traffic around the Lincoln Tunnel. They never made it farther than Washington Heights.

It was almost 2 p.m. when the cousins decided to stop at a pizza parlor on Broadway, a place Quinones remembered from when his son was born, at nearby Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.  After double-parking on West 169^th Street between Broadway and Fort Washington Avenues, the two dashed into the pizza parlor and returned with a small pie to share in the parked car. (Detective Harold Hernandez of the 33^rd squad would later say he believed the pair was actually in Washington Heights to “cop some marijuana, but they stuck to the stopping for pizza story.”)

Regardless, the cousins were sitting in Quinones’ black Camry, and it was still raining heavily as they watched, through the fogged driver’s-side window, as across the street, in front of 217 West 169^th Street, a tall, light-skinned black man in a soaking wet white T-shirt, a black stocking cap and blue jeans approached an elderly Hispanic man wearing a baseball cap and carrying an umbrella.

The two quickly got into what Quinones would later testify looked like a fistfight, although a black umbrella “flaring around in the air” in front of the pair made it difficult to see exactly what was going on. Diaz leaned across the car to look out Quinones’ window just as the older man fell to the ground, with the younger black man on top of him. The cousins watched as the younger man appeared to rifle through the older man’s pockets, then take off up the street toward Fort Washington Avenue. “It happened in seconds,” Quinones later said. As the younger man ran away down the street, Quinones started the car and slowly crept forward to get a better look. The old man was on his back on the wet pavement, not moving, his mouth open to the rain.

***

Carlos Ramirez was, physically, a diminutive man. At 5 feet, 5 inches and 140 pounds, with graying hair and small features, his slight presence did little to hint at the 63-year-old’s effusive charm. Born in the Dominican Republic, Ramirez moved to New York in his early twenties and had lived in Washington Heights ever since. By day, he blended in with the other men in the heavily Dominican neighborhood, stopping to talk to neighbors in front of the local bodegas. He listened to Yankees’ games on the radio in his apartment, and went to games when he could. By night, he was the assistant manager and bartender at the Regency, a glitzy private whist club on East 67^th Street in Manhattan––a multilevel brownstone with a dining room and bridge tables that saw the likes of actor Omar Sharif and Bear Stearns CEO Ace Greenberg, as well as a pool of regulars drawn from the upper echelon of old New York’s social elite.

Ramirez was at the Regency for 25 years and, even with celebrities around, he was often everyone’s favorite person in the room. “Carlos was a gentleman in the true sense of the word,” said Patricia Stacom, who managed the exclusive club for most of the 1990s, in an e-mail. “He was always gracious, polite…supportive and willing to pitch in.” Stacom added that Ramirez’s attitude around the club made it feel like home, even for newcomers.  “He had a smile for everyone.”

“Cheerful, always cheerful, loved by everyone,” is how his former co-worker, bridge dealer Bob Yellis remembers him. “He was an institution.” He had a superior memory for names and faces––and drinks, according to those who knew him best. “He would remember how a member wanted his martini from 10 years ago,” general manager Margie Gewirtz told the New York Post in 2006. “He really was incredible.”

In addition to remembering cocktail orders, Ramirez was known to be fond of a few drinks himself. Irma Oestreicher, 88, who has been a member of the Regency for more than 30 years, says it was an oft-repeated rumor around the club that Ramirez was a heavy drinker. “He would drink, smoke sometimes, sure,” agrees Yellis. Ramirez may have had a relationship with other substances as well. A toxicology report following his death found traces of cocaine in his system in addition to alcohol, most likely from the previous night. Irma Oestreicher says whatever his habits were, they never got in the way of his work.

“There was some talk that they were thinking of letting him go because of [his drinking], but the membership would never have allowed it,” says Oestriecher in a phone interview. “Everyone liked him so much! He was always affable, always professional, always helpful.”

Ramirez had been divorced from his wife for many years, according to Detective Hernandez. According to court records, he had been estranged from his oldest daughter, who lived in southern Florida, but the two had reconnected in early 2006, when Ramirez met his youngest grandchild for the first time. His son was in the U.S. Navy. Ramirez was carrying pictures of his grandchildren in a plastic card holder in his pocket on that rainy Sunday, August 27, 2006. He was running errands just blocks from his apartment in Washington Heights when he was approached by a young black man who demanded his money.

***

Cedric Lawton was not a man who had many friends. At 6 feet tall and just under 200 pounds, Lawton was a large, striking man who tended not to speak unless he was spoken to.  Born in Plainfield, N.J., in June 1967, Lawton was diagnosed in early adulthood with both type 1 bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, according to court records. He did not graduate from high school.

In 1984, at the age of 17, he was convicted in the Superior Court of Union County, N.J., of aggravated sexual assault after raping a young teenager at knifepoint, and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He served nine of them, all at the Adult Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Avenel, N.J., a residential treatment facility for convicted sex offenders. He was released in December 1993, with antipsychotic prescription drugs to manage his symptoms. It is unclear how long Lawton stayed on the medication. It is also unclear when he began using crack cocaine, but court records indicate a “history of addiction.”

In April 1997, he was convicted of attempted assault in the Supreme Court of Bronx County, after a failed robbery, and served less than a year in prison. Upon his release, he was convicted almost immediately, in March 1998, in the Supreme Court of New York County, of robbery in the second degree––a case in which he attacked a 72-year-old woman in order to steal her purse and, according to Manhattan’s Judge Daniel P. Fitzgerald, “apparently punched her in the face until she let go, then jumped into a waiting car to get away.” He served five years at Downstate Correctional Facility, was released in May 2003, and was back from September 2003 through March 2005 on a drug charge.

According to Rafael Gonzalez, a security guard at the Fort Washington Men’s Shelter––a facility where Cedric Lawton had been staying for roughly eight months before the August 27, 2006 murder––Lawton never acted like someone even capable of violence.

“He was really pretty quiet,” says Gonzalez, strolling around the block from the Fort Washington Men’s Shelter, located at 651 West 168^th Street, to the corner where Lawton encountered Carlos Ramirez three years ago.  “He kept to himself. He had one friend that he was always with, a real light-skinned brother. They would always be smoking cigarettes outside together.”

Gonzalez said he never saw or heard about Lawton getting into physical altercations with staff or other residents at the shelter––he hardly interacted with most people. When Lawton did talk, it was usually about getting his act together. “He was trying to stay out of trouble,” says Gonzalez. “He had problems with drugs…crack, mostly. He’d been through a lot in life, he felt like people were always trying to bring him down.” Gonzalez says it was obvious that Lawton, like a lot of people in the homeless shelter system, had “mental problems.”

“These aren’t bad people. I don’t think Cedric was a bad person. A lot of these people, they just need help,” says Gonzalez, stopping in front of the rust-colored residential building at 217 West 169^th Street. He gestures at the sidewalk, a nearby tree, a fire hydrant. “Here. It happened right here.”

***

On Sunday, August 27, 2006, Cedric Lawton was 39 years old, and had been incarcerated for more than 15 of them. He got out of his bed at the Fort Washington Men’s Shelter at 7 a.m. and, according to a confession he would write less than 12 hours later in the interview room at the 33^rd precinct, went out into the rain with a friend to buy crack cocaine. He was wearing jeans and a white-and-yellow T-shirt that read “Blue Angels,” with the elite Navy squadron’s logo. Lawton said he and the friend spent the morning smoking crack and then split up in the early afternoon, at which point Lawton started coming down off his high and became “desperate” and fiending, as addicts often refer to their need for the next high.

Lawton was soaking wet and walking aimlessly around Washington Heights in the vicinity of the shelter. It was just a few minutes past 2 p.m. when he saw Carlos Ramirez, an elderly Hispanic man dressed in a light blue sweater, beige Dockers and a baseball cap, carrying an umbrella and heading west toward Fort Washington Avenue on 169^th Street.

“I approached him from behind asking for money,” wrote Lawton in a broad, slanting script in front of Detective Harold Hernandez later that evening. “He turned around and started struggling with me and that’s when I had the knife which caught him in the back.”

When questioned by Hernandez at the 33^rd precinct––after waiving his right to speak with an attorney––Cedric Lawton said he only remembered “nicking” Ramirez once, in the lower back, with a small, brown-handled folding knife Lawton always carried with him. An examination done by Emergency Medical Services technician Liat Reichman revealed a deep scratch on the man’s lower left back, above his belt, according to the EMT’s testimony. However, Carlos Ramirez died from a stab wound to the chest––a three-inch-deep puncture to his heart and lungs that killed him almost immediately.

“[Lawton] says he doesn’t remember much of the attack, that he was in a kind of drug haze,” says Hernandez. “I don’t buy it, but that’s what he says.” Lawton did remember going through Ramirez’s pockets once he was on the ground, and grabbing what he believed to be a wallet. He stood up, and walked quickly away toward Fort Washington Avenue; he was confused, he later wrote. He began going through what he’d taken as he walked, and soon found it was not a wallet but but a plastic card holder, which he tossed in a nearby trash can as he headed west toward Fort Washington Avenue. The contents, recovered by Hernandez a few hours later from a trash can on West 169^th Street, included identification cards and photos of Ramirez’s grandchildren.

A woman who later declined to be identified was the first person to stop when she saw Ramirez lying on the ground. According to Hernandez, she thought he must have had a heart attack. She screamed for help, then picked up the elderly man’s umbrella, which was open at his side, and held it above his face while she called 911. The EMT team that arrived found Ramirez unmoving on the sidewalk, his feet hanging off the edge of the curb, into the street.

José Quinones and his cousin, José Diaz, who had unwittingly watched the attack from their car, later testified that the struggle seemed to be over in seconds. At first glance, it looked like a fistfight. When they saw the taller figure get up and walk away from the elderly man, who was still on the ground, unmoving, they realized this might be something more serious. Once they saw the woman approach the man and take out her cell phone, they decided there was no need for them to get entangled in the siutation. “We thought, you know, someone was taking care of him, we didn’t want to be involved,” Quinones would later say in court. But they were interested enough, after starting the car, to follow the young black man (from a distance) down the block and around the corner onto Fort Washington Avenue.  “Thank God for these guys, really,” says Hernandez. “It was on a residential street, and apparently no one was looking out their window. Without them as witnesses, this would have been one hell of a case to put together.” When they saw Lawton stop and lean against a wall of the Armory building, just trying to get out of the rain and not running away, they circled back around the block to flag down one of the police cars converging around the body of Carlos Ramirez.

Police Sergeant Fredy Cruz had been with the NYPD for 12 years, and was just arriving at the scene when Quinones approached his vehicle with his jacket pulled over his head for protection from the rain. Quinones told him he had seen a black man involved in the fight, and that he had run toward Fort Washington Avenue. Cruz convinced Quinones to get into his police car, then radioed to the officers in the car in front of him, Officers Erick Mero and Edward Garcia, that he would follow them toward Fort Washington Avenue. According to witnesses’ testimony, the rain was easing up when both police cars stopped at a red light at Fort Washington, and Cedric Lawton attempted to cross the street in front of them.

“That’s him,” said Quinones to Cruz, who repeated it over the radio to the car in front of him. Garcia apprehended Lawton, who didn’t put up a fight, and searched him. He quickly found a brown-handled folding knife in Lawton’s back right pocket. Garcia opened the knife and saw blood. “That’s really what made this what we call––in police terminology––a ground ball,” says Hernandez, referring to an easy “out” in baseball. “You don’t get that kind of luck.” The officers cuffed Lawton and put him into the police car, and Cruz contacted the officers back at the scene. “I wanted to bring the victim to the suspect for an ID,” Cruz testified later. It was then that all three learned Ramirez had been pronounced dead less than 10 minutes earlier, at 2:08 p.m.

The two police cars proceeded back east on West 169^th toward the precinct, passing the crime scene on the way. Lawton later wrote in his confession that he was surprised to see the sheet covering Carlos Ramirez’s body from the window of the police car.

***

On August 27, 2006, at around 4:30  P.M., Detective Harold Hernandez arrived at the 33^rd precinct to interview Cedric Lawton, roughly two hours after he’d been arrested. His clothes were soaking wet and he was handcuffed to a metal bar in the interrogation room.

Hernandez would later testify that he did everything possible to make Lawton comfortable before they talked about the case. Lawton said he was cold and hungry, and requested cigarettes. The air conditioning was on full blast. Hernandez gathered dry clothes for Lawton, including a warm cotton hat of his own, heated a cup of tea for the suspect, and offered him a choice of McDonald’s, pizza or Chinese food. Lawton chose Chinese. After allowing him to eat and smoke three cigarettes inside the precinct, Hernandez read Lawton his Miranda rights, and proceeded with questioning.

The result was a five-page written confession and an eleven-minute videotaped confession, both detailing Lawton’s activities that morning, including the fact that Lawton was still coming down off of crack cocaine while sitting in the interrogation room. But Hernandez testified and confirmed in a recent interview that Lawton seemed “coherent” and “very aware” throughout the questioning, if a little “depressed” and “concerned” about the situation he was in. Lawton’s written confession concluded with the sentence “I did not know that he died, I did not mean for him to die, I am so sorry for this.” It was dated and signed “Cedric Lawton, August 27, 2006.”

In Manhattan Criminal Court, almost a year later, Assistant District Attorney William Beesch argued before Judge Daniel P. Fitzgerald that Lawton was an innately violent person, who had been “ill-served to this point in his life by a system which in many respects forgives him for his crimes.”

Defense Attorney Sol Schwartzberg asked Judge Fitzgerald to have mercy, mentioned Lawton’s obvious mental illness, and said that Lawton had a “gentle, childlike quality” to him. Cedric Lawton did not take the stand during the trial, nor did Ramirez’s daughter, who sat silently as the verdict was read: Lawton was guilty of two counts of murder in the second degree, and two counts of robbery in the second degree.

In his sentencing, Judge Fitzgerald told Lawton it was apparent that the defendant had decided “fairly early on” that the best way to conduct his life was to “use violence to prey upon the weak, those physically unable to resist you because they were just a little too young or a little too old.” Today Lawton is serving a sentence of 25 years to life at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York. He declined requests for an interview.

Rafael Gonzalez says he was stunned when he came into work at the men’s shelter on Monday, August 28th, the day after the murder, and heard what happened. “I was like, ‘Not Cedric,’ you know?” he says. “But this was a guy no one really knew. I don’t think he’s had family that cared about him for years.”

Carlos Ramirez was a different story. Aside from the grief felt by family members and friends at the Regency Whist Club, Detective Hernandez says the homicide still troubles him as an example of a regular person who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time in what was nothing more than a murder of convenience.

“Out of all I saw as a detective, this is probably the case that affected me the most in my career,” says Hernandez, three years later. He left the NYPD in May 2007 after 20 years. “I try to block some of this stuff out, you know? Because all I saw was ugliness. With some of the cases and victims I dealt with, in some way, you felt they had it coming to them…I mean drug dealer-on-drug dealer crimes, you can detach yourself as a cop,” says Hernandez. “Not this. This guy was just a regular Joe, and for him to be involved in something this horrible…” he trails off.

“I was devastated when I met that family. They were just such a nice family, and he seemed like such a good person,” says Hernandez. “I remember thinking, ‘This could be my family.’”

After a 1,700-mile search, a detective gets a killer

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. Continue Reading