Samuel Encarnacion asks the key question

By Ashlee Fairey

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.

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Rafin Vellon killed three people in the Bronx in October 2006, using a weightlifting barbell.

Rafin Vellon hugged his grandmother and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She did not notice the specks of blood on his forehead and hands. He proceeded to the bathroom of her senior citizen’s home at 441 155th street to wash away the evidence from a fit of rage that would cost him his freedom.

Vellon was sporting a new cap and jacket, which he had bought minutes earlier at a Modell’s sporting goods store at 2929 3rd Avenue. The transaction, according to a receipt contained in police records, was $49, paid in cash; the time 12:45 pm on October 23 2006.

Vellon had left his favorite dark blue windbreaker with the black letters BRONX written on the front at 1029 Hall Place, where he lived with his girlfriend, and before visiting Modell’s was wearing only a t-shirt, jeans and a pair of beige Timberland boots that were also flecked with blood. Some of these items would later be admitted as evidence against him on a triple homicide charge. Continue Reading

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. Continue Reading

Friends of Victims Still Feel the Loss

By Darius Dixon
February 2, 2010

It was a brisk May evening in lower Manhattan when Halil Korkmaz decided to take his new motorcycle out for a spin. He recently purchased a new Honda CBR 900 styled with red paint. At the time, Korkmaz, a Turkish immigrant, was the maître d’ at Downtown, the SoHo incarnation of a high-end Italian restaurant chain. Friends and co-workers recalled that he was “fanatical about motorcycles.” Continue Reading