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NY outraged by brutal anti-gay attacks
New York City leaders are expressing outrage over a horrific anti-gay gang attack on three men in the Bronx. Five City Council members visited the block Saturday where a street gang is accused of staging a string of torture assaults inside a vacant apartment.
Suspects Bryan Cepeda, 16 (top left); Ildefonzo Mendez, 23 (top right); Nelson Falu, 18 (middle left); Steven Carballo, 17 (middle right); David Rivera, 21 (bottom left); Denis Peitars, 17 (bottom right).
City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who is gay, passed out leaflets imploring residents to turn in two suspects still at large. Police say the gang went berserk after learning that a 17-year-old recruit was gay. Investigators say the teen was stripped, beaten and sodomised with a plunger handle. They say the attackers then grabbed a second teen and tortured him, too. A third attack involved a 30-year-old man who was lured to the apartment and sodomised with a miniature baseball bat. Police arrested an eighth suspect in the beatings Saturday, while a ninth remained at large.
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said that several of the suspects had made statements implicating themselves in the crime, which occurred in a neighborhood where residents said homosexuality is both common and tolerated. Asked if the men had expressed any remorse for what they had done, Kelly said "I wouldn't call it remorse." Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was "sickened" by the violence, that police said included sodomising one of the men with a plunger handle and hourslong torture of others.
The attack came amid heightened attention to anti-gay bullying following a string of teen suicides attributed to it last month around the country. "Like many New Yorkers, I was sickened by the brutal nature of these crimes and saddened by the anti-gay bias that contributed to them," the mayor said. " "The heartless men who committed these crimes should know that their fellow New Yorkers will not tolerate their vicious acts, or the hatred that fuels them."
Ninth suspect, Ruddy Vargas-Perez, 22, is still at large
The suspects arrested Thursday and Friday were identified as Ildefonzo Mendez, 23; David Rivera, 21; four 17-year-olds, Steven Caraballo, Denis Peitars, Nelson Falu and Bryan Almonte; and Brian Cepeda, 16. All face charges including robbery, assault and unlawful imprisonment as hate crimes; Mendez, Rivera and Falu were additionally charged with committing a criminal sex act. The eighth suspect, Elmer Confresi, 23, turned himself in on Saturday.
Kelly said that a lawyer representing the ninth suspect had arranged for his client to turn himself in, but never showed. Bryan Almonte's stepmother, Carmen, told The New York Times that the teen was hospitalised Friday night after going into diabetic shock during his arrest. She said his father died three months ago. "Bryan is not a bad kid," she told the newspaper. "If he was there, he didn't do anything." Cepeda was interested in becoming a police officer, said his mother, Ada Cepeda.
The building where two of the attacks took place
"He's not rude; he's quite intelligent," Cepeda told the NYT. "I'm a realist. It's not that my son is a saint. But I doubt he would do that." Police said the nine members of a gang that called itself the Latin King Goonies went berserk after hearing a rumour that one of their new recruits, a 17-year-old, was gay, and trapped and brutalised the men on Oct. 3-4.
Investigators say the teen was stripped, beaten and sodomized with a plunger handle until he confessed to having had sex with a 30-year-old man who lives a few blocks away. Then, the group grabbed a second teen they suspected was gay and tortured him, too, police said. Finally, they invited the 30-year-old to the house, telling him they were having a party.
When he arrived, they burned, beat and tortured him for hours. Gay men and women lived openly in the neighborhood, and while residents were disturbed by some past violent behavior by the suspects, some said they hadn't previously targeted homosexuals. Word of the assaults apparently reached residents long before police had pieced together what happened.
Jaymarie Mendez, 16, said she heard about the attack, "the next day," but said that, like other young people in the area, "We don't talk to cops. We don't like them." The victims, authorities said, didn't call the police either. "How can people do something like that?" asked Keith Handsford, 35, an air conditioning repairman who lives next to the building where the assaults took place.
Source: AP
