SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Source: mikey k via flickr

The body of a decomposing woman was found in a Midwood home last night displaying a confessional note listing a bizarre motive. NBC NY is reporting that the note said, “I killed my wife she’s putting spells on me.”

The victim was identified as 57-year-old Yevonne Gefner. Her body was found inside her Avenue N home after neighbors called 911 complaining about a foul odor. According to an ABC report, police found Gefner’s body riddled with multiple stab wounds in the back, noting that when discovered, she had been dead for a week.

In perhaps accounting for the bizarre note which complained of witchcraft as a motive for the slaying, Gefner’s husband was subsequently found at Kings County Hospital’s psychiatric ward, where he had a broken neck and arm.

Yeshiva World News is reporting that the suspect may be the person who jumped in front of a Q train two weeks ago at Avenue J. That person was taken to Kings County Hospital at the time, the site notes.

Police were told by neighbors that the couple had been together for about two years.

The Nostrand Avenue building where Sergeny Mamontov chopped up his roommate, Aleksandr Zilbergleyt. Source: Google Maps

Sergey Mamontov, the 50-year-old lunatic who brutally butchered his 55-year-old roommate Aleksandr Zilbergleyt received a 25 years to life sentence on Monday.

The New York Daily News reported that Mamontov’s case horrified jurors and the prosecution, especially when he took the stand and explained in graphic detail how he disposed of Zilbergleyt’s body by cutting it up into thousands of pieces, throwing his fingers into Sheepshead Bay and running his brain through a meat grinder.

Melissa Carvajal, a prosecutor in the case described the crime as so “horrendous, horrific, gruesome” that Zilbergleyt’s family “couldn’t attend the trial because they simply couldn’t hear the details.”

Dondre Samuel (Source: Facebook)

A 19-year-old Kingsborough Community College student was the lone survivor at the scene of an apparent double murder and suicide perpetrated by his mother, an NYPD officer,  in their Flatlands home yesterday.

Officer Rosette Samuel, a 13-year veteran of the NYPD who had never discharged her firearm in the line of duty, is believed to have fatally shot her boyfriend, their one-year-old son and then herself. A second son from a previous relationship, the 19-year-old student, fled out the back window when he was awoken by gunshots and called 911.

From the New York Post:

A cop who had worked with Samuel in the Manhattan traffic division before Samuel transferred to the 108th Precinct in Long Island City in January, said, “This is unbelievable.”

“She was tight with everyone here. It wasn’t her. Sometimes people snap,” that cop said. “Post-partum depression is the first thing that came to my mind. Didn’t show any signs of it.”

… The killings occurred just before 8:30 a.m. in Samuel’s first-floor apartment on E. 56th St. near Farragut Road in Flatlands.

Witnesses said they saw Samuel’s 19-year-old son Dondre Samuel, a biology student at Kingsborough Community College, frantically climbing out of the back window of that apartment wearing a pair of shorts and no shirt, just an Addidas jacket.

“He was shaken up,” said Anthony Beckford, 19. “My uncle asked what happened . . . he was all scraped up and he ran into the backyard. His elbows and his knees were scraped. He said, ‘Look, look!’”

“He was frantic. He couldn’t really talk,” Beckford said of Dondre, who is Samuel’s son from a prior relationship.

When Beckford looked at the front of the apartment, near the front door, he saw the body of Samuel’s boyfriend Peters, lying on the floor.

“I just the his head, and the top part of his body,” Beckford said. “He was facing down, surrounded by blood.”

Samuel’s body was found in bed, along with the one-year-old son.

Metro reports that a possible suicide note was found at the scene:

The source paraphrased Rosette Samuel’s note as saying, “Sorry I had to do this. I’m going to take Dylan with me because I can’t bear it alone,” referring to her 1-year-old son.

It also referenced a sum of money in a deferred compensation plan and specified it should be used for the college education of her other son, 19-year-old Dondre Samuel.

Cops reportedly found a sealed envelope as well. The contents are currently unknown.

Video surveillance captured Klass robbing the liquor store.

The man who confessed to killing a beloved Midwood liquor store clerk during a 2010 robbery was sentenced to 35 years in prison, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes announced today.

Eion Klass, 36, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and attempted robbery charges earlier this month, and was sentenced to 25 years and 10 years respectively.

According to the DA’s office, Klass was out on parole on August 19, 2010, when he attempted to rob a Midwood liquor store wearing a mask and a gun. During the robbery, he demanded the jewelry off of a woman in the store who turned out to be the girlfriend of the clerk, Yoseph Robinson. Robinson tried to stop Klass, leading to a struggle in which he was fatally shot.

Klass was arrested the following week.

Robinson himself was a beloved and inspirational figure, having been a repentant Jamaican-born drug dealer who converted to Orthodox Judaism. His death sparked a tremendous outpouring of support from Brooklyn’s Jewish community, and more than 1,000 people attended his funeral.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Neil Firetog also slapped Klass with 10 years for an unrelated robbery, in which Klass clubbed a man over the head and beat him before stealing jewelry and a cell phone. Klass will serve those 10 years concurrently.

Remember Maksim Gelman, the lunatic who went on a stabbing spree that resulted in the tragic deaths of four people and 28 hour manhunt throughout the entire city? Well, the last person Gelman attacked, 42-year-old Joseph Lozito, is suing the city for failing to intervene when he was being attacked by Gelman on the subway with police in view of the whole incident, according to a report by the New York Post.

Lozito, who suffered seven stab wounds mainly to the back of the head and face, recognized Gelman on an uptown 3 train and tackled him to the ground. According to Lozito, police officers Terrance Howell and Tamara Taylor, who were stationed in the adjacent operator’s cab, did nothing until Lozito managed to pin Gelman to the ground.

In their defense, the city is (somehow) arguing that a police officer has no “special duty” to protect a citizen, even if they are being attacked in plain sight.

The city’s arguments are even murkier considering that the original NYPD affidavit claimed that it was Howell who had heroically tackled Gelman, not Lozito. According to the Post, it was this point that angered Lozito and spurred his lawsuit:

Lozito says a grand-jury member later told him Howell admitted on the stand that he hid during the attack because he thought Gelman had a gun.

An angry Lozito decided to sue the city for negligence, arguing the cops should have recognized Gelman and prevented, or reacted more quickly to, the assault.

The city routinely settles such litigation but is playing hardball with Lozito, insisting his demand for unspecified money damages be tossed because the police had no “special duty” to protect him or any individual on the train that day.

Experts say it’s a long-standing legal precedent requiring police to put the public safety of all ahead of any one individual’s rights.

Is it just me, or is this one of the most convoluted and bumbling defenses ever put forward? Police officers encounter crazed killer and either fail to recognize him or are hiding from him in fear. Crazed killer tries to kill a citizen in plain sight of police officers. Stabbed citizen pins killer, cops finally emerge, take credit for stopping said lunatic, then later claim they were not obligated to assist a citizen getting brutally stabbed in plain sight. Y’know, allegedly, or something.

Whether or not Lozito’s bizarre case goes to trial is now in the hands of a judge.

Source: SalFalko/Flickr

A federal judge threw out the conviction of a man sentenced for a 1989 murder in Brighton Beach after already serving 23 years of his sentence, with the judge calling the case “rotten from day one.”

Village Voice has a great rundown:

On Aug. 31, 1989, two men walked into the basement of a crackhouse at 3053 Brighton Fifth St. in Brooklyn and robbed the drug dealer, Elvirn Surria. One of the men shot Surria twice with a double-barreled shotgun and he died. [William] Lopez was arrested and later convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

One witness, Daisy Guadalupe Flores, claimed she came face-to-face and spoke with the shooter, but did not recognize Lopez when she saw him in the courtroom. In addition, she said the shooter was a “tall, dark, black” man taller than 6-foot-3. Lopez is about 5-foot-7 and has a light complexion.

The second witness, Janet Chapman, had smoked 10-to-12 vials of crack in the two hours prior to the shooting. She claimed not to have seen the shooting, but said she saw Lopez with a gun, heard a shot and heard a body fall. During the trial, she changed her story. She claimed she saw the shooting. After the trial, she changed her story a second time, saying Lopez was present at all, and she was intimidated into naming him by prosecutors.

Chapman first identified Lopez as a suspect after she was arrested for prostitution about a month after the murder. When she testified, she had been held at Rikers for five month. “There is conflicting evidence in the record regarding whether, at the time of her testimony, there was an outstanding deal between the prosecution and Chapman whereby Chapman would receive a sentence of time served if she testified against Lopez consistently with her audiotaped statement at the police department,” Garaufis writes.

In other words, Chapman may have had an incentive to name Lopez as the killer.

Indeed, about two months after the trial, Chapman gave Lopez’s brother a typewritten statement saying she had been intimidated by police and prosecutors into naming Lopez.

The prosecutorial misdeeds go on from there, with Chapman recanting three times over the years and even saying that the district attorney “told me never to tell anyone that we cut a deal about my testimony in exchange for my freedom.”

It wasn’t just the prosecutors who bungled the case. Lopez’s trial lawyer failed to call his alibi witnesses, as well as a witness who claimed to know who the real killer was.

The judge, Nicholas Garaufis, has ordered that Lopez be tried again – even though the alibi witnesses are no longer available to testify – or that he be released within 60 days.

The decision is a blow to Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, who oversaw the case early in his tenure. The New York Times writes:

It is the latest official rebuke of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has been faulted repeatedly by judges for misconduct that has put innocent people behind bars.

A spokesman for Charles J. Hynes, the longtime district attorney who is preparing to run for re-election this year, declined to comment in detail, saying only that the office was reviewing the matter.

… In 2010, another federal judge called the office’s conduct “shameful” for the way it handled the case of Jabbar Collins, who later had his murder conviction vacated. In 2011, the office dismissed rape charges against four men after it was revealed that the prosecution against them had continued even after the victim recanted. The office started its own unit to investigate claims of innocence; that unit overturned another case last year.

Hynes is appealing Judge Garaufis’ decision.

New York Law Journal has more on the case.

Source: Facebook

Authorities have revealed the identity of the naked, burned body found on Gerritsen Beach’s shores Sunday morning as 14-year-old Shaniesha Forbes.

Forbes was reported missing on Friday, last seen at her Flatlands home on Avenue I at 8 a.m. Friday before leaving for school. Forbes was a freshman at Academy for Young Writers in East New York, according to her Facebook profile.

According to the Daily News, Forbes’ naked body was found partially burned next to the remains of a bonfire and some beer. The burns are not believed to be the cause of her death, as there was no smoke in her lungs and only her legs, arms and hands were burned.

Police have not yet ruled the death a homicide, and an autopsy was inconclusive. They have previously noted that there were no obvious signs of trauma, but are continuing to investigate.

Various reports say that Forbes had run away from home at least once before, and so police did not issue a public missing persons bulletin.

Photo: PIX11

Authorities rushed to a patch of shoreline near Gerritsen Avenue near Lois Avenue early Sunday morning, where a woman was found dead, naked and charred by fire.

Police say the victim was a young black woman in her late teens or early twenties, according to PIX11.

The body was found near the water in the nature preserve at approximately 7:15 a.m., and police were on scene for most of the day. In addition to homicide detectives, emergency services units and K-9 units were also active at the scene, and reportedly combed the shore.

Authorities had not yet identified the woman as of Sunday evening, and no identification was found near the remains.

According to the New York Post, “Parts of the victim’s body were burned, but there were no other obvious signs of trauma, and it did not appear the woman had been dead for long.”

Police are still investigating whether there was foul play. The medical examiner will determine the cause of death.

Source: Google Maps

Richard Cohen, 31, of Midwood stabbed his mother in the torso on Saturday evening. He then dialed 9-1-1 to report the murder.

His mother, Anne Cohen, 64, was a Bath Beach resident who recently sold her home to the tune of $800,000. She also had money from a malpractice suit involving her late husband. Police believe that the argument erupted over her financial standing in Richard’s apartment at 1220 Ocean Avenue.

Richard has a history of mental health issues and domestic violence involving his mother. He was sent to a mental hospital after threatening his mother with a knife some time ago. She has also filed several complaints against him in the past.

Anne kicked Richard out of her Bay 25th Street property because she didn’t get along with his girlfriend. Neighbors say that Richard was normally very quiet and unapproachable.

Autopsy reports reveal that Anne died of 41 stab wounds to the torso and neck.

Anne was taken to New York Community Hospital where she was pronounced dead, according to DNA Info.

Her son was charged with second-degree murder.

Photo by Justin Santoro

For the fifth year in a row, dozens gathered in Homecrest Playground (Homecrest Avenue and Williams Court) to play softball in remembrance of Anthony Senisi Jr., a 44-year old father of two who was tragically murdered six years ago.

Senisi was on his way home from a grocery store on Brighton 6th Street when he was stabbed in the back. He collapsed in front of his house in view of his son, and died in his father’s arms.

Making the crime even more senseless, authorities believed Senisi was mistaken for someone else while buying milk for his Sunday morning ritual of coffee with his daughter.

Read how the softball game came about, and view more photos.