He’s a teen honor student who was held on Rikers Island for over a year unable to pay $250,000 bail on a gun charge.
He has maintained his innocence and refused a plea deal.
His lawyers say rogue detectives in the 42nd Precinct in the Bronx have a vendetta against him.
His case has become a cause celebre for bail reform advocates, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group. The group won the teen’s freedom in July by posting $100,000 after a judge agreed to reduce the bail amount.
But that is only half the story in the Bronx Tale of 18-year-old Pedro Hernandez.
Court records offer a more complicated picture — including Hernandez’s criminal past, his civil attorneys’ potential conflict of interest, his private eye’s checkered past and the role played by a detective who has been stripped of his gun and badge.
The Bronx district attorney charged Hernandez last August with firing into a crowd near a school on Sept. 1, 2015, wounding Shaun Nardoni, who is now 16.
Prosecutor David Slott later amended the allegations — to assert that, instead of pulling the trigger, Hernandez had passed the weapon to the shooter, who has not been identified.
Arguing for Hernandez’ release at a bail hearing, defense lawyer David Narain said the charges were based on the word of a single witness who identified Hernandez in a photo array. Narain also maintained that Hernandez has no criminal record, having won dismissal of previous felony charges. The teen was already suing cops for false arrest, Narain added.
“My client and the 42nd Precinct, without even explaining in proper words, is a bad relationship,” the lawyer said.
Judge Steven Barrett spurned Narain’s bail plea after Slott revealed that a family court judge had given Hernandez 12 months' probation and put him on a curfew for gun possession as a youth.
Slott also countered that Hernandez had Facebook conversations with members of a crew called the Hilltop Gang, recruiting people to come out on the night of the shooting.
Calling Hernandez “a scammer,” Slott said he expected the DA’s office to charge him in a fake check-cashing scheme. One year later, the DA is still investigating the alleged scam, sources said.
Defense lawyer Alex Spiro, who replaced Narain last month in the Nardoni shooting case, declined to comment.
Hernandez also has an open felony charge in a Nov. 6, 2015, robbery, in which he's accused of using a knife to steal a cellphone and remote car alarm.
Regardless, advocates say Hernandez is a poster child for bail reform.
Wade McMullen Jr., of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group, noted that Hernandez was “too poor to purchase his release (from jail)” after turning down a plea deal that would have set him free immediately.
“No matter how you spin it, the fact is we cannot support a legal system that punishes the poor and people of color, using cages to disproportionately exact criminal convictions and disrupt our communities in the process,” McMullen said.
As he heads toward trial, Hernandez is surrounded by few angels either among cops or on his legal team.
THE PRIVATE EYE
Private investigator Manuel Gomez is a former cop who was arrested by fellow officers in 2009 over a public dispute with his then-girlfriend. He spent five days in jail, but the Bronx DA later dropped all the charges.
Still, the NYPD bounced Gomez in 2011 after an administrative trial judge determined that he had pointed his gun at bystanders who tried to intervene during the altercation.
The department also considered Gomez’s disciplinary history, records show.
In 2006 the NYPD docked Gomez 30 vacation days and placed him on one-year probation after he failed an Internal Affairs Bureau integrity test by neglecting to voucher a quantity of placebo heroin, according to a departmental memorandum.
Gomez told the Daily News that the bystanders who testified at the departmental trial lied. He also said the NYPD had it in for him ever since he was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit brought against the department in 1999 over its treatment of minority employees.
Gomez, who served more than two decades in the Army and is a retired commissioned officer, said he went on to work for the U.S. Department of State in Afghanistan, and points out that he has been licensed as a private eye.
“The Department of State cleared me and authorized me to carry weapons,” he said. “That’s got to say something.”
More recently, Gomez, 50, has made a name digging up evidence that has gotten charges dropped against defendants in the Bronx. He cites the five days he spent in jail as putting him on a mission.
“That is the catalyst for the reason why I fight with such tenacity and such fortitude against this 1,000-pound gorilla we call the NYPD and the 2,000-pound gorilla we call the Bronx District Attorney's Office,” Gomez said.
In Hernandez’s case, Gomez says he found witnesses who say that another gunman — not Hernandez — committed the shooting.
He also levels troubling accusations again the 42nd Precinct, in particular one of its detectives.
THE COP GUNNING FOR HERNANDEZ
David Terrell, a field intelligence officer in the Morrisania precinct, had provided intel to another detective in the 42nd Precinct that led to Hernandez’s arrest in the shooting of Nardoni.
But Terrell had been gunning for Hernandez for years, according to Gomez.
The private eye found teens who said Terrell had been involved in their own false arrests. He also located crime victims who claimed they were intimidated into fingering Hernandez or another innocent suspect.
The law firm belonging to Hernandez’s civil attorney John Scola is now representing 22 clients who say they have been harassed by Terrell, another 42nd Precinct detective, Daniel Brady, or other members of the precinct.
So far Scola’s firm has filed 10 lawsuits involving Terrell and two notices of claim — the first step in suing the city.
In one federal lawsuit, filed July 31, Kenny Shenery said he was rolling dice with his friends on a Bronx street corner when Terrell falsely arrested him.
Terrell then bizarrely pledged to free Shenery if he lost a game of dice — but then reneged on the offer after losing, according to the suit. Terrell then harassed Shenery about Hernandez, the suit charges.
In another case, Terrell was accused of promising a Bronx mom her son would be protected from arrest in exchange for sex. In yet another case, he was accused of beating up a teen, Anthony Floyd, in a failed effort to extract information about guns.
Since 2005, Terrell has also been sued at least seven times by plaintiffs represented by lawyers other than Scola.
The NYPD placed Terrell on modified duty in the fall after an off-duty domestic incident, according to sources. The Bronx DA's Public Integrity Bureau is also investing the allegations against Terrell and the 42nd Precinct.
Michael Palladino, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, defended the work of his members in the 42nd Precinct, saying they have been unfairly cast as bad guys by the lawyers of gang members. He described the onslaught of lawsuits as a cheap tactic.
“Filing a lawsuit and seeking publicity on it is all part of a defense attorneys’ desperate strategy designed to persuade potential jurors and defuse the case against their client before it goes to trial,” Palladino said.
Indeed, questions linger about Scola and Gomez.
THE LEGAL TEAM
Scola’s client list has grown sizably as Gomez — his frequent collaborator — has identified more alleged victims of false arrests and police intimidation.
Scola told The News that Gomez doesn’t work for his law firm. He said he provides legal advice when the private eye has questions involving the kids he identifies.
“If there is an action to pursue, I then sign those clients up,” Scola said.
In a peculiar arrangement, Scola’s firm also represents Nardoni, the shooting victim in the current criminal case against Hernandez. Nardoni retained Scola’s firm after giving Gomez a written affidavit and videotaped statement that he never saw his shooter.
The shooting victim says in his suit against the city that Terrell threatened to kick and punch him if he didn’t identify Hernandez as the gunman.
Scola’s unusual ties don’t end there.
The lawyer also reps the witness who identified Hernandez — meaning that Scola counts as civil clients the suspect, the victim and the key witness in the same crime.
In a notice of claim filed by Scola, Bronx teen William Stevens said Slott, the prosecutor, threatened to send detectives from the 42nd Precinct to arrest him if he didn’t identify Hernandez as the shooter in the Nardoni shooting.
Stevens said he was left with no other choice than to falsely identify Hernandez as the triggerman.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former prosecutor and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said a civil attorney representing an accused criminal defendant, the crime victim and a witness in lawsuits isn’t necessarily wrong, but “it’s thin-ice territory.”
It becomes even trickier when private investigators are involved and there is a potential financial gain at play — like winning a legal settlement from the city, he said.
Scola insisted there is no conflict of interest in repping Hernandez and Nardoni.
“I could see a conflict of interest if I was a criminal lawyer,” Scola said.
“The civil cases, just because they all have similar stories against the same detective, doesn’t mean that they’re all lying. The facts are very similar for all of them.”
Scola and Gomez, the private investigator, have known each other since at least 2013, when the attorney repped Gomez in a lawsuit against the NYPD claiming wrongful termination over the incident with his then-girlfriend.
Scola and his law firm partner, Chukwuemeka Nwokoro, are currently representing Gomez in a lawsuit he brought this year against unions who he says defamed him on their social media pages. Gomez said he is paying the firm for its representation.
But Palladino said one should wonder why Gomez is the common denominator in all of these lawsuits.
“I am not impressed with Gomez and his tactics,” he said. “He has a checkered past with the NYPD and I think his motives and his credibility are very questionable.”
No comments:
Post a Comment