The Bronx Ink

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The community gathers at the Sankar family home to remember Anil. [HAZEL SHEFFIELD/ The Bronx Ink

The 18-year-old’s face was torn open at the temple and bruised around his mouth. His nose was smashed in and his hands were scratched. One plastic sandal had been discarded on the bank and another floated in the shallow water, not far from where he lay.

On a grassy patch, a packet of Newport cigarettes, soggy with dew, had been ripped in half and thrown aside.

“They say he hit his head and drowned,” said his father, Teakaram Sankar, as the Sankar family, who moved to the Bronx from Guyana 17 years ago, gathered in their small Boynton Avenue living room for a vigil to remember Anil. Police have dismissed his son’s death as accidental. “But I figure that’s impossible.”
As they sat together, the Sankar family passed phone records and emails between them and tried to piece together what happened the night that Anil disappeared. His sister-in-law, Natasha Sankar, held up a phone log showing that hours before he died, Anil made an 80-minute call to the mother of his girlfriend. The young couple had fallen out, said his mother, Mohaine. She remembered telling Anil to pray at the family shrine that Sunday morning, while he worked on the music he made on their home computer. The whole family agreed that Anil was not apt to hang around the park alone at night.

The Sankars may never know the truth of what happened that Sunday evening. The detective assigned to the case said it is closed. But the surrounding community has rallied around their grief nonetheless – to share their sadness, to protest the lack of safety in Concrete Park, and to highlight growing violence among their youth.

“I hope all the young people in the community can look at this and see that violence is not the answer,” said Natasha as she addressed the assembled mourners in the park four weeks after his death.

Over a hundred concerned residents and friends of Anil walked from the Sankar home to Concrete Plant Park on Oct. 16, to show their support for the family and their concern for rising levels of violence among young people in the Bronx. Felony assaults are up 10 percent in the district from last year, an increase of 33 incidents. A local resident confirmed that since Anil’s death, another young boy has been mugged at gunpoint in broad daylight in the park.

As the vigil progressed, residents passed by an unsecured hydraulic pole that is supposed to stop vehicles from entering the park and through a gate that stays open all night. The path runs by the river on one side and open fences onto the Metro North lines on the other. Two expressways, an elevated train line and a residential road surround the area.

“It’s the perfect place to prey on women or children if you’re an opportunist,” said Ephrain Cruz of the community group Bronx For Change. “We need to highlight that this park is not secure.”

Concrete Plant Park opened on an old industrial site in 2009, after a 10-year funding battle to restore the land and return it to the community by faith-based community group Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice.

“That park was developed as a safe space for young people,” said Julian Terrell from Youth Ministries. “Putting up gates to prevent people from getting in sets the wrong precedent.”

On Sunday evening, as the trains rattled by, the Sankar family laid candles and incense above the jetty where Anil Sankar’s body was found. His sister Anita lit one of his favorite Newport cigarettes and tucked it behind a purple bottle of pina colada flavored drink. The crowd gathered with candles to hear stories about Sankar’s life from his friends. His family stood quietly, unable to speak.

Towards the end of the vigil, Bronx Assemblyman Marcus Crespo stood forward to talk about ending violence among young people in the Bronx.

“The answers don’t lie somewhere else,” Crespo said. “They lie right here with all of us. It’s about our respect for one another.”

When the meeting was over and the crowds dispersed, Ephrain Cruz said: “Crespo says the answers lie with us. But this park does not belong to us. It is looked after by the state.”

Back at the Sankars’ two-bedroom apartment, young children ran between a gilded Hindu shrine and display cabinets stuffed with family photos. Mohaine Sankar clutched at a tissue, holding it against the white t-shirt printed with a photo of her son.

Mohaine knew Anil had broken up with his girlfriend the day before he died. The Sunday he disappeared, she checked on him in the peach-coloured bedroom he shared with his twin sister, Kumarie, and their 15-year-old brother, Robin.

“He laid back on the bed with his arm above his head,” said Mohaine. “He was really worried about something.”

“The police don’t want us to call people and ask what happened,” said Anil’s sister-in-law Natasha. “They say for us to wait, but they’re not doing anything. We need to know.”

Police yesterday released a video of two men wanted for beating a Fordham father to death, mugging him for $15, according to the New York Daily News.  The suspects attacked Bimal Chanda, 59, on the second-floor landing of his apartment Saturday.

Police have charged Binghamton resident Joseph A. Ross-Jones, 25, with killing Bronx resident Daniel Martinez, 27, according to the Binghamton Press and Sun-Bulletin. Police say Martinez, found in a wooded area with a gun shot and stab wounds, died of “multiple traumatic injuries and blood loss.” Jones has pleaded not guilty to a second-degree murder charge.

Police found a man and woman dead in a Bronx apartment in an apparent murder-suicide, NY1 reports.

Investigators say they found Marie Jannette Lawrence, 30, shot to death in her apartment at 2084 Grand Avenue in Morris Heights Friday afternoon.

Batu McClary-Griggs, 37, was also found dead on the floor with a gunshot wound to the head.

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Blood stains on the pavement across the street from Joel Rojas' house in Mott Haven, the morning after he was stabbed to death. In the background, passersby condole his sisters, who set up a small memorial under the mailbox where he was found. (NASR UL HADI/The Bronx Ink)

Joel Rojas must have fought hard for his life.

The trail of blood on East 138th Street in Mott Haven was nearly a block long. It began outside the storefront church at 467, reappeared on a red sports Pontiac parked all the way up at 481, and ended under a mailbox next to it.

When the emergency team arrived shortly after midnight on Saturday, the mailbox was dented, with scratches all around the impact. Rojas, who lived in an apartment just across the street, lay there bleeding from a stab wound to his abdomen. He had almost made it home.

The medics rushed him to Lincoln Hospital, but Rojas was declared dead on arrival at 1:35 am. Police had informed the 24-year-old’s family–his parents, two younger sisters, wife and 3-year-old daughter, Analia.

This stabbing is part of a recent surge in violence across the 40th Precinct. Last weekend, there were six shooting incidents, one of them fatal. The homicide count till October 2 this year is 15, up 15.4 percent from 2010.

Around noon on Saturday, Rojas’ sisters set up a small memorial with candles and bouquets under the mailbox where he was found. A cardboard carton sheltered the candles from the wind, with “R.I.P. Cholo” and “Shortiiee loves you” scribbled on it. Passersby paid their respects and asked how he died, but the family had no explanation.

“We don’t know who my brother was out with or why, because he lived alone in his apartment,” said Laura “Shortiiee” Rojas, a high school freshman, who lives with her parents in another building on the same block. She claimed that there were “a lot of people here who hated Cholo for no reason.”

But most of the gathered mourners weren’t sure they knew him at all. “There’s no photograph of him,” pointed out a woman who lived in the same building, “so I don’t know who it was. But it’s tragic that he was so young.”

People outside the House of Faith Ministries, the church where Rojas’ blood marked the site of the attack, said that two gangs, the Mexicanos and the Chicanos, shared this neighborhood. Brook Avenue, just a block away from Rojas’ home, serves as the dividing line for the gangs’ territories, they said.

But detectives who spent most of the afternoon interrogating people in the neighborhood said that the connection was still speculative. “We keep hearing about the gang rivalry here,” said one of the investigators, “but there’s nothing conclusive yet. We are still looking.”

Rojas’ sister too insisted that her brother, who worked in construction, didn’t hang out with any “bad people.”

A Bronx murder suspect whose arresting officer was caught on a wiretap fixing a ticket took a plea deal yesterday before a jury was selected
, New York Post reports.

Careem Johnson, 25, copped to manslaughter and accepted 25 years in prison for killing José Arvelo, 18, in Mott Haven in 2008.

It was initially speculated that Johnson — charged with second-degree murder — might walk because the cop who arrested him, Detective Jason Allison, was caught on wiretap allegedly trying to void a summons for a cop’s relative.

Late Friday night, Kenneth Williams, 27, was arrested for the murder of 3-year-old India Durant. Williams was the live-in boyfriend of the child’s mother and was watching her on the morning she died. Williams claims Durant was not feeling well so he placed her in a chair where she later fell off and began to have a seizure. He called 911 to reported Durant unresponsive.  She was pronounced dead at Barnabas Hospital later that morning. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Williams was charged with murder in the second-degree, manslaughter, assault and reckless endangerment late last night. Durant’s biological father is looking for answers and mourning the loss of his daughter. “I am deeply upset. I am hurt,” he said. “I lost my world. That was my only child.”

The Rev. Wallace Diamond has lived at the McKinley Houses, a public housing project on East 161st Street, for 47 years. During that time, he has presided over the funerals of five young victims of gang violence. In August 2006, he buried the last two, 25-year-old Leonard Crocket and 20-year-old Jason Semidey, who were killed in a gang-related shooting in the complex’s basketball courts.

The basketball court where Leonard Crocket and Jason Semiday were shot to death, in August 2006. Photo by Alice Speri

On Tuesday, Gavin Murray, a Bloods gang member with a history of violence, was convicted of both murders.

Murray, who was 18 at the time of the incident, was arrested in June 2009 at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. He was charged with murder, attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon and is also awaiting trial in relation to two earlier shootings. He faces up to life in prison.

For Diamond, who is also the president of the tenants association at McKinley Houses, the 2006 shooting marked a turning point in the community.

“The night that this happened I just got tired,” Diamond said. The next day, he summoned local authorities and community members, and led a demonstration to the site of the shooting.

“We took back our project,” he said. “Before, you couldn’t go in there because drug dealers had taken it, the kids couldn’t play there.”

“It’s quiet now, very quiet, no more drug dealers, nothing like that,” Diamond said, adding that more police have been patrolling the area. “The children are allowed to play out there.”

At the McKinley Houses, in Morrisania, not everyone remembers the August 2006 shooting. Photo by Alice Speri

Since then, Diamond has been mentoring local young people.

“They call us the OGs, the old guys,” he said of himself and other older residents who have been working to improve communication with the younger generation. “I earned their respect; they talk to me.”

Diamond has also helped Angela Griffin, the aunt of one of the victims, set up a foundation in his memory. The Jason Semidey Foundation, located at the nearby Forest Houses on Trinity Avenue, offers GED classes and assistance with resumes and job interviews.

“I knew Jason very well, he grew up with my kids, I used to encourage him to get a job,” said Diamond, adding that just two days before being shot, Semidey had started a job as a maintenance worker.

Diamond said that Semidey’s death has encouraged his friends to get jobs. “Something good came out of it,” he said. “He’s never gonna be forgotten.”

Some in the neighborhood, however, have forgotten the incident or moved on.

“I hate to be so nonchalant about this stuff,” said Daisy Hassel, a 30-year-old resident of the Forest Homes. “But I don’t remember that happening.”

There were 113 murders in the Bronx in 2009 alone, nearly a quarter of the total for the entire city. The number, however, shows a 14 percent decrease over the last four years.

“It’s not anything different from what happens in this area,” said Earl Childs, the program director at the McKinley Homes Community Center. “People get shot, life goes on.”

“Bloomberg says things are getting better,” Childs said. “But if you ask people around here, things are not getting better.” Childs also disagreed with Diamond about the increase in police presence.

“I don’t remember when is the last time I saw a cop around here,” Childs said.

Like Diamond, however, Childs refuses to give up and continues to mentor young people at the housing project, as he did before Crocket and Semidey were killed.

“The way we address this is to provide these kids with something else to do,” he said.

“We are talking about kids that live a life of hopelessness, there’s no way out; they think, I need to pick up a gun.” In a sense, Murray was a victim of this, too, Childs added.

To keep the memory of the victims alive, Diamond organizes a memorial event every Aug. 16 – the anniversary of the shooting – with candlelight vigils and a basketball tournament on the very court where Semidey fell to the ground.

But Childs says more has to be done.

“All programs are gonna have to work together,” he said. “All branches of the government, all youth services, the board of education.”

Diamond agreed.

“There’s gotta be more than a candlelight vigil,” he said.