'Hysterical' suspect in train stabbings, Brenddy Garcia, jailed amid claim of self-defense
Saturday, April 3rd 2010, 4:00 AM
The 19-year-old Brooklyn man accused of fatally knifing two men on a No.2 train cried in the courtroom Friday as he was formally charged with a pair of killings.
Brenddy Garcia bawled as he consulted his lawyer and kept bawling as a Manhattan judge ordered him held without bail and banished him to Rikers Island.
His lawyer said Garcia has never been in trouble before and has an inkling of what might be ahead because he's been studying criminal justice at a Brooklyn college.
"He was hysterical," his lawyer, Pamela Roth, said. "He was crying inside the interview booth and when he was standing next to me in the courtroom."
Roth insisted Garcia was defending himself early Sunday morning from an unruly gang of 10 to 13 men and one woman whose ringleader declared "I want to smack me a n----r" when he boarded the train.
The ringleader, whom Roth did not identify, allegedly terrorized a woman and a homeless man before the group turned its attention to Garcia and his friends.
"No one [in Garcia's crew] was looking for a problem," Roth said.
Then, suddenly, one of them smashed Garcia over the head with a beer bottle, said Roth.
"My client doubled over and as he was down someone in the group put him in the headlock," the defense lawyer said.
Prosecutors painted a different story.
They said Garcia fatally stabbed Ricardo Williams and Darnell Morel, both 24, in a frenzy of rage triggered by a "perceived act of disrespect."
Williams inadvertently hit Garcia's friend, Diogenes Hernandez, with a bag of garbage while tossing it at a platform trash receptacle through the train's opening doors, prosecutors said.
Garcia was heartless because he continued to taunt his victims "as two young men bled to death," said Assistant District Attorney Jon Veiga.
Williams' older sister said Garcia is just trying to blame the victims.
"He was the one carrying the knife," said Andrea Williams, 25. "Don't try to blame someone who isn't here. The dead can't speak."
At the Brooklyn building where Garcia lives, a woman who identified herself as Mrs. G said the accused double-murderer was a "nice kid" who had been victimized in the past.
"He was probably having a flashback of when he was stabbed," she said, giving no other details of the alleged stabbing.
Garcia, who confessed to being the knife-wielding butcher, was arraigned on two counts of murder and one count of possession of a weapon.
Cops had also charged Garcia's friends - Franklin Varella, 21, of Manhattan, and Hernandez, 21, of Queens. But the DA's office declined to prosecute them after witnesses did not see them commit any crime and couldn't pick them out of a lineup, sources said.
"We obviously believed we had enough to question and charge two others in connection with this. It's not unusual for district attorneys to decide there is not sufficient evidence to sustain those charges and prosecute," said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/04/03/2010-04-03_the_monsters_bawl_hysterical_susp_in_train_slays_jailed_amid_claim_of_selfdefens.html#ixzz0k3zfpPar
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