A Murder in Brooklyn is Not Investigated as a Murder in Manhattan
TODD MAISEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
As part of the unsolved homicides project, Donna Rayside remembers her son Dustin Yeates, 31, killed in a club on May 27, 2013. She is moving out of her home in the Glenwood Houses at 1690 Ralph Ave. because she can't bear to be in Brooklyn anymore.
She sees him when she closes her eyes. And she sees him when she dreams at night.
Yeates, 31, was Rayside’s only child, a former high school basketball star who once considered a career in law enforcement.
Seven months have passed since he was shot to death outside an East Flatbush club — and Rayside still can’t shake the image of him walking out of her Marine Park home for the final time. But her sadness is sharpened by anger.
Rayside is hoping she will someday have another image to fixate on — her son’s killer in handcuffs.
She’s convinced the cops are doing little to solve her son’s murder, dismissing it as just “one black guy against another.”
“It just seems like his case got swept under the rug,” said Rayside, 56, who added $8,000 of her own money to what is now a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of her son’s killer. “If this man had killed a cop, they would have found him already.”
Detective Anthony Cheatham, who is assigned to the murder, told the Daily News police are doing all they can to solve the crime.
“The case is still active,” Cheatham said. “I can only tell you that we’re investigating all leads at this point.”
The NYPD has won great praise for bringing crime down to historic lows. But lost amid the fanfare is a growing segment of New Yorkers like Rayside: Those waiting for justice in the murders of their loved ones. About 1,500 murders have gone unsolved over the last decade.
The number of homicides in 2013 dipped to 334 — the lowest tally since the NYPD started keeping track in the early 1960s. The number represents a 41% decline over the past decade. Given the decrease in murders, some argue that the NYPD should be using this opportunity to get more killers off the streets.
“There are thousands of murderers walking around who haven’t been brought to justice,” said Andy Rosenzweig, a former NYPD lieutenant and ex-chief investigator for the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “It’s horrifying.”
The News reviewed the status of last year’s homicides, detective staffing at each precinct and borough command over the past two decades. It also looked at trends in the city’s clearance rate — the number of arrests made in homicide cases during a 12-month period, as a percentage of homicides reported during that time.
The News found that as the homicide rate plummeted in the 1990s and activity on the cold case squad was at an all-time high, the clearance rate shot up to over 80% during the final years of the decade. But then the clearance rate started to drop again, and has since averaged around 70%.
Michael Palladino, head of the Detectives Endowment Association, said around 3,000 seasoned detectives retired in the two years following the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Another 800 detectives were shifted to the newly created counterterrorism unit, and precinct-level detectives who used to focus only on major felonies found themselves investigating newly prevalent crimes like identity theft and lower-level offenses like petty larceny.
The NYPD’s Cold Case Squad had about 50 detectives when it was formed in 1996. Now there are about eight.
The number of murders solved has gone down, too. In 2000, records show the NYPD solved 533, including murders that occurred during previous years. In 2012, that number was 314 — a 41% decrease.
“If we had more staffing, and if we were able to focus more on the unsolved homicides, I’m sure the clearance rate would be higher,” Palladino said.
Former Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, who ran the department for 12 years under Mayor Bloomberg, disagreed.
“The homicide squads are always pretty well staffed. As a matter of fact they do other things because the number of murders is way down,” Kelly told The News. “I think the clearance rate is going to remain at roughly 70%, give or take. That’s just the way it is. There are … certain homicides that will never be solved. We don’t necessarily want to make that public, but that’s just the way it is.”
The News conducted a case-by-case review of the status of each of last year’s murder investigations — no arrests have been made in 48% — and detective staffing across the five boroughs:
● Brooklyn has 77 open murder investigations, followed by the Bronx with 39, Queens with 26, Manhattan with 15, and Staten Island with just two.
●The top three precincts with the most open murders are the 67th Precinct (East Flatbush) with 10 out of 12 unsolved, the 77th Precinct (Crown Heights) with nine out of 13 unsolved, and the 75th Precinct (East New York) with eight out of 17 unsolved.
● Manhattan South’s homicide squad has 10 detectives to assist precincts in murder investigations, according to a police source familiar with staffing levels, despite only 10 murders in its jurisdiction in 2013 — one case per detective. Brooklyn North’s homicide squad has 17 detectives, despite a whopping 86 homicides in its jurisdiction — five cases per detective.
● When precinct-level detectives, who could be assigned anything from a murder to a mugging, are factored in, Manhattan South has 15.6 detectives per murder, versus Brooklyn North, which has 2.4 detectives per murder.
● Roughly 86% of homicides involving a white victim have been solved compared to 45% involving a black victim and 56% involving a Hispanic victim. The races of 34 victims are unknown.
“Manhattan is treated differently than the outer boroughs because that’s where the money is," said Joseph Giacalone, 44, an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who retired last year as commanding officer of the Bronx Cold Case squad. He was also director of the NYPD’s homicide school.
Giacalone said Manhattan homicides “get probably double the amount of cops that you see in Brooklyn,” partly in response to the heightened media attention. “It’s just part of the deal.”
He said the number of detectives assigned to a case during the critical first hours of an investigation has a big impact on whether that murder will ever get solved.
“The more detectives you have working a case, the faster you’re going to close them. It’s just a fact,” said Giacalone.
Donna Rayside’s son was killed in the 63rd Precinct, which has just 12 detectives who handled around 1,500 cases involving all manner of crime, according to the law enforcement source. With eight killings in 2013, the precinct has among the fewest detectives per homicide in the entire city at 1.5, compared to most Manhattan precincts that have anywhere from five to 26 detectives per murder.
Citywide, the number of detectives on the force has dropped from 7,151 in 2001 down to 5,137 and the number of homicide squad detectives has been cut in half to just 74, Palladino said.
Giacalone said murders in the city’s rougher neighborhoods are often more difficult to solve in part because of the iron-clad street code against talking to police, particularly when the victim is a “bad guy.”
“If the people who are murdered in the cases that aren’t solved are bad guys, that means that the people who killed them are also bad guys,” said Giacalone. “If you’re running with the wrong crowd — drug dealer, gangster — the likelihood of people within those circles helping to solve these cases is small.”
Kelly said the “CSI effect” has made killers smarter.
“People are conscious of leaving evidence, leaving trace evidence. They’re aware of things that certainly will reduce the possibility of identification,” he said.
TODD MAISEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Dolene John holds a wanted poster of the man suspected of shooting of her son Kellan (inset), outside her home on Jan. 7, 2013. She continues to put up the wanted posters around the neighborhood.
These reasons matter little to grieving parents like Dolene John. All she wants is closure and a sense of justice.
John’s 22-year-old son, Kellan, was shot and killed in January outside his East Flatbush home, about 45 minutes after he chased away a man who was trying to break in, cops and relatives said. A friend of his was shot in the leg but survived.
A father of a 2-month-old boy with a second child on the way, Kellan was weeks away from marrying his schoolteacher fiancé.
Since the murder, Kellan’s mother has walked up and down the block herself posting flyers asking for information leading to her son’s killer.
“Every time they go down, I have them reprinted and put them back up,” said John, who wears a different article of her son’s clothing every day.
John says cops only sought out the surviving victim to draw up a sketch after months of pressing by the family. The sketch was finally done in May, four months after the murder, John said.
“My son got shot on the 7th of January and they made the sketch on the 16th of May,” she said. “Do you know how far (his killer) could have went? He could be in Hawaii.”
Like many other relatives of slain loved ones interviewed by The News, John believes her son’s race is at least partly to blame for what she believes to be cops’ failure to aggressively pursue the killer.
“They push it under the carpet because he was an African-American,” she said. “If it was in Park Slope, this sketch would have been done the same night in the hospital.”
Kellan’s murder took place in the 67th precinct, which has the highest number of unsolved homicides in the city — 10 of the 12 in its jurisdiction, according to The News’ analysis.
Deputy Inspector Kenneth Lehr, the commanding officer of the precinct, who declined to discuss individual cases, defended his detectives.
“Investigations take time,” Lehr told The News after a community council meeting in November.
Completing a murder investigation is “not just a matter of making an arrest,” Lehr said. “You have to gather evidence in a way where a jury can be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, for obvious reasons. And it’s also to make sure you’re not locking up the wrong person.”
“I’ll tell you this,” he added, “if I had a family member meet their demise, there’s nobody I’d want investigating that more than the detectives across the hall.”
With Ryan Sit and Alfred Ng
Anyone with information in regards to any homicide is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577.
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