Grief, and Mystery, Over Immigrant’s Killing
(NYT May 14, 2007)
photo by Librado Romero/The New York Times
The Mount Kisco laundry where Rene Javier Perez, seen in a photograph on the flier, called 911 on April 28. Three Mount Kisco police officers responded to the call.
MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. — Fourteen years ago, when Rene Javier Perez decided to leave his impoverished hometown in eastern Guatemala in search of a more prosperous life in the United States, his parents mortgaged the plot of land where they lived to raise $3,000 he needed for a smuggler to lead him across the border.
About an hour after the officers met Mr. Perez, he was found, beaten, along a dirt road in Bedford.
The plan, which Mr. Perez shared with a few of his relatives, was to move to this placid village in Westchester County, where thousands of his countrymen had settled before him, and find work so that he could help his parents pay off the debt.
But jobs were hard to come by and the pay was not as good as he had envisioned, his mother, Merced Perez, recalled. So the money he was sending home, steady at first, turned into a trickle and eventually stopped. Unable to keep up with the loan payments, his parents lost their modest slice of land.
Now they have lost their son, and his death on April 29 — somewhere between a coin laundry in Mount Kisco and the side of a desolate dirt road in nearby Bedford — has become a source of sadness in Apantes, the Guatemalan town where he was born, and a mystery involving two police departments in his adopted Westchester County.
“He was so ashamed of the trouble he caused us, he didn’t call home for 10 years,” Ms. Perez, 68, said in a telephone interview on Thursday from her mud-brick home, where relatives and neighbors gathered to mourn over Mr. Perez’s body, which had arrived in Guatemala the previous night.
Mr. Perez, 42, who had lived on the streets here for about a year and had taken to drinking heavily, had accumulated a string of arrests for petty crimes.
The last time he called, early last year, Ms. Perez said, “he talked to his father and all he said was, ‘Forgive me! Forgive me!’ before he started crying.”
Mr. Perez died shortly after he was found unconscious close to midnight April 28, an hour after three Mount Kisco police officers responded to a 911 call he had placed from a coin-operated laundry. The Westchester medical examiner’s office said he died from internal injuries, probably caused by blows to his abdomen, and ruled the death a homicide.
On Thursday, the officers — two patrolmen and a lieutenant — were placed on desk duty, two days after the police chief in neighboring Bedford said the three were a focus of the investigation into Mr. Perez’s killing.
“At this time, we’re trying to account for the officers’ whereabouts,” the Bedford chief, Christian Menzel, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Asked if the officers from Mount Kisco might have been involved in the killing, Chief Menzel said, “We have not ruled that out yet.”
Mr. Perez was the third Guatemalan to die under suspicious circumstances in Mount Kisco in the past four years, which in some ways adds to the puzzle. Santos Bojorguez, 33, was found strangled here in 2003, and Roberto Martinez, 42, was killed the same way in 2004. Both cases remain unsolved.
Although there had been tensions here over immigrant day laborers, they subsided after a social service organization for Hispanics, supported by local donations, was opened here by some residents in 2000 to provide job training, education and other services.
At a news conference outside the federal courthouse in White Plains on Thursday, Fernando Mateo, president of Hispanics Across America, a fledgling advocacy group based in Manhattan, called on the federal authorities to investigate the three deaths.
The Westchester County district attorney, Janet DiFiore, announced at a news conference on Friday that the United States attorney’s office had agreed to join the investigation of the Perez case, noting in a subsequent interview that the events surrounding his death “may have not only state, but federal implications as well.”
The officers met Mr. Perez at the laundry, but it is still a mystery whether Mr. Perez left the laundry on his own, or with someone else, or was driven away by the officers.
F. Hollis Griffin Jr., who is representing Officer George Bubaris, the first of the three Mount Kisco police officers to respond to Mr. Perez’s 911 call, said on Saturday that Bedford police detectives had interviewed his client twice and that once all the documentary evidence had been analyzed, it would become clear that he went back to patrolling the community as soon as he left the laundry.
photo by Alan Zale for The New York Times
Hispanics Across America, an advocacy group, is seeking a federal inquiry into the deaths of three Guatemalans in Mount Kisco in four years.
The two other officers under investigation are Edward Dwyer, a patrolman, and Lt. Edward Dunnigan. Mr. Dwyer’s lawyer, John Grant, could not be reached for comment. It is unclear if Lieutenant Dunnigan has retained a lawyer.
“We don’t have any reason to believe that Mr. Perez was in my client’s patrol car that night,” Mr. Griffin said. He added, however, that it was possible Mr. Perez’s DNA and fingerprints could be found in the car, as well as in other Mount Kisco patrol cars, because of his many interactions with the local police over the years.
Mr. Perez was the second of four sons born to Ms. Perez and her husband, Esteban Javier Rodriguez, whose families have lived in Apantes, near the Honduran border, as far back as she can remember. Two of his brothers followed him to the United States; the oldest, Israel, lives in Port Chester, and the youngest, Anibal, has lived in Bedford for two years. Endis, the third born, remained in Guatemala, working in the fields and caring for his aging parents.
Mr. Perez was baptized, catechized, confirmed and married in the humble church in Apantes and attended school until age 14, when he began working in the fields with his father, his mother said. They picked coffee beans to sell in the rural markets in the region where they lived, Chiquimula, the birthplace of most of the Guatemalans who have settled in Mount Kisco. Guatemalans appear to make up most of the village’s approximately 2,500 Hispanic immigrants, who are about a quarter of the local population.
“It’s fair to say that over here we can make money, but the money we make in a day’s work is hardly enough to feed us for the day,” Endis Javier Perez, 31, said in a telephone interview. “My brothers left here thinking they could do better and help us, but it seems like things didn’t work too well for Rene.”
Rene Javier Perez moved here in 1992, three months after the birth of his only child, Gladys, who is now 15 and remained in Guatemala. She said she did not remember her father, or even his voice, since their phone conversations were few. “He sent me money last year to buy a cellphone,” she said from her home in Apantes.
Gladys’s mother, whom Mr. Perez married in 1990, four years after leaving the Guatemalan Army, has lived with another man for several years, Mr. Perez’s relatives said.
To many of the Guatemalans who have settled here, Mr. Perez was a source of pity — a sullen man of few words whom they saw fishing bottles from trash cans and occasionally begging for food.
“He’d show up here drunk once in a while and I’d give him a plate of chicken, rice and beans because I felt sorry for him,” said Adán Villeda, from Chiquimula, who owns the American Latino Deli on Main Street. “He was a drunk, but he was harmless.”
But to the police here and in Bedford, Mr. Perez was a nuisance, a drunken vagrant who urinated in public, exposed himself, trespassed and occasionally robbed local stores. He had been arrested 59 times in the past six years; last year, he served five months in the county jail after pleading guilty to petty larceny.
None of his close relatives know for sure when he started drinking heavily, and they can only suspect why — depression, shame, guilt over his parents’ loss of the only thing of value they had ever owned.
“He told me many times he wanted to go back to Guatemala, but he didn’t have the money for the trip,” said Betty Duarte, a cousin who grew up with Mr. Perez in Apantes and has lived in the Dutchess County town of Dover for 12 years. “I knew he was unhappy here, and that he had his troubles, but I had no idea how bad things were.”
Two hours before Mr. Perez called 911 from the Lexington Laundry here, the police in Bedford had picked him up at a department store in their town, where he was said to have been drunk and harassing customers. The officers ferried him to Main Street in Mount Kisco in what Chief Menzel described as a “courtesy ride.”
At the news conference on May 8, Chief Menzel took pains to note that the Bedford officers could not have inflicted the fatal injuries.
“The medical examiner has informed us that a person with that serious an injury could not have survived that injury for a long time,” he said.
Whatever happened to Mr. Perez, the chief added, occurred between 8:43 p.m., when the Bedford officers dropped him off here, and 11:55 p.m., when he was found unconscious on Byram Lake Road in Bedford.
In Mount Kisco, police logs indicate that the patrolman who first responded to the 911 call, Officer Bubaris, arrived at the laundry at 10:47 p.m., followed a minute later by the two other officers.
The two patrol cars used — which were later seized and examined by the state police — have since been returned to the Mount Kisco Police Department, although Chief Menzel of Bedford said on Thursday that no conclusions should be drawn from that. Still, it seems likely that had any evidence showed up in the cars, they would have been held longer.
For now, the mystery of how Rene Javier Perez was killed and who killed him lingers.
“If he was so much of a problem, why didn’t they just deport him?” his mother asked before his burial on Thursday in Apantes. “Now, he’s dead and I’ll never have a chance to tell him that we forgive him and that he was a good son, in spite of it all.”
