Results tagged “fingerprints”

A man who was wrongly jailed on Rikers Island for 17 months has accepted a $145,000 settlement with the city because a detective misidentified his fingerprints. Dwight Gomas was residing in Atlanta in 2004 when he was suddenly arrested by U.S. marshals for an armed robbery at a Howard Beach jewelry store. Detective Eileen Barrett had matched a partial finger print from the crime scene to Gomas, whose prints were on file after his only prior arrest as an adult: driving with a suspended license in Brooklyn. Gomas maintained his innocence before a grand jury, but was indicted and couldn't make bail. Languishing on Rikers, his Legal Aid lawyer urged him to accept a plea offer of five years in prison, but he refused. Luckily, veteran detective Daniel Perruzzaa finally conducted a routine review of the fingerprints. He tells the Daily News, "When I looked at it, I said, 'You know what? This is a screwup; this is not his fingerprints." Oopsy! Gomas was released after 523 days in jail, but by then his girlfriend and their child moved in with another man. On the plus side, he pulled in $145K in less than two years on Rikers, so we're sure there's no hard feelings.

The police have taken fingerprints from the bike believed to have been trashed by the Times Square bomber. They are also looking for traces of DNA left on the bike and checking cellphone transmissions in the area during Thursday early morning, which is when a bomb exploded outside the army recruiting center.

The family and friends of slain dentist Daniel Malakov yelled at murder suspect Mikhail Mallayev (pictured) in a Queens courtroom yesterday. Malakov was gunned down last year when he was dropping off his daughter to his ex-wife at a Queens playground. His brother yelled, "Hang him up!" as other yelled "Shoot him!" and "Take off his head!" when Mallayev left.