Results tagged “josesucuzhañay”

Today's Post reveals for the first time that there was a third man in the SUV with the Keith Phoenix and Hakim Scott the night of the attack on the late Jose Sucuzhanay and his brother Romel last December in Bushwick. The paper says that the unnamed man did not participate in the attack and is now under police protection since he will testify against his friends. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes has unsealed the indictments against the two men charged with second-degree murder, manslaughter and assault—all as hate crimes. Hynes said, "The acts which we charge this morning are no less despicable because the victims Jose and Romel Sucuzhañay were not gay.” The DA says that Romel was putting a jacket around his brother on the cold December night when they were spotted by the pair of Bronx men who then allegedly beat Jose with a bottle and a bat. Both Scott and Phoenix are expected to plead not guilty to the crimes that could land them 78 years to life in prison—the maximum sentence.

The second man arrested in the hate crime killing of an Ecuadorian immigrant is presenting a very different story of the fight that led to the death of Jose Sucuzhaynay. The accusations have been that the two murder suspects, Keith Phoenix and Hakim Scott, targeted the late Jose Sucuzhaynay and his brother because the pair of brothers appeared to be gay. Instead, Phoenix says that one of the Sucuzhaynays provoked the fight by kicking in the door of the car that Phoenix was driving. He says that as the fight escalated, Sucuzhaynay reached into his waistband for what Phoenix thought was a weapon, inciting the fatal beating.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly released a chilling account of yesterday's police interrogation of Keith Phoenix, the second man arrested this week in the hate crime murder of an Ecuadorian immigrant in Bushwick. While his partner in crime Hakim Scott was reported to have been shaken up by the death of Jose Sucuzhanay when brought in, Phoenix expressed no such remorse. Instead he asked cops, "So I killed someone—that makes me a bad guy?...What's the big deal? The guy's dead."

Police have arrested and received a confession out of one of two suspects in the hate crime killing of an Ecuadorian man in Bushwick this past December. Police picked up 25-year-old Hakim Scott at his home in the Bronx and quickly got a full confession out of him. Police Commissioner Kelly said, "He said he had seen the news reports and that they had troubled him. He said he wanted to get it off his chest." Cops had used eyewitness accounts along with RFK Bridge surveillance footage to track down a vehicle driven by the other suspect, Scott's friend Keith Phoenix, a 28-year-old Bronx man (pictured) still being searched for. The assailants attacked the late Jose Sucuzhañay and his brother Romel when they saw them walking arm-in-arm along Bushwick Avenue and believed that they were homosexuals. A spokesman for the family said, “With anything, you are going to be appalled by any type of hate crime, whether mistaken as gay individuals or as immigrants, I think.” Mayor Bloomberg emphasized that "there is no such thing as a second-class citizen," giving remarks on the arrest in both English and Spanish.