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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
By VIVIAN YEE and MARC SANTORAJUNE 2, 2014
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Nicholas Avitto outside the building where his 6-year-old son was killed in an elevator.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times
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Nicholas Avitto outside the building where his 6-year-old son was killed in an elevator.CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times
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Prince Joshua Avitto
Many public housing projects across the city do not have surveillance cameras, despite the more than $60 million that the city has allocated for them over the past several years. Boulevard Houses has five, but they are concentrated in one of its 18 buildings.
The attack at Boulevard Houses came only two days after an 18-year-old woman, Tanaya Copeland, was stabbed to death on Stanley Avenue, several blocks from the housing development. Several common factors, including the fact that kitchen knives were used and recovered in both cases and the proximity of the attacks, have led detectives to believe that the cases may be related.
In the case of Ms. Copeland’s death, grainy video captured the killer fleeing the scene in clothing similar to that worn by a man witnesses described seeing after the children were stabbed.
On Sunday evening, Mikayla Capers, 7, and Prince Joshua Avitto, 6, who was known as P.J., craved something cold and sweet after playing outside in the sun. As they entered the cramped, dimly lit elevator in the Boulevard Houses just before 6 p.m., a 22-second ride away from the Icees in the freezer, the killer was just behind them.
In that metal box, he plunged a black-handled 8-inch kitchen knife again and again. P.J. was mortally wounded. Mikayla stumbled out, screaming, before collapsing as the man fled past her.
Mikayla, who is hospitalized in Manhattan, was able to give the police a short description of the attacker, which was aiding in the search, Eric L. Adams, the Brooklyn borough president, said. Family members said she was briefly conscious on Sunday night after the stabbing.
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A memorial has sprouted at the Boulevard Houses. CreditKarsten Moran for The New York Times
Police Commissioner William J. Bratton said the department would not rest until the killer was caught. On Monday, dozens of police officers swept through the housing project, police helicopters circled above and additional officers patrolled the streets where children walk to and from school.
“I’m extraordinarily concerned and angered about the idea that children cannot in their own building feel safe taking the elevator,” Mr. Bratton said. “We’re going to get this character, and we will hopefully get him very, very quickly.”
Later on Monday, the police released a sketch of the attacker and described him as a black man about 25 to 35 years old and six feet tall with a heavy build. He was last seen wearing a gray top, the police said. Several people reported seeing the man fall several times as he darted through the housing complex after the children were stabbed, but no one appeared to recognize him.
He left behind the bloody knife he had used in the attack.
On Monday night, hundreds gathered for a vigil in front of the apartment building. Many carried flowers, and a few held balloons that showed Spider-Man — P.J.’s last Halloween costume.
The crowd was so thick that it had to part for P.J.’s parents to walk through.
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Regenia Trevathan showing a photo of Mikayla Capers, 7, her great-granddaughter. Mikayla is recovering after being critically injured in the attack Sunday night. CreditUli Seit for The New York Times
“Find this man; bring him to justice,” said P.J.’s mother, Arica McClinton. “Our baby gone, he not coming back, his birthday in 15 days.”
Beside her, P.J.’s father, Nicholas Avitto, wore a picture of his son pinned to his plaid shirt. He wept as she spoke and said, “Oh God, I can’t do this. My son is gone, I got to go.”
“They took away my pride and joy, my life, my reason to live, my backbone — my baby.”
Rochelle Copeland, the mother of the 18-year-old who was fatally stabbed on Friday, pleaded to get the killer — or killers — off the streets.
“They stabbed an 18-year-old girl over 30 times, a 7-year-old girl more than 15 times,” she said, pointing to the television cameras. “We need help. You help us.”
Surveillance security has been contentious for years. Critics of the housing authority say it has been too slow to install the cameras, which the agency estimates would cost $200 million to place in all its developments. The authority cautions that the process is complex.
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Charles Barron, a former New York City councilman who represented East New York, with Ms. Trevathan.CreditUli Seit for The New York Times
The city budget “helps build basketball arenas and baseball stadiums,” said Charles Barron, a former city councilman for the area, who said he allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to install cameras in the Boulevard Houses when he was in office. “They can put in a few security cameras.”
Family friends of the two children and neighbors agreed, saying each building should have cameras in elevators, which the police say attract a disproportionate share of crimes.
At a news conference on Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said there would be an update on the status of security cameras in public housing at a City Council hearing on Wednesday.
Spatters of blood stained the sidewalk a few yards away from police officers, green- and orange-jacketed members of community anti-violence groups and reporters, who milled around the front of the apartment building.
For the tight-knit network of relatives and friends who live in the Boulevard Houses and help raise one another’s children, it was hard to shake the feeling that they were under siege. “I have mace,” Anabelle Diaz Alston, P.J.’s godmother, said, “and I’m going to use it.”
On Sunday, P.J. spent the last hours of his life riding his bike, whizzing down playground slides and smacking on Bubble Yum gum, said his godfather, Henry Alston.
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A police sketch of the children’s attacker.CreditNew York Police Department
P.J.’s godmother had been watching him play when a woman selling shaved ice came by with her cart. Ms. Alston was not carrying enough cash to buy one, family friends said, so P.J. asked to go upstairs to retrieve frozen treats she had bought earlier. She said no at first, relenting only when Mikayla offered to go with him.
No one was surprised that they went together. They had been inseparable as long as anybody could remember, so close “we figured they’d grow up and get married,” Ms. Baptiste said. Mikayla was possessive and protective of him, “Like, ‘Don’t talk to my P.J.,’ ” Ms. Baptiste said.
She is a chatterbox who loves the Harry Potter books and “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” said her uncle, Lemar King. He was an “old soul,” Ms. Baptiste said, stubborn, watchful and always worried about his adult caretakers. He loved pretending to be superheroes — sometimes Captain America, sometimes Spider-Man. For a school dress-up day recently, he donned a suit and went as President Obama.
His seventh birthday was to be on June 17.
As P.J. was loaded into an ambulance on Sunday, his mother darted after it, banging on the doors. At Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center, she was told her son had not survived. She uncovered his body and cradled him, sobbing over his wounds.
“He was just a baby. He was just a baby,” Sophia Diaz, 47, a family friend who drove P.J.’s mother to the hospital, said in disbelief. “He didn’t even make it to 7 years old.”
In the same hospital, Mikayla was in surgery. In the ambulance, said Ms. Diaz, whose sister rode with Mikayla, the girl had asked, “Why did this man hurt me?”
Regenia Trevathan, 62, Mikayla’s great-grandmother, said the girl had opened her eyes Sunday night and asked for her mother and aunt.
She also asked about her friend.
For now, they cannot bring themselves to tell her what happened to P.J.
Reporting was contributed by Joseph Goldstein, J. David Goodman, Mireya Navarro and Nate Schweber.
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