He’s an honor student – with a record
HE’S A TEEN honor student who was held at Rikers Island for more than a year unable to pay $250,000 bail on a gun charge.
He has maintained his innocence and refused a plea deal.
His lawyers say rogue detectives in the 42nd Precinct in the Bronx have a vendetta against him.
His case has become a cause celebre for bail reform advocates, including the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group. The group won the teen’s freedom in July by posting $100,000 after a judge agreed to reduce the bail amount.
But that is only half the story in the Bronx Tale of 18-year-old Pedro Hernandez.
Court records offer a more complicated picture — including Hernandez’s criminal past, his civil attorney’s potential conflict of interest, his private eye’s checkered past and the role played by a detective who has been stripped of his gun and badge.
The Bronx district attorney charged Hernandez last August with firing into a crowd near a school on Sept. 1, 2015, wounding Shaun Nardoni, who is now 16.
Prosecutor David Slott later amended the allegations — to assert that, instead of pulling the trigger, Hernandez had passed the weapon to the shooter, who has not been identified.
Arguing for Hernandez’s release at a bail hearing, defense lawyer David Narain said the charges were based on the word of a single witness who identified Hernandez in a photo array. Narain also maintained that Hernandez has no criminal record, having won the dismissal of previous felony charges. The teen was already suing cops for false arrest, Narain added.
“My client and the 42nd Precinct, without even explaining in proper words, is a bad relationship,” the lawyer said.
Bronx Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett spurned Narain’s bail plea after Slott revealed that a Family Court judge had given Hernandez 12 months’ probation and put him on a curfew for gun possession as a youth.
Slott also countered that Hernandez had Facebook conversations with members of a crew called the Hilltop Gang, recruiting people to come out on the night of the shooting.
Calling Hernandez “a scammer,” Slott said he expected the DA’s office to charge him in a fake check-cashing scheme. One year later, the DA is still investigating the alleged scam, sources said.
Defense lawyer Alex Spiro, who replaced Narain last month in the Nardoni shooting case, declined to comment.
Hernandez also has an open felony charge in a Nov. 6, 2015, robbery, in which he’s accused of using a knife to steal a cell phone and a remote car alarm. Trials for the gun charge and the robbery bust are scheduled to begin Sept. 6.
Regardless, advocates say Hernandez is a poster child for bail reform.
Wade McMullen of the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights group noted that Hernandez was “too poor to purchase his release (from jail)” after turning down a plea deal that would have set him free immediately.
“No matter how you spin it, the fact is we cannot support a legal system that punishes the poor and people of color, using cages to disproportionately exact criminal convictions and disrupt our communities in the process,” McMullen said.
As he heads toward trial, Hernandez is surrounded by few angels among cops or his legal team.
The private eye
Private investigator Manuel Gomez is a former cop who was arrested by fellow officers in 2009 over a public dispute with his then-girlfriend. He spent five days in jail, but the Bronx DA later dropped all the charges.
Still, the NYPD bounced Gomez in 2011 after an administrative trial judge determined that he had pointed his gun at bystanders who tried to intervene during the altercation.
The department also considered Gomez’s disciplinary history, records show.
In 2006, the NYPD docked Gomez 30 vacation days and placed him on one year of probation after he failed an Internal Affairs Bureau integrity test by neglecting to voucher a quantity of placebo heroin, according to a departmental memo.
Gomez told the Daily News that the bystanders who testified at the departmental trial lied. He also said the NYPD had it in for him ever since he was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit brought against the department in 1999 over its treatment of minority employees.
Gomez, who served more than two decades in the Army and is a retired commissioned officer, said he went on to work for the State Department in Afghanistan, and points out that he has been licensed as a private eye.
“The Department of State cleared me and authorized me to carry weapons,” he said. “That’s got to say something.”
More recently, Gomez, 50, has made a name digging up evidence that has gotten charges dropped against defendants in the Bronx. He cites the five days he spent in jail as putting him on a mission.
“That is the catalyst for the reason why I fight with such tenacity and such fortitude against this 1,000-pound gorilla we call the NYPD and the 2,000-pound gorilla we call the Bronx district attorney’s office,” Gomez said.
In Hernandez’s case, Gomez says he found witnesses who say that another gunman — not Hernandez — committed the shooting.
He also levels troubling accusations again the Morrisania-based 42nd Precinct, in particular one of its detectives.
The cop pursuing Hernandez
David Terrell, a field intelligence officer in the 42nd Precinct, had provided intel to another detective in the precinct that led to Hernandez’s arrest in the shooting of Nardoni.
But Terrell had been gunning for Hernandez for years, according to Gomez.
The private eye found teens