‘A GRACEFUL AND DIGNIFIED PERSON’
organizations, with a request to review Rodriguez’s resume, including his conviction and Cuomo’s clemency.
Robert Lafferty, Highgate’s vice president of human resources and labor counsel, and fellow company leaders found the Innocence Project’s work on Rodriguez’s behalf, as well as Cuomo’s clemency to be compelling. Lafferty interviewed Rodriguez.
“I discovered what a truly decent, graceful and dignified person he is,” Lafferty says.
The job title is house attendant. The hotel is the Row NYC on Eighth Ave. The duties entail supporting room attendants by delivering and removing linens, as well as cleaning throughout the building.
This is honest work, Rodriguez says. The union’s health benefits are New York’s best. The pay is $24 an hour, a boon to a man used to an hourly rate of 10 cents.
So it is as Felipe Rodriguez verges on his first Christmas in freedom. He will not be alone. Felipe Jr., who was always with him in spirit, will be with him in person. There will also be a little boy, Gabby, short for Gabriel.
Rodriguez met Gabby in a restaurant near Rodriguez’s halfway house. The boy was 4. He reminded Rodriguez of his last vision of 3-year-old Felipe Jr. before prison. Gabby was waiting for his mother to get off work as a waitress in the restaurant.
Gabby was hungry. Rodriguez bought him food and talked to his mother, Karen. Rodriguez came to the restaurant again. He and Karen talked again, and then some more. Rodriguez met Karen’s other son, 15-year-old Iverson. Naturally, he is a basketball point guard.
They live as a family in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Gabby sleeps in a Lightning McQueen bed. Santa has brought him a motorized car, modeled after a BMW, for driving down the sidewalk.
Rodriguez will sit joyfully with Karen, Iverson, Gabby and Felipe Jr. gathered around the tree.
After Christmas arrives at midnight, he will lay his head on the pillow and recite a prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, thankful that his lawyers, Morrison and Margulis-Ohnuma, will fight on to clear his name — newly buoyed that Ramos appears ready to provide a fresh retelling of the crucial evidence presented by cops.
“We spoke to Mr. Ramos briefly about the case this week. He was very reluctant to talk to us but provided information that we think is important that we forward to the district attorney’s office,” they said in a statement. “We look forward to speaking to him further through his attorney as the investigation continues.”
If Rodriguez were to win exoneration, authorities would confront a terrible question that would add to the searing pain of Maureen McNeill Fernandez’s loved ones: Who is the true killer?
Rodriguez says that he prays for her and for justice for all while looking back at his journey through hell in the best light humanly possible.
“Prison made me a real man,” he says. “Prison molded me to be something that, if I never went in there, I would never have become. I would’ve never paid God any attention. I would never have had the need or the devotion to sit down and pay attention to God’s voice, to hear what he had to say to me.”
At this Christmas hour, in this time of gift-giving, Rodriguez also speaks of a gift drawn from the depth of incarceration.
“One of the greatest gifts that I received from prison was the ability to embrace solitude,” he explains. “The ability to be still. To be still and hear God’s voice. To be still and know that he’s God, and that all things are possible.”