FADING HOPES FOR A MIRACLE
After stab, kin face losing 20-yr.-old on Xmas
There is little joy for Giovanny Pimentel’s family this Christmas as relatives of the Bronx man rendered brain dead in a brutal stabbing decide whether it’s time to let him go.
“He’s still on the machine. We’re hoping for a miracle at the moment,” said Awilda Gomez, 44, the mother of the young man who was repeatedly stabbed early Saturday in University Heights. “Now, every year, Christmas is going to be the day that we were going to lose Giovanny.”
“It’s awful to spend it like this,” she told the Daily News Tuesday outside St. Barnabas Hospital, where her son barely clings to life.
Gomez said Pimentel has not shown any signs of recovery since the attack. “He’s going to keep suffering. He’s not with us,” she said. “He’s not alive.”
Gomez said her 20-yearold son went after work Friday to hang out at a friend’s house that is steps from the Bronx Community College campus.
“[He told me,] Mom, I’m gonna be home by 1:30,” she said. “And I never heard from him again.”
Pimentel was stabbed once in the chest at around 1:30 a.m. Saturday at 2170 University Ave. in what appears to be a random attack, police said.
The suspect — a man who is about 5feet-11 and weighs around 180 pounds — fled on foot, cops said. So far, no arrests have been made.
Pimentel’s brother Nelson Plasencia said now things will never be the same.
“Me and Giovanny had a close connection. He’s my little brother. He call[s] me for everything. We had a lot of goals,” said Plasencia, 25. “We spoke every single day. I feel like we’re destroyed.”
Other family members said Pimentel is a well-liked young man who stays out of trouble and wondered what could have prompted such a merciless act.
“Another innocent, hardworking, bright young man stabbed senselessly simply for being in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” his cousin Yanill Franklin wrote on Facebook. “He was a wonderful young man with his whole future ahead.”
Another cousin, Joemayra Pimentel, urged people on social media to come forward with any information on the incident.
“He was a son, brother, uncle, and a grandson. He had his whole life ahead of him. Please help my family and I find justice,” she wrote on Facebook. “A mother and father just lost their son before the holidays.”
The random stabbing took place less than 2 miles from where Bronx teen Lesandro “Junior” Guzman-Feliz was murdered in a case of mistaken identity that gripped the city last year.
The attack on Pimentel — who has one arrest that is sealed, a source said — is being investigated as an assault, police said.
“Nobody knows yet exactly what happened,” his grandmother’s cousin Lucrezia Soto, 77, told The News. “There is no explanation.”
But the family is preparing for the worst. Relatives created a GoFundMe page Tuesday to seek money for Pimentel’s funeral.
Gomez said Pimentel’s 16year-old brother has not left his hospital bedside.
“He just misses him so much,” she said. “[He] was crying on top of Giovanny and saying, ‘You can’t leave me! You can’t leave me, Bro!’ ”
Gomez said Pimentel had big plans to save up money from his job at a shipping company and buy an apartment.
Now, she said, those dreams are shattered.“All of this was just taken away [from] a kid with so many hopes and dreams,” she said. “[His attacker] has to be brought to justice. … You’re not going to walk the streets like ‘Life is great’ after you killed somebody. It’s not going to happen.”