FATAL FLAWS
He blames gov’t after mentally ill bro kills ma
Failed government efforts to help the mentally ill are to blame for the machete death of a Queens woman at the hands of her troubled ex-cop son, the suspect’s brother said Friday.
Maria Diaz, 78, was found dead inside a bedroom in her Queens Village apartment around 7:50 p.m. Wednesday, bleeding from a deep slash wound to the back of her head, investigators said.
Her son, Osvaldo Diaz, 45, is being sought for questioning in the case. Mother and son shared the second-floor apartment above a beauty salon on Hillside Ave. in Queens Village.
Members of the Diaz family have no doubt Osvaldo killed his mother — but they are certain he wasn’t of sound mind when he did it, the suspect’s brother, Christian Diaz, told the Daily News.
“Although I believe my brother did it, that’s not the point,” Diaz said. “The point is that my brother has been suffering from mental illness for many years now, and we have reached out to the mental health department multiple times explaining that we believed our brother was becoming a risk to our mother.”
Police have not arrested or charged Osvaldo Diaz with the killing.
Christian, 38, said he and his family tried to support Osvaldo any way they could following his bipolar schizophrenia diagnosis around 2004.
After putting himself through college, where he studied finance and criminal law, Osvaldo was hired by the NYPD in July 2005, a department spokesperson confirmed. At one point, he was posted at Manhattan’s Midtown North precinct, a source told The News.
The missing man’s family ties Osvaldo’s 2008 termination from the force with his serious mental decline.
“He was a police officer, he was still in the probationary period. I don’t know what happened, but I know that after that his mental health started to deteriorate,” Christian Diaz said.
Christian and his mother sounded alarm bells multiple times, he said. They successfully got Osvaldo into a psychiatric facility on one occasion, but its operators disagreed with their belief he posed a safety risk to Maria at home.
“When he was not mentally stable, he would not address her as mother but as ‘the lady’ or sometimes call her ‘a robot,’” Christian said, describing his brother’s symptoms of paranoia.
“He’s in constant fear and suspects the woman he’s living with to be someone different than she was. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I hate to say I’m right, but look at the ending.”
Time and again, Christian said his genuine concerns were not taken seriously by city-run services like the Mobile Crisis Teams units, which operate two dozen units in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, according to its website.
“I used to tell them, ‘Are you going to wait till he hurts himself or somebody till you do something?’ And their answer was, ‘Unfortunately, that’s the only way,’” said Christian.
The city Health Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Christian Diaz said honoring his late mother in this harrowing moment means looking out for Osvaldo.
“I owe it to my mom to honor her wishes, and her wishes were for my brother to be OK. And despite whatever my human nature makes me feel, it doesn’t overpower the wishes of my mother,” he said.
“The only thing she wanted was his well-being. She proved that’s all she cared about with her life, and that’s the frustrating part. I strongly believe that this could have been avoided had repeated calls and requests for help been met.”
He said reports Osvaldo is a hardened criminal or otherwise violent in nature are categorically false. He described his brother as a doting uncle, sibling, and son. Osvaldo was the oldest of Maria’s nine children.
“My brother loved his family. Up until he started to have mental illness, he was a loving part of the family,” Christian said.
Maria was aware of the inherent risks of living with Osvaldo, Christian noted. Still, she was more concerned for her son’s safety in city or state-run mental health facilities, where he’d been attacked before.
“She paid with her life the price for that decision, trying to protect my brother.”
As of late Friday, while Christian was at a funeral home trying to make arrangements, police were still searching for Osvaldo.
Detectives have put up wanted posters near the Diaz family home, offering a $2,500 reward for any information about the attack.
“If you went around, asked about my mother, they would tell you about the love for her loved ones,” Christian said of his mom.
“She is a person that puts everybody in front of herself, and the fact that this happened to her is a tragedy I cannot live down.”
An ex-NYPD cop busted last summer as part of a Long Island drug ring has pleaded guilty to manslaughter for dealing a lethal dose of fentanyl to a Suffolk County man, officials said Friday.
Joseph Recca, 28, of West Islip, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, criminal sale of a controlled substance and conspiracy charges, Suffolk County District Attorney Timothy Sini said.
“For a police officer to be selling fentanyl — a drug we are acutely aware can be fatal — he is not just breaking the law he is sworn to uphold, but knowingly gambling with people’s lives,” Sini said in a statement. “This goes beyond criminality. It was irresponsible and morally corrupt.”
The investigation into Recca (photo) began after cops found a cellphone near Ryan Bornschein, a 28-year-old Copiague man who fatally overdosed on Sept. 3, 2019. The phone contained text messages between Bornschein and Recca.
The texts revealed that the cop had sold the victim fentanyl — and that the disgraced officer and his two partners were part of a suburban painkiller ring.
The heavily tattooed Recca was arrested in July.
His partners, Michael Sosa of Brentwood and Michael Corbett of West Islip, were also slapped with a range of charges including conspiracy, drug sales and drug possession.
Recca knew Sosa from a local bodybuilding gym, while Sosa and Corbett knew each other from their Long Island neighborhood, police said.
“I’m shocked just as much as everyone else,” said the ex-cop’s father, Jim Recca, at the time. “He’s just a great guy, that’s all I can say.”
Bornschein’s mother, Jessica Bornschein, filed a civil lawsuit against the city and the NYPD in November over her son’s overdose death. The case is still pending.
“Just because we have been successful on this front does not eliminate the need for a specific death-by-dealer statute,” Sini said Friday.
“We need a law on the books that sends a clear message to drug dealers causing fatal overdoses that these are homicides.”
The criminal cases against Sosa and Corbett are still pending.
It’s all Trump all the time for attendants of this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party was unmistakably firm as the annual CPAC event began in Florida on Friday, with speaker after speaker raining praise on the former president and regurgitating his false claims about fraud in the 2020 election.
The conference, held in Orlando because organizers weren’t able to secure a permit at its usual Maryland location due to coronavirus restrictions, featured a motley crew of right-wing icons for the first major event of the four-day conservative love-fest.
Donald Trump Jr., the president’s oldest son, was among the main attractions.
The U.S. government officially concluded Friday that Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman ordered the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident and journalist whose grisly death drew international and bipartisan outrage.
Avril Haines, President Biden’s director of national intelligence, asserted the finding by ordering the long-awaited declassification of a document whose contents have been known since shortly after Khashoggi’s 2018 murder, but not publicly released until now.
“Bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi,” the document states. “We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom since 2017, the direct involvement of a key adviser and members of Muhammad bin Salman’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad.”
The four-page document lists 21 individuals who “participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in” killing Khashoggi on bin Salman’s behalf at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Among the names is Saud al-Qahtani, a close adviser to bin Salman, who said publicly in 2018 that he did not make decisions “without the Crown Prince’s approval,” according to the document.
According to previously leaked CIA findings, a team of assassins loyal to bin Salman killed Khashoggi after he entered the consulate to obtain documents for his forthcoming marriage. After killing him, the assassins dismembered Khashoggi’s body using a bone saw. His remains were never found.
Hanan El-Atr Khashoggi, Khashoggi’s widow who waited outside the consulate in Istanbul while the Saudi-critical journalist was being killed, said Friday’s release brought her little solace.
“This report reopen my painful wounds again,” she said in a statement. “What I want most is to be told the truth about where Jamal’s body is so I can bury him properly as his widow and in accordance with Islamic tradition.”
Though bin Salman’s role in
Khashoggi’s death has not been in dispute among U.S. officials, the public release of the intelligence document could ramp up pressure on Biden to punish the kingdom.
“The Biden administration will need to follow this attribution of responsibility with serious repercussions against all of the responsible parties it has identified, and also reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” said House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
After Avril’s declassification, the Biden administration slapped sanctions and visa bans on some senior Saudi officials, though it did not immediately target bin Salman directly.
Often overlooking the kingdom’s oppressive rule, presidents of both parties have historically viewed the Saudis as important strategic partners in the region.
Former President Donald Trump, who was in power at the time of Khashoggi’s March 2018 death, refused to point fingers at bin Salman, even though he was briefed on the U.S. intelligence community’s findings.
“It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!” Trump, whose son-in-law Jared Kushner has a personal relationship with bin Salman, tweeted in the wake of Khashoggi’s assassination.
Bin Salman, who operates as Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, had his foreign ministry slam the U.S. intelligence document as “negative, false and unacceptable.”
“The report contained inaccurate information and conclusions,” the ministry said in a statement.
Khashoggi, an influential Washington Post columnist, wrote blistering critiques of bin Salman’s authoritarian consolidation of power and history of imprisoning and killing political opponents, including members of his own family. He also frequently rebuked the Saudi-led military killings of civilians in Yemen, making him a target of bin Salman’s wrath.
The Saudi government at first denied knowing anything about Khashoggi’s death, but later changed its story several times until finally admitting the murder was premeditated. Still, the Saudis maintain bin Salman played no role in his murder.
Within minutes of being pepper-sprayed in SoHo, Yaeji Kim knew she had been the victim of a random attack — and possibly a hate crime.
As she made her way home, still crying from the burning in her eyes and temporary blindness, Kim tried to push the severity of the Feb. 16 incident out of her mind.
Yet the more she thought about the man who rolled down the window of a dark-colored sedan on W. Houston St. and pointed a canister at her, the more frightened she felt.
“When it first happened, I felt helpless. And as I was walking home … I was crying because it burned, but [because] I was also feeling bullied,” 30-yearold Kim, a pharmacist and professor who grew up in South Korea, told the Daily News on Thursday.
“I tried to downplay it ... I wasn’t even going to report it. But I think I am more traumatized than I thought,” she said. “It’s hard for me to walk down Houston Street … and whenever I’m on the subway I’m really tense, and [have] a panic attack.”
“I feel targeted,” she continued. “I wish I didn’t feel this [way]. I wish it didn’t affect me as much as it has.”
Kim, who reported the attack to police on Feb. 18, said she did not recognize the passenger who pepper-sprayed her or the driver of the sedan, both of whom she claims were white men in their 20s or 30s.
The attack has not yet been ruled a hate crime, though Kim said she has been in close contact with the NYPD Asian Hate Crimes Task Force. There have been no arrests.
The incident is the latest in a string of random attacks on Asian-Americans across the city.
Police have made 18 arrests in 28 incidents of “COVID-related” hate crimes against Asians since the start of the pandemic, though the commanding officer of the task force acknowledged many more incidents have likely gone unreported.
City officials have responded by directing the 500 additional officers deployed to the subway system to help combat bias, and Mayor de Blasio has vowed to meet with community leaders about the issue.
Yet for Kim, an HIV pharmacist at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University and a professor at Touro College of Pharmacy, the lingering fear of another unexpected ambush has left her on edge.
“As an Asian woman I have experienced racism but not [to] this extent … I don’t think we were expecting this kind of hate towards us,” said Kim. “Now we are worried about going outside and taking the train and doing normal things.
“If there was logic to this, I think it would be easier to solve,” she said. “But I don’t think there’s logic to this right now. It’s just chaotic.”
An NYPD cop accused of soliciting pornographic pictures and videos from children also boasted to his partner about his sick obsession and even admitted to raping a 13-year-old, federal prosecutors said Friday at a court appearance where the officer pleaded for home release.
Carmine Simpson, 27, who allegedly solicited pornographic pictures of teenagers, boasted of his vile desires while on patrol with his NYPD partner in 2019, prosecutors wrote in court papers filed late Thursday ahead of the hearing.
“The defendant repeatedly stated in sum and substance that he was interested in young girls, and specifically girls between the ages of 13 and 14,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Megan Farrell, who said her office had interviewed the former partner. “On one occasion, the defendant told Officer-1, in sum and substance, that he was having intercourse with the 13-yearold female pictured in one of the photos that he had in his phone and that this girl lived in a nearby state.”
Simpson’s lawyer argued that the NYPD officer, who was arrested Jan. 28, was suffering behind bars at Brooklyn’s federal lock-up. He would be safe in the care of his parents at their Long Island home, Simpson’s lawyer added, noting that the suspect’s father is a retired cop himself.
Simpson (photo) has faced awful conditions since being jailed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, his attorney Todd Greenberg said. In one instance, Simpson’s cellmate went “crazy,” and responding corrections officers assaulted Simpson, the attorney said.
“He was slammed to the ground, put in handcuffs, pepper sprayed,” Greenberg said. “He thinks his jaw is broken and he can’t get medical attention.”
But Long Island Federal Court Judge Denis Hurley said Simpson would be a danger to the community if released, citing his “compulsion” for child porn. The judge added that he believes the suspended cop is also a flight risk.
The Brooklyn cop, who got on the job in 2018, is accused of using Twitter to connect with 46 teens between 13 and 17 years old from April to November 2020, the feds charge.
He moved the conversations from Twitter to Snapchat, TikTok or Discord and would try to FaceTime the kids for video sex, prosecutors said. Simpson allegedly got 18 sexually explicit photos and 33 videos on Twitter alone.
He also encouraged girls he had contact with online to commit self-harm, including gagging and spanking themselves, as well as asking one girl to wrap a belt around her throat, according to the feds.
“I like watching you choke yourself,” the cop messaged one 15-year-old girl, according to court papers.
Greenberg denied the rape accusations on Friday while obliquely admitting to some of the child porn allegations.
“Never, never, never did he have sex with a child or meet up with a child or teenager. He absolutely denies those allegations,” Greenberg said.
“We’re going to accept responsibility here down the road,” Greenberg said, but then added that Simpson was not going to admit guilt for something he didn’t do.
Simpson, who has not yet been charged with rape, faces 11 counts of sexual exploitation of a child as well as attempted sexual exploitation of a child in a case with nine Jane Doe victims and two John Does