MA MOURNS LOSS
Tells of love for man slain on B’klyn street
When Luis Ocasio was found stabbed to death on a Brooklyn street, the locals identified him as “Stylez” — a homeless man left to sleep outdoors in a baby carriage by his losing battle with drug addiction.
The memories from 3,000 miles west in Carson, Calif., were starkly different, with family members who learned of his sad demise from news stories instead recalling a 37-year-old father of three who once found steady employment as a sanitation worker for a Brooklyn company.
“Besides the shock, seeing the paper, I’m just trying to deal with knowing how he was living,” his devastated mother Lizette Rodriguez, 53, told the Daily News by phone shortly after Ocasio’s body was discovered on Stanwix St. near Jefferson St. in Bushwick on Dec. 12, his throat slit.
Rodriguez, who moved to California from Brooklyn about two decades ago, recalled how her son’s life spiraled downhill after a work-related accident in 1999 left him addicted to painkillers.
“He fell off the truck and he had to have surgery on his leg,” she recalled.
“They put him on pain medication, then they dropped his insurance. He couldn’t work no more. From my understanding, he went to the county to try to get the insurance to get the medication he needed — and he started going to the streets.”
A worried Rodriguez encouraged her son to join her on the West Coast. But with relatives and his own young children tying him to New York, Ocasio didn’t want to leave — staying on and off with his sister at his stepmother’s house in Bushwick, often opting to sleep in the streets.
“He didn’t have to be homeless,” said Sabrina Diaz, 23, Ocasio’s sister. “He had places to stay … He chose to be on his own.”
Surveillance video obtained by the Daily News suggests Ocasio was acquainted with his killer, who has not been caught.
The video shows Ocasio walking down the block where he was killed side-by-side with a man in black pants, a black hoodie, and white sneakers just after 4 a.m., about two-and-a-half hours before his body was discovered. Minutes later they walk back down the block in the opposite direcdtion.
Suddenly, the killer lunges at Ocasio and slams him against a building’s metal gate as they struggle. Ocasio fights back, with the two briefly disappearing behind construction scaffolding as they struggle with each other.
When they reemerge, Ocasio is on the sidewalk, flailing his legs and rolling around as the killer stabs him repeatedly until the victim finally lays motionless on the sidewalk. The stabber steps away, looking back towards Ocasio, before coming back to the body. He appears to roll Ocasio over, possibly rifling through his pockets before walking off.
Several local witnesses recounted seeing a man following Ocasio down nearby Myrtle Ave. hours earlier, pointing his finger and making threats about money.
Detectives are looking deeper into Ocasio’s past for clues of a possible motive— a dark history of more than 40 arrests, many for sale or possession of drugs.
Ocasio’s painkiller habit escalated over time to harder drugs but the distance kept his mother in the dark about her son’s increasingly dangerous lifestyle. The last time she saw him in person, about five years ago, he seemed to be improving.
“He was doing better than he was now,” Rodriguez recalled. “He was working, he was in the supermarket working. And he tried.”
Last week, Rodriguez returned to New York to see her son for the last time. Gathering at a Brooklyn funeral home, she and Ocasio’s other relatives from around the country grappled with his gruesome death.
“This is too much,” she said. “I have to say goodbye to my son.”
Diaz remains shaken by the violent end of her brother’s life.
“It was so brutal,” she said. “Who would do this? It was a freakish incident. My brother was loved by everybody … He didn’t deserve this.”
Dad Luis Ocasio Sr., 53, remembered his son as a good kid and vowed that justice will be served.
“We don’t know who did this but we have police in our family,” he said. “They’ll get to the bottom of this and that person will be cuffed.”
Despite the unanswered questions in her son’s murder, Rodriguez places a measure of blame on the addictive narcotics that derailed his life.
“If he wouldn’t have had that accident, he would have been fine,” she said.
“He wanted to work, he wanted to get his his school diploma, because he didn’t. And he wanted to better himself for his kids. He wanted to be on his own. And he did it for a while.”