Outrage over fiend’s release
Shocking tale of ’84 Bronx massacre – and why killer of 10 is now free
CHRISTINA Rivera was just a baby when a cocaine-crazed addict walked into her twofamily home in East New York, Brooklyn, packing two silencerequipped .22-caliber handguns, and systematically shot everyone there but her.
There were 10 dead in all — her mother, her two older brothers, six other children ages 4 to 14 and another young mother who was six months pregnant. Each one was shot in the head. It was April 15, 1984, a rainy Palm Sunday.
Rivera, the massacre’s only survivor, was left blood-splattered and screaming in her dead mother’s lap. She was just 11 months old. “The baby had been sitting in her mother’s lap” as the mother was shot, retired Brooklyn Detective Joseph Hall remembered Saturday of the crime scene.
Her mother, Carmen Perez, 20, had been feeding baby Christina from a can of chocolate pudding, when the addict, Christopher Thomas, a frequent visitor to the home, stormed inside.
“The mother had the pudding in one hand and the spoon in the other, and there was a kid on either side of the mother,” Hall said.
“All three of them were dead on the couch, with their eyes wide open, as if they were still watching the TV. “It was like a wax museum.” Four other victims, all children, were watching the television when they were shot dead.
In a back bedroom, the second mother, pregnant Virginia Lopez, 24, had been shot in her bed.
Both her sons were also dead, one of them found collapsed partially behind his mother’s bedboard, as if he had been trying to hide.
“When I found out Thomas had been freed, I became sick to my stomach,” Hall said of learning that the man behind the massacre had “maxed out” of his prison sentence.
Cleared by a jury of murder due to his very evident drug-crazed state, Thomas had served two-thirds of his 50-year manslaughter sentence and was sprung, as mandated by state law, for good behavior.
Thomas, now 68, was quietly let loose from an upstate prison nearly three months ago.
“He should have never seen the light of day,” Hall said.
Now-retired Lt. Herbert Hohmann, who was in charge of the investigation, agrees: “It was a coldblooded murder.”
BY any sane accounting, Christopher Thomas was a very bad man. Days before the massacre, he had broken into estranged wife Charmane’s home in The Bronx, beating her senseless.
Thomas, then 34, believed Charmane was sleeping with his cocaine dealer, Enrique Bermudez.
That’s who Thomas was looking for when he burst into Bermudez’s home at 1080 Liberty Ave. But Bermudez wasn’t home. Instead, Thomas shot everyone else in the house, including Bermudez’s pregnant wife and two boys, sparing only the baby.
Thomas wouldn’t be behind bars for about a month, and in that time he allegedly sexually attacked his own mother. The mom told cops Thomas had sodomized and attempted to rape her. And so Thomas was conveniently already in jail on sex-assault charges in the Bronx House of Detention when cops linked him to the massacre.
Thomas indeed owned a .22-caliber handgun, Charmane had told cops.
The gun was gone, she told him. But one of their children had pocketed one of the gun’s shell casings.
Thomas had fired the gun in their Bronx apartment, shooting at a mouse that had skittered across the floor. The kid took the casing as a souvenir.
For all his other many faults, it was the massacre charge that caused a crowd to gather as Thomas was escorted by cops into a police station house in East New York on the evening of June 19, 1984.
Full of hate, the mob spat and cursed at him, The Post reported at the time. Inside the station house, Thomas was put into a lineup.
At least one witness recognized him from his frequent visits to Bermudez’s house and identified him as the drug-crazed guy they had seen at the house on the day of the savage killings.
Several prosecution witnesses would testify they had seen him, bolstering the case against him.
But these witnesses also testified that Thomas was whacked out on cocaine.
And while their testimony successfully tied Thomas to the slayings, it also convinced jurors that Thomas was suffering from an “extreme emotional disturbance.”
He was therefore guilty only of 10 counts of the lesser charge of manslaughter, the jury found in June 1985.
“Christopher Thomas belongs in jail for the rest of his life,” the trial judge, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Ronald Aiello, said after the verdict.
When he sentenced Thomas three months later, Aiello recalled another murderer who had crossed his path, “Son of Sam” David Berkowitz.
“I thought I had met the worst person in my life then,” Aiello told Thomas. “Until I met you.” Thomas stood in court expressionless as the judge continued.
“What you did was brutal, callous and inhumane,” he said.
“Taking adult lives is bad enough. but taking the lives of children the way you did — putting a gun to their head and literally blowing their brains out — was the most cowardly act possible.”
Aiello slammed Thomas with the maximum sentence allowed for manslaughter: 8 ¹/3 to 25 years in prison for each of the 10 deaths.
Under Aiello’s senence, if a pa- role board never granted Thomas parole, he would remain behind bars for a hypothetical 25 years times 10: a total of 250 years.
It’s unclear whether the judge knew that this sentence, while headline-grabbing, was a fiction.
UNDER New York state law, then as now, the amount of time anyone can stay in prison on manslaughter, a “B” violent felony, is capped at 50 years.
“Even if you’re convicted on 100 different manslaughters, the most you could do would be 50,” says veteran defense lawyer Daniel Gotlin.
But Thomas also benefited by a now-defunct law that mandated that inmates be sprung after serving two-thirds of their sentence providing they exhibited “good behavior.”
Under current law, Thomas would have to serve out six-sevenths of his sentence before getting sprung on good behavior.
“Instead of releasing him now at age 68, you would be able to keep him in prison — and pay for all his elder-care expenses until he was in his mid-70s,” says leftist defense lawyer Ron Kuby.
Thomas is now living at an undisclosed location in Queens, where he will be monitored by parole officials for the final third of his sentence, said state Corrections spokesman Patrick Bailey.
“He’s on parole now for the next 17 years,” Bailey said.
“He has a parole officer. He has to report periodically to his parole officer,” Bailey said.
So technically, at least until June 6, 2034, “he is not set free,” Bailey said.
THAT’S a distinction likely lost on Rivera, the massacre’s only surviving victim. In the years since the massacre, Rivera, who declined to be interviewed on Saturday, was raised until age 14 by her grandmother, Felicia Rivera.
Then she was raised into adulthood by a big-hearted cop, Joanne Jaffe, and Jaffe’s husband.
Later the chief of NYPD community affairs and now retired, Jaffe had been one of the first of the many officers who responded to the massacre that day.
A front page New York Post photo shows Jaffe holding the tot at the crime scene.
Jaffe would watch over the baby through the night, first at the hospital and later at the NYPD East New York station house.
Jaffe has remained in Rivera’s life ever since, even formally adopting her in 2014 when Rivera was 31.
“I was assigned to her and fell in love with her,” Jaffe told The New York Times in a 2014 interview.
“I can’t imagine my life without her.”
As a young girl, Rivera thought of Jaffe as “the funny police lady who would come by,” Rivera told the Times.
Rivera learned of what happened to her mother and family only at age 10, after a classmate blurted out the truth.
Eventually, Rivera told the Times, she began to think of Jaffe as her mother.
“It was unbelievable to watch her thrive, this little scared child,” Jaffe recalled.
When the grandmother found caring for the adolescent too taxing, Jaffe gladly took Rivera into her home.
Today, Rivera still lives in her grandmother’s Washington Heights apartment, where one longtime neighbor described her as “quiet, keeps to herself, doesn’t say much.”
The neighbor, Aida Martinez, 66, watched Rivera grow up.
“This child, you can tell she has something she’s guarded for many years. She has something inside her,” Martinez said.
Told that Thomas was free, Martinez burst out, “Impossible!”
“How could they let him out?” she railed. “That’s a dangerous man. No, it’s not fair.”
“He should have gotten the death penalty or life in prison.”