HIS GIFT OF LIFE REBORN
Freed after 27 years on shaky murder rap, dad fights for exoneration on a very merry Christmas
CHRISTMAS CAN GLOW with special magic when its joy intertwines with the happiest moments of life. So it was for Felipe Rodriguez at the age of 13. The year was 1978. His mother and stepfather flew with Felipe from Puerto Rico to New York to start new lives. They landed late in November, as the season’s lights were twinkling and the first snow was soon to fall.
There wasn’t much of a storm, just a 2-inch dusting. Still, after arriving from an island where it never snows, young Felipe found wonder in the flakes that dropped through the air and shimmered on everything.
The man Felipe considers his true father taught him to make a snow angel and later showed him the splendor of the Rockefeller Center tree.
Ten years passed before Christmas again lighted Felipe’s life.
Now a young man of 23, and dreaming of a future as an NYPD helicopter pilot, Felipe had fallen in love with a woman named Lloyda, who loved him in return.
On Christmas Eve 1988, Felipe and Lloyda sat by the tree they had decorated. Lloyda presented Felipe with a white box. Inside, he found a suit custom-made by a tailor to whom Lloyda had brought a shirt and trousers worn by Felipe while working as a maintenance man. The tailor had used the garments to size the suit.
“I hope you didn’t spend all your money,” Felipe said. “It’s all worth it,” Lloyda answered. This Christmas, three decades later, will far surpass those cherished moments, Felipe is sure.
Because this Christmas will be the first Christmas Felipe Rodriguez celebrates as a free man after being in prison for almost 27 years, having been convicted in 1990 of savagely killing a mother of three in a sexually-driven spasm of violence.
It will also be yet another Christmas observed by the family of Maureen McNeill Fernandez, whose oldest son, Louis McNeill, reviles Rodriguez as a monster who butchered his mother and irreparably scarred her loved ones.
The official record holds that Rodriguez stabbed and slashed McNeill Fernandez 37 times. A Queens jury found him guilty of second-degree murder. A judge imposed a life sentence, with first parole eligibility at the 25-year mark.
While such a verdict demands respect, today’s standards of CSI evidence, cell phone location technology and healthy skepticism about eyewitness identifications gnaw at the validity of Rodriguez’s conviction.
Bizarre testimony by an admitted liar and identification by a highly intoxicated man dominated his trial, overmatching an ill-prepared defense lawyer who failed to show the jury that the key witness had, in effect, exonerated Rodriguez in a taped conversation.
Now, that admitted liar — the key witness in the case — has signaled a readiness to recant some or all of the testimony that sent Rodriguez to prison.
“I didn’t know that the police were lying to me,” Javier Ramos told the Daily News on Thursday before referring questions to his lawyer.
The lawyer, Adam Perlmutter, told The News on Friday:
“There is no question that a grave injustice has occurred to Felipe Rodriguez for reasons beyond Javier Ramos. We are looking forward to meeting in the very near future with the Queens district attorney’s office.”
The verdict plunged Rodriguez into a hell of locked steel and homicidal violence from which he rose over the course of tormented decades to
redemption through his trust in God and a commitment to good works on Earth — even if a prison yard would be the only plot of Earth he ever knew.
Rodriguez came to speak as fluently about the Bible and philosopher and theologian St. Augustine (“That dude could write,” Rodriguez says.) as about icepick and knifepoint slayings.
An acolyte of St. Francis of Assisi, he performed as an altar server for Timothy Cardinal Dolan at a prison Mass, offered prayers sought by guards and counseled inmates, including serial killer Arthur Shawcross, who found his way to confession with a priest under Rodriguez’s guidance.
Now, as he nears celebrating the birth of Christ, Rodriguez is a free and productive man thanks to New Yorkers who found him worthy.
Certain he was wrongly convicted, two lawyers — the Innocence Project’s Nina Morrison and top criminal practitioner Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma — have labored hard for Rodriguez, Morrison for a decade, Margulis-Ohnuma more recently.
Gov. Cuomo granted Rodriguez clemency last December.
And Queens District Attorney Richard Brown has ordered a review to determine whether or not Rodriguez’s name should be fully cleared.
“We always take such claims seriously. As a result of the request of Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project we have begun a review of this case,” a spokesman for Brown said. “We are endeavoring a search of the long-archived materials necessary for us to facilitate our work.”
Police Commissioner James O’Neill, too, has ordered a search for the NYPD’s musty case records.
Hotel workers union president Peter Ward facilitated Rodriguez’s employment as a $24-an-hour house attendant at the Row NYC Hotel.
Not everyone thinks that springing Rodriguez was the right thing to do.
“Cuomo has no idea what he did in releasing a violent felon,” says Louis McNeill, who sat through Rodriguez’s trial as a 15-year-old while helping his grandmother raise two younger siblings.
He described his mother as “a spunky woman,” adding that the murder “tore the whole family into pieces.”
lll The killer was out for blood. He held a woman captive. Her name was Maureen Fernandez. She was a mother of three and liked to be called Nina.
He drove Fernandez to an empty and ugly place. The tires of his car crunched on graveled asphalt as they passed into the trucking yard behind a grocery warehouse in Queens. There would be no witnesses as the night headed toward dawn on Thanksgiving Day 1987.
The man could murder Fernandez easily. She was a small woman, 5-feet-3 and 117 pounds. After drinking vodka plain and vodka with orange juice, doubles, across a long night, she was virtually incapacitated. Out came a knife with a 4-inch blade.
lll From the moment he was arrested, Rodriguez maintained his innocence. That is not surprising. Prisons are filled with “innocent” men.
Rare, though, is the convict who refuses to apply for all-but-guaranteed parole because he finds the price of freedom too high: He would have to admit guilt to open the prison gates.
As he approached a quarter-century behind bars, authorities scheduled Rodriguez’s first appearance before a parole board.
Faith rewarded, a life redeemed
With a clean prison record — with even corrections officers pulling for him — there was an excellent chance Rodriguez would walk free to embrace a son from whom he had been torn when the boy was 3, as well as a mother who had grown old waiting for him to come home.
“I apologized to my son and to my moms, the only people that I needed to apologize to, and I said, ‘I’m so sorry,’” Rodriguez recalls. “My innocence was non-negotiable. So I said in prison: ‘Unless you acknowledge that I’m innocent, you will not release me.’”
Two years later, when his next parole eligibility arrived, Rodriguez was even better positioned, having raised money from inmates to buy Christmas gifts for disabled children, support elderly nuns and purchase a golden ciborium that holds consecrated hosts in the prison chapel.
Rodriguez was just as adamant that he would not seek parole.
“I am willing to die in prison,” he told corrections officials.
Peter Early, deputy superintendent for security at the Otisville Correctional Facility, took Rodriguez at his word.
“I have the most respect for him of all the inmates I met over 36 years,” Early says. “I had no reason to disbelieve what he was telling me about being innocent.”
lll The killer stabbed Maureen Fernandez with hacking thrusts. The blade severed Fernandez’s carotid artery and jugular vein, penetrated her right kidney and serrated her liver. She hemorrhaged. Blood gushed from her body.
Still, the man wanted more. He pulled Fernandez’s jacket and shredded pink shirt up over her head. The back of the shirt bore her nickname between flowers. The front carried the words, “They may be small but they are all mine.”
The man pulled Fernandez’s jeans down her legs. He ripped her underwear down and slashed her across the top of her privates.
Finished with the knife, the man folded a dollar bill in four and placed it in a smear of blood on the jacket. Then, he left Maureen McNeill Fernandez tilted on her side, her eyes open, dead or soon dead.
lll The case against Felipe Rodriguez was, at first, a case of no’s.
No witnesses. No motive. No connection between Rodriguez and Fernandez. No DNA evidence. No criminal record. No history of violence. No knife. No description of bloodstains on the clothing of the man presumed to be the killer.
No trail from McNeill Fernandez’s last known hours to the murder scene.
She spent her final day tending to her 2-year-old daughter, who was being treated for a stomach virus at Brooklyn’s now-shuttered Wyckoff Hospital. There was another mother and child in the room. As night approached, McNeill Fernandez started drinking. A nurse reported that she seemed “giddy.”
Around midnight or 1 a.m., McNeill Fernandez called her husband on a payphone. He could tell she was intoxicated. They fought. She returned to the hospital room, appearing upset. She asked the other mother to change a $10 bill. The other mother had only two singles. McNeill Fernandez traded her $10 for the two bills and said they would settle up later. She left, perhaps carrying the single the killer would stick to her coat.
The hospital lobby was deserted. McNeill Fernandez walked toward an exit door.
“Good morning,” she said to a security guard.
“Have a good Thanksgiving,” he replied.
She said she’d called a cab. He stepped into an office off the lobby. A few minutes passed. The guard hadn’t heard the hospital door open or close. He checked. McNeill Fernandez was looking out through the glass, as if she were waiting for someone to pick her up. Three minutes later, the guard heard the door open and close. He assumed someone had picked up McNeill Fernandez. She was gone.
Although a cab service reported answering a call from a woman at about the right time and place, the service also reported that the driver failed to find the caller. Meanwhile, the guard provided cops with an additional piece of information: He saw fellow security guard Javier Ramos at the hospital that night.
McNeill Fernandez was next definitively seen around 2:30 a.m. or 3 a.m., when she entered an establishment in Bushwick variously known as the LaFiesta Social Club, the Little Liva Bar and the Liva Little Bar. A man accompanied her.
The bartender knew McNeill Fernandez through one of her brothers. He was concerned. She said she was okay, that she knew the man. They sat at the end of the bar. She left with the man around 3:30 a.m.
Six hours later, on an unseasonably warm Thanksgiving, two NYPD officers responded to a 10-54 call — a report of a body down — from a security service. The cops sent up the chain that an unidentified female had been stabbed to death, partially stripped and left to die on the ground.
Detectives focused on McNeill Fernandez’s companion.
A street hustler named Robert Thompson had spoken to Fernandez and her companion in the bar after smoking five joints and drinking half a fifth of rum, plus downing three double shots of rum in their company.
A week after the murder, Thompson described the man to detectives as having reddish brown hair. Rodriguez’s hair was jet black. The bartender said the man was “stocky” at 5-foot-8 and weighed 175 to 200 pounds. Rodriguez was 5-foot-11 and weighed 140 pounds.
Still, after almost a year-and-a-half, Thompson became the sole witness to pick Rodriguez out of a lineup, eventually proclaiming to a jury that getting drunk improved his sight and memory.
The only witness who connected Rodriguez to the murder was admitted liar Javier Ramos, the security guard seen at the hospital the night Fernandez disappeared.
Rodriguez and Ramos were friends. Initially a suspect, Ramos told police he had loaned his car on the night before Thanksgiving to a pal named Richie. Around 6 a.m. the following day, Ramos said, Richie burst into his apartment with the words:
“I got into an argument with a stupid b---h and I had to prove to her that I was a man.”
Later that morning, Ramos claimed, he found his car thick with blood and cleaned up the mess without calling police.
After detectives established Richie’s innocence, Ramos switched his story, now saying that it was Rodriguez who had returned the bloody car and who had uttered the still more incriminating exclamation:
“I got into an argument with a stupid b---h and I had to stab her to prove to her that I was a man.”
Ramos made no mention of bloodstains on Rodriguez or his clothing, a near certain outcome of a multi-wound close-contact killing. Nor did his account match with the murder scene.
While Ramos indicated that blood poured from McNeill Fernandez in his car, the medical examiner noted no trail leading the dozen or so feet from where the killer parked the vehicle to McNeill Fernandez’s resting place.
The prosecution filled out its evidence
with additional circumstantial dots.
Thompson, the man who had been high and intoxicated in the bar, stepped to the fore with a story that first appeared in NYPD files six months after the murder. Suddenly, detectives wrote, Thompson had recalled that the man in the bar had tattooed the fingers of his left hand with “LOVE” in all caps. Rodriguez had no tattoos. Well, Thompson said, maybe Rodriguez had written the letters on his fingers.
Rodriguez is left-handed. A lefthanded person would naturally write on his right hand.
The DA’s office searched for witnesses to corroborate that Rodriguez made a habit of writing letters on his hand.
Investigators came up with a onetime rival auxiliary cop who hadn’t seen Rodriguez in several years, plus a hospital worker who had encountered Rodriguez a few times for a few minutes and believed he had markings on his hands — at a time when Rodriguez did construction work.
The prosecutors also called the bartender to the stand. After failing to pick out Rodriguez in a lineup six months after allegedly serving him across the bar for an hour, the bartender pointed to Rodriguez in court two years later.
As the prosecution connected its dots, Rodriguez’s defense lawyer was ill prepared, the trial transcript shows.
Jenny Maiolo was a well-liked fixture of the overwhelmed Queens criminal courts of that era. But unknown to her colleagues — and certainly to Rodriguez — Maiolo was under intense pressure as his trial neared.
A widow who had lost her husband due to complications after a dental procedure, Maiolo had just begun to steal an eventual half-million dollars from clients to stave off loansharks demanding payment for a family member’s gambling debts.
Her distraction extended to failing to respond after the Queens DA and federal authorities provided notice that a cooperating witness had exonerated another client who had been convicted of murder.
Maiolo’s inaction cost that innocent man three years in prison.
Most tragically for Rodriguez, Maiolo failed to secure and play in court a police-supervised, surreptitious recording on which Ramos offered yet another story about the allegedly bloody car supposedly used in the murder.
As a result, the jury never heard Ramos say that, in fact, he had not loaned his car to anyone, that he had never cleaned up any blood, and that a child’s spilled juice probably caused the stain.
When the jury foreman pronounced Rodriguez guilty, Lloyda exploded in anguish.
“It was like a scream of when somebody that you love dearly is taken from you,” Rodriguez remembers.
lll The date: June 16, 1990. The place: D Block, Gallery 3, Cell 7 at the Great Meadows Correctional Facility, known to prisoners as Gladiator School.
“They got Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings,” Rodriguez says. “The tension is so high you feel it in the back of your neck.”
Rodriguez collapsed on his bunk and wept. The first years of his sentence were years of rage, stoked by the fear of “losing yourself in a black hole forever.”
Then, reading a book by former Navy Seal Richard Marcinko, he came across a proverb that holds: For he who opts for revenge, make sure you dig two graves.
With anger eating him alive, Rodriguez fought to look forward with hope.
“There was days where I just wished I could fly away like a bird and just disappear,” he remembers. “There were days I just walked like a zombie, just because I needed to move. No strength, no focus, no purpose — just walking.”
In time, he accepted loneliness and suffering as his only two friends. He would allow only one of those unwelcome friends to visit on any given day.
Determined to maintain a relationship with his son, Felipe Jr., Rodriguez sent notes and cards home regularly, with the total running into the thousands. Felipe Jr. wrote back just as much.
“My son did 27 years with me,” Rodriguez laments. “His soul, his spirit, my son never stopped being in prison with me. So he distanced himself from everybody, and he went to prison with me.”
Nine years into his sentence, Rodriguez and Lloyda married in prison. But four years later he let Lloyda go because, as he tells inmates who have wives or girlfriends, “Don’t put the handcuffs on her because you’re cuffed.”
Violence and death were like familiar cellmates.
An icepick through the heart took a prisoner standing next to Rodriguez at the Auburn Correctional Facility. The victim, roughly 20, was suspected of stealing a gay lover and died calling, “Mommy. I want my mommy.”
Entrusted to hold heroin for a gang, the prisoner in the cell next to Rodriguez’s in Sing Sing shot up one night, danced around and hanged himself with a bed sheet.
After a member of the Bloods switched allegiance to the Crips, gang members ordered him to shed a cross on a chain given to him by his mother. He refused. His former friends in Sing Sing took turns stabbing the defiant prisoner with a butterfly knife.
Why and how anyone finds faith is a mystery. For Rodriguez, a chance encounter with a prayer group kindled a devotion to Catholicism, the religion in which he was raised but in which he had never been particularly active.
As the years passed, he tried to apply the teachings of Christianity even as he could not help but question God’s designs.
“There was days when you just sat down somewhere and you just begged God, you just begged, you said, ‘Please, if you do exist — if you are real, if you are true — why are you putting me through this?’” he remembers.
Always, though, he believed that God would come through for him, whether as a free man or on his prison deathbed.
A letter to the Innocence Project, one of hundreds he wrote appealing for help, started the ball rolling a long, slow course to a telephone call with Cuomo.
At the time, Rodriguez was painting a mural on the wall of a prison office. (Yes, he discovered artistic talent in prison, including the ability to build ships out of Popsicle sticks and Elmer’s glue.) He was ordered to go to a prison superintendent’s office.
The leadership of the Otisville Correctional Institution — his tenth home since incarceration — met him there.
“You ok, Mr. Felipe?” the superintendent asked.
She had always called him Mr. Rodriguez. His eyes grew watery and his heart jumped, and then he knew that his faith had been rewarded, and he wept.
“In the years I’ve worked in corrections, I’ve never had the privilege to do this,” the superintendent said. “But today I have it and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. You’re a free man.”
Shortly, Cuomo’s voice came over the phone.
“Mr. Rodriguez, state your number for the record. This will be the last time you state that number.” “90A7694.” “By the power vested in me as governor of New York State, I hereby order your immediate release from state custody. I want to wish you the best of luck, and I hope you are able to restart your life and make something of it.”
He has and he is, while shadowed by the frenzied violence inflicted on Maureen McNeill Fernandez and the enduring suffering of her family.
A young woman named Tina falls in love with a young man named Matt. The time comes for Matt to meet Tina’s father, a formidable man named Peter.
The meeting goes well. Matt is a lawyer. He explains that he studied at Cardozo Law School because two professors, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, were the brains of the Innocence Project, an organization that has won exoneration of more than 300 convicted prisoners through DNA testing.
Tina’s father admired the Innocence Project, and Matt was happy to make an introduction.
So it was that the proud father, Peter Ward, (right) president of the New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council, sat down with Scheck. Ward arrived with three pledges:
He would raise money for the Innocence Project because he felt deeply that the criminal justice system is often stacked against poor and minority defendants. He would help with the Innocence Project’s legislative agenda, bringing the muscle of 35,000 members to bear in Albany. And he would help find jobs for released prisoners. So it was that Felipe Rodriguez walked into Ward’s office fresh out of prison and living in a halfway house. “Mr. Ward, all I want is to go to bed at night and not hear the institutional background noise,” Rodriguez said. “I want a little apartment where I have some peace and quiet.” Rodriguez told his story. Ward interrupted, fibbing that he needed to get a bottle of water in the next room. “I was really going inside to get a bottle of water because I was starting to cry,” Ward recalls. He contacted an executive at Highgate, one of the city’s largest hotel management