‘FALSELY ACCUSED’
2 Bx. men jailed 3 years on slay rap before acquittal
Two Bronx men acquitted of murder and suing the NYPD said a detective from a precinct where the quality of police work has come under scrutiny ignored a witness’ description of the shooter and relied on two women who later testified that they were pressured into falsely identifying the men as the killers.
Zaire Bansey, now 23, and Peter Hajdari, now 22, said they haven’t emotionally recovered from the nearly three years they spent at Rikers Island before a jury set them free in June 2017. “If we continue to live angry we’ll never get past it,” Hajdari said. “So right now, all we do is day by day.”
Bansey described “a constant state of depression. The readapting, to this day, is very tough. You don’t know who’s with you, who’s against you.”
The case involved the shooting deaths of Dennis Rodriguez and Armani Gonzalez, 24 and 21, respectively.
Jeffrey Guzman, the lawyer for Bansey and Hajdari, said Detective Sergio Lovera of the 52nd Precinct was “willfully negligent” and looking to close the case regardless of the evidence. “It’s a way to get from point A to point Z as quickly and conveniently as possible, and whether that happens to throw an innocent person under the bus, that doesn’t matter,” Guzman said. “It’s just about getting the conviction and closing the case. Even a cursory review of the evidence that they had would raise doubts that these were actually the perpetrators, but those leads were never followed.”
Lovera did not respond to requests for comment.
Questions about the soundness of the police investigation were raised during the trial by lawyers for Bansey and Hajdari. But six months after they were acquitted, Lovera was promoted to detective first grade, the highest rank for an investigator.
The NYPD declined to comment on the allegations because litigation is pending. It also would not say if detectives are looking for another suspect or if cops believe the jury cleared the real killers. The department also declined to say if the trial had been considered when Police Commissioner Jame O’Neill promoted Lovera.
NYPD investigators are looking into three recent 52nd Precinct cases that were profiled by the Daily News. Two were dismissed because a judge didn’t believe the testimony of the arresting officers, and the other involved a gun bust in which, based on video, it appeared police changed the time of the arrest in court documents to make it appear that they didn’t search a suspect’s home without consent.
In 2018, The News reported the Bronx district attorney’s office was investigating the methods used by cops at that precinct to make gun arrests. The probe ended with no arrests and no disciplinary action by the NYPD. Lawyers, however, say the problem at the precinct persists.
The double murder occurred Oct. 5, 2014, about 4 a.m. outside Xtreme Lounge on Valentine Ave. in Fordham.
Bansey and Hajdar had gone to the club with three other people, including women they know who were then 17 and 18. They had just left the club when a brawl involving a baseball bat and knives broke out. It led to gunfire.
Two men were slashed, another was clubbed in the head, a fourth was shot in the leg and Gonzalez and Rodriguez were shot. Rodriguez died at the scene. Gonzalez died a couple of months later.
Bansey and Hajdari were faced with a double-murder rap, with prosecutors suggesting the victims were not the intended targets. They say the case against them was a sham.
According to Guzman, at trial Lovera dismissed as unimportant an account that a black man with dreads and a black hoodie had opened fire and got away in an SUV.
Bansey, who is black and had two braids of hair, was wearing a T-shirt. He left the scene in an ambulance with Rodriguez. Hajdari took the female pals home, driving the gray Chevy Impala in which they had arrived with Bansey.
Lovera later told Bansey and Hajdari the women had implicated them in the shooting. “We got the females,” Hajdari remembers Lovera saying. “We don’t have to worry about anything else. This seals the deal.” But, Guzman said, at trial the women testified that police told them they would be charged with murder if they didn’t implicate Bansey and Hajdari.