Not a thought for victim
Jury sees video of EMT-slay suspect focused on his own pain
The family of slain FDNY EMT Yadira Arroyo said they were outraged that the man accused of crushing her under the wheels of her ambulance was more concerned about his own injuries than he was about her death.
In the hours after Arroyo died on a Bronx street in 2017, her accused killer, Jose Gonzalez, whined to cops about injuries he said he suffered when he boarded the ambulance at White Plains Road and Watson Ave. in Soundview.
Gonzalez, in video prosecutors played to jurors at his trial in Bronx Criminal Court, callously told cops he was bleeding and had broken his hand, even as Arroyo’s broken body lay in the intersection.
“Did you notice that someone was under the ambulance?” one of the detectives asked him in the video.
“There was nobody. That’s a lie,” Gonzalez said.
“That’s not a lie,” the detective said. “I know what I saw, I know what I did,” Gonzalez said.
AJ Hernandez, Arroyo’s uncle, said he had heard enough.
“We’ve seen most, if not all, of the videos including the way she was killed and left to die, in the middle of the street, naked, face-down,” Hernandez said during a break. “And he’s talking about those kinds of things as if they matter compared to what he did. How many people will it take for him to do that to for the justice system to realize, ‘Hey, he’s a bad guy. He doesn’t belong out there.’ ”
Cops said Gonzalez was high on PCP on March 16, 2017 when he allegedly jumped on Arroyo’s rear bumper.
When Arroyo stepped out of the ambulance to investigate, Gonzalez slid behind the wheel and took off.
He ran her over twice and dragged her into the intersection while her partner desperately tried to stop him, prosecutors said.
Arroyo, 44, a mother of five and a 14year FDNY veteran, was died at the scene.
Former FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro was among the Arroyo family’s supporters in court on Thursday.
The case dragged across more than 50 hearings before Gonzalez was finally found fit for trial, with a court date set last September after seemingly endless legal wrangling on his mental competence.
Gonzalez had 31 arrests before the killing, and faces charges of murder, manslaughter, vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs.