The day my boy didn't come home
Pat Comunale will never forget the day his beloved son Joey went missing — it simply crushes him every time.
“It’s the worst, it’s the worst,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes during an exclusive sit-down with The Post.
“On Sunday afternoon, it’s football day — we talk about our fantasy football teams. I randomly called and I didn’t hear back,” the dad said of that day, Nov. 13, 2016.
After growing increasingly worried over the next few hours, Pat decided to start calling Joey’s friends.
“They said they went out the night before to the Gilded Lily [nightclub] and left,” he said.
“We started talking to some of the girls he was with, and they hadn’t heard from him.”
At 5 p.m., Pat went to police in his hometown of Stamford, Conn., to file a missing-person report.
“I knew then. I knew. I knew when I didn’t hear from my son. I knew something was terribly wrong,” he told The Post.
Three days later “the police came to the house. You know the rest,” he said, fighting back tears.
“Not a day goes by, not a day,” the father added. “You just question: Why him? It’s just so senseless . . . It makes no sense, except for the fact that you have some really bad people out there.”
When Joey went missing, one of Pat’s first phone calls was to his brother, Joe, a detective with the Bedford Police Department.
Tracking down social-media accounts of others at the party, Joe zeroed in on James Rackover, and court records show he called him at 10:20 p.m. on Nov. 13 — just as Rackover and co-defendant Lawrence Dilione were allegedly driving to New Jersey to bury Joey’s body.
James admitted that Joey had been partying in his apartment, but claimed that “the last time I saw him was when we walked the girls out around 7 a.m.,” court records state.
“We put them in an Uber that I paid from my account. Joey said he was going to get cigarettes and I never saw him again,” Rackover allegedly told the victim’s uncle.
Pat remains mystified by the motive for his son’s death.
“I think, eventually, the story comes out,” he said.