The most severely brutalized victim was a gay 30-year-old Hispanic immigrant known in his Bronx neighborhood as “la Reina,” Spanish for “the Queen.” He was playful, flirty and always ready for a party, neighbors said. At the bodega below the apartment he shared with his brother, he often bought sodas for teenagers.
The ringleader of the street crew was known on his block as a stocky 23-year-old thug with tattoos all over his arms and a pit bull at his side, a marijuana dealer who would hang out on a fire escape and would put teenagers to work selling drugs. He had previous arrests for gun possession and robbery and, as a neighbor put it, “looked like trouble.”
“He acted like he was a big shot,” said the neighbor, Michael Perez, 20, of the ringleader, Idelfonso Mendez, 23. “It was just a matter of time.”
Their lives intersected last weekend in what city officials described on Saturday as the worst antigay attack in recent memory. It happened in an abandoned building in the Morris Heights section that neighbors said had been virtually taken over in recent months by youths who used it for wild parties and sex.
The authorities say nine young men who called themselves the Latin King Goonies lured the gay man to the building with the promise of a party and tortured him and the two 17-year-olds they suspected of having sex with him, subjecting them to beatings that went on for hours, gruesome sexual attacks with a small baseball bat and the wooden handle of a toilet plunger, and cigarette burns on the genitals of the older man.
The attacks unfolded inside 1910 Osborne Place, a four-story brick building with a lime-green door on a third-floor porch. The building is across the street from an elementary school on a quiet block in Morris Heights, a largely Hispanic neighborhood. But neighbors said that, lately, it had become a magnet for trouble, with music blasting in the small hours of the morning, young men and boys drinking on the stoop, and, on several occasions, police officers breaking up the crowds but making no arrests.
Officials said Saturday that the building’s owner had paid fines on two Buildings Department violations — one for doing work without a permit, another for having too many tenants — since 2005. Both had followed complaints to the city’s 311 line.
A makeshift tribute appeared on the steps Saturday: pink roses with a card calling for “Prayers for healing — for our community.” Gov. David A. Paterson, five members of the City Council, and a coterie of other politicians and ministers marched down a block to show solidarity with the victims.
The 30-year-old gay man and his 40-year-old brother, who neighbors said were from Ecuador, lived two blocks away, in a fifth-floor apartment at the corner of Loring Place South and West Burnside Avenue. During the attacks, investigators said, some members of the group went to the apartment, beat the older brother and stole $1,000, debit cards and a 52-inch television set.
On Saturday, the brothers’ neighbors gave a harrowing account of having heard banging at their door early Monday, and opening it to find the older brother, his face and head covered with blue and white masking tape, his hands tied behind him with white string. Behind the gag, they said, they heard him cry, “Ayúdame!” (“Help me!”). They took him in, cut the bindings and called the police, spawning a weeklong investigation that led to the arrest of seven of the gang members late Thursday and early Friday.
Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Saturday that those suspects had “made statements implicating themselves in this crime.” An eighth suspect, Elmer Confresi, 23, turned himself in on Saturday, while the ninth, Rudy Vargas-Perez, 22, reneged on a promise made through a lawyer to turn himself and remained at large, Mr. Kelly said.
Besides Mr. Mendez and Mr. Confresi, the suspects are David Rivera, 21, who had prior arrests for weapons possession and robbery; Bryan Almonte, 17; Steven Caraballo, 17; Elin Brayon Cepeda, 16; Nelson Falu, 17; and Denis Peitars, 17, all of the Bronx. They were still awaiting arraignment on Saturday night; officials said that the charges included kidnapping and sodomy, and that all would be charged as adults and with hate crimes.
“Like many New Yorkers, I was sickened by these antigay crimes,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Saturday afternoon. “The heartless men who committed these crimes should know that New Yorkers will not tolerate them.”
Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who is gay, added: “These crimes are not jokes. They are not games. They are things that eat away at the fabric of our city.”
Mr. Mendez, who the police said was the ringleader and was known by the street name “Cheto,” lived several miles away from the crime scene, in Bedford Park. Neighbors on his block, marred by graffiti and the scene of open drug markets, said that he had a crew of younger friends who were often with him but that he spent most of his time elsewhere. “He tried to look gangster,” Mr. Perez said. “He walked around like he was one of the neighborhood thugs.”
Several other suspects lived in the blocks surrounding Osborne Place, near the man known as “la Reina,” who worked at an optometrist’s store in the Parkchester section. Every day, he stopped by El Tio grocery, the bodega on the ground floor of his building, for juices, sandwiches and small talk, according to the manager, Xavier Peña. “He was a good friend,” Mr. Peña said. “He’s a very, very nice guy. He called me Papi, Papi.”
Many in the neighborhood used female pronouns to refer to the man, though they said he dressed in men’s clothes. “She’s gay, she’s like a woman, we think of her like a woman,” explained one neighbor, speaking on the condition that he not be named for fear of reprisals.
“She’s a very good person,” he added. “If you were ever hungry or thirsty, you could go to Reina, and she would help you.”
The police said the violence began about 3:30 a.m. Sunday, when, investigators said, the 17-year-old gang recruit was taken to the Osborne Place building, beaten, stripped, slashed with a box cutter and sodomized with a plunger handle after admitting that he had had a sexual encounter with the 30-year-old.
On Sunday night, the police said, gang members abducted a second 17-year-old, who was robbed of jewelry and beaten after telling them of having also had a liaison with the 30-year-old. The older man, told to bring 10 tall cans of a malt liquor called Four Loko to Osborne Place for a party, was then stripped, tied up, beaten, made to drink all 10 cans of the liquor, burned and sodomized with a small baseball bat, the police said.
Relatives of some of the suspects expressed shock at the charges on Saturday, describing them as young men who went to school and steered clear of trouble.
Carmen Almonte, 54, Bryan’s stepmother, said Bryan’s father had died three months ago, and that Bryan was admitted on Friday night to Montefiore Medical Center after going into diabetic shock during his arrest. “Bryan is not a bad kid,” she said. “If he was there, he didn’t do anything.”
Steven Caraballo’s parents said that he had enrolled in a G.E.D. program, lifted weights and played basketball with his three brothers. “He told me nothing is going on in the streets,” said his father, Jose. “He’s in school. He never got involved in this kind of thing.”
Genesis Suarez, who is 15, pregnant and referred to herself as Steven Caraballo’s wife, said Bryan Almonte was her sister’s boyfriend. “If you bother him he gets mad, like everybody,” she said of Bryan. “But he’s a good guy.”
Ada Cepeda said her son, Elin, had joined her from Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, three years ago; attended classes at Bronx International High School; and recently had expressed interest in becoming a police officer. He was in his room playing video games when the police arrested him on Thursday.
“I’m a realist,” Ms. Cepeda, 52, said. “It’s not that my son is a saint. But I doubt he would do that.”
