Eight gang suspects arrested in the torture of two teenage boys and a man in an anti-gay attack were arraigned on Sunday on hate crime charges, standing in a courtroom with their heads down and their hands cuffed behind them as their relatives wept.
The charges include robbery, assault, sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment as hate crimes. The defendants didn’t enter pleas and police were looking for a ninth suspect, who had been expected to turn himself in, but didn’t show up.
The nine members of the Latin King Goonies gang earlier this month heard a rumor one of their teenage recruits was gay and then found the teen, stripped him, beat him and sodomized him with a plunger handle until he confessed to having had sex with a man, police said. The gang members then found a second teen they suspected was gay and tortured him and the man, police said.
The gang members found the man by inviting him to a house, telling him they were having a party, police said. When he arrived, they burned, beat and tortured him for hours and sodomized him with a miniature baseball bat, police said.
The suspects arraigned on Sunday were identified as Ildefonzo Mendez, 23; Elmer Confresi, 23; David Rivera, 21; Steven Caraballo, Denis Peitars, Nelson Falu and Bryan Almonte, all 17; and Brian Cepeda, 16.
Bronx Criminal Court Judge Harold Adler set bail for Peitars and Caraballo at US$100,000 bond or US$50,000 cash; the other six were held without bail.
Two attorneys, Paul Horowitz and Fred Bittlingmeyer, represented the eight at the hearing.
Bittlingmeyer, representing one of the defendants, said his client only punched one of the complainants after the other defendants said they “were going to find out who the men are in this room and who the fags are in this room.”
Bittlingmeyer said if his client didn’t throw a punch he would have been attacked himself.
He also denied it was a scheme by a gang, describing it as people getting together on a Sunday night and “one individual let it get out of hand.”
The beatings, which occurred on Oct. 3 in the Bronx, followed a string of anti-gay attacks and teen suicides attributed to anti-gay bullying that have led to nationwide soul-searching.
Gay men and women live openly in the largely Hispanic neighborhood where the Oct. 3 beatings took place, Morris Heights, and while residents were disturbed by some past violent behavior blamed on the defendants, some said they hadn’t previously targeted homosexuals.
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