The pink house warren street brooklyn3/16/2024 The prosecution’s star witness was James Walker, who had signed a coöperation agreement with the Manhattan D.A.’s office prosecutors promised that if he testified “truthfully” they would not send him to prison for the January 2nd mugging. Prosecutors accused Smokes of punching Jean Casse and Warren of trying to rob him. That summer, Smokes and Warren were tried for murder in New York State Supreme Court, in Manhattan. He explained, “I’m not going to say he did something I know he didn’t do.” “It was like a dream that I just couldn’t wake up from.” Six months passed, and prosecutors offered Warren various plea deals: if he testified against Smokes, he would receive a very short prison sentence. “They took me from high school to jail,” Warren told me. They were sent to Rikers Island, where they were placed in separate housing units. “He looked at me as a big brother, and I looked at him as my little brother, and there was nothing I could do to help my little brother.” He added, “I couldn’t comfort him in no way except to say that we’re in this together.” “From the point that we got to his school, the reality of it really hit,” Smokes told me. Smokes watched from the back seat of a police cruiser as detectives brought his friend out of high school in handcuffs. The police released Smokes and Warren, but arrested them five days later. Smokes states he did not see any old man get mugged.” According to the police report of Smokes’s interrogation, “Mr. Both Smokes and Warren said repeatedly that they had not gone north of Forty-eighth Street. Smokes said that, around West Thirty-eighth Street, he “saw some people fighting and saw some guy that got shot.” When the bullet hit, feathers flew out of the man’s jacket. Warren recalled, “We didn’t have the funds for that, so we stood around for a little while” before heading south. Smokes and Warren had ended up on West Forty-eighth Street, outside the Latin Quarter, a night club popular with teen-agers. On January 3rd, Smokes and Warren were questioned separately by detectives, and both said that they had gone to Times Square with friends on New Year’s Eve a few hundred thousand people had packed the streets. They’d each had a minor run-in with the law: Smokes had been arrested and fined for shoplifting, and Warren had been arrested for a mugging. Smokes was nineteen, and Warren was sixteen. Walker went on to identify Eric Smokes and David Warren, two best friends who lived in one of Brooklyn’s poorest neighborhoods, East New York. While in police custody, Walker told a detective that earlier that day he had run into an acquaintance named “Smokey,” who had said that he’d “caught a body” in Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. The group included James Walker, a sixteen-year-old from Brooklyn. On the afternoon of January 2nd, the police caught four young people mugging a man on West Forty-seventh Street. The New York City Police Department quickly set up a hotline and announced that it “desperately” needed “witnesses of the incident to come forward.” Officers were instructed to ask anyone arrested for robbery if he had information about the murder. Casse fell, hitting his head on the sidewalk. One young man punched the victim, and one or more rifled through his pockets. One of the first occurred about ten minutes after the ball dropped in Times Square, when a group of young people mugged a seventy-one-year-old French tourist named Jean Casse, on West Fifty-second Street, outside Ben Benson’s Steak House. There were nearly seventeen hundred murders in New York City in 1987.
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