Arsonist who killed 87 in 1990 NYC club fire dies in prison

NEW YORK (AP) — The man who started the fire that killed 87 people at a New York City nightclub 26 years ago has died at an upstate prison.

The Daily News reports (http://nydn.us/2c7tHtd ) a state corrections spokesman says 61-year-old Julio Gonzalez died Tuesday at Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital in Plattsburgh. Gonzalez had been serving a 25-years-to-life sentence in the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in nearby Dannemora.

Authorities say Gonzalez was taken to the hospital after suffering what appeared to be a heart attack. An autopsy will be conducted Wednesday.

Gonzalez set fire to the illegally operated Happy Land social club in the Bronx in March 1990 after getting into an argument with his former girlfriend and being thrown out of the club.

Only six people inside the two-story club escaped, including his ex-girlfriend. </s> The bodega clerk convicted for the 1979 murder of New York first-grader Etan Patz was sentenced on Tuesday to 25 years to life in prison. Pedro Hernandez, 56, was convicted of kidnapping and murder in February, nearly 40 years after the 6-year-old disappeared on May 25, 1979.

Start the conversation, or Read more at WEHT. </s> (JTA) — A former grocery store clerk convicted of the 1979 kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Etan Patz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

Pedro Hernandez, 56, of New Jersey, was sentenced Tuesday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Hernandez, who was found guilty in February after two trials, was given the maximum allowable sentence. He will not be eligible for parole for at least 25 years.

He did not look at Etan’s parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who were in the courtroom as he received his sentence, The Associated Press reported. Hernandez did not speak to the court.

“Pedro Hernandez, after all these years, we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart. I will never forgive you,” Stan Patz said in court before the sentencing, according to the AP. “The god you pray to will never forgive you. You are the monster in your own nightmares.”

Etan, who was Jewish, was one of the first missing children to be featured on the side of milk cartons. He disappeared in May 1979 while walking to his school bus stop two blocks from his home in the downtown SoHo section of New York for the first time by himself. Hernandez, then 18, worked nearby at a grocery store.

Hernandez was arrested based on a tip from a brother-in-law. He confessed in 2012 to having strangled Etan in the basement of the grocery store after luring him there with a soda, then putting the boy’s body in a box, which he left in an alley.

Hernandez’s defense attorneys said at the trial that Hernandez is mentally ill and the confessions were coerced. He also reportedly has a very low IQ.

Jose Ramos, a convicted pedophile, was declared responsible for Etan’s death in a 2004 civil case.

At the first trial of Hernandez, the defense argued that the evidence pointed to Ramos, not Hernandez. In 2004, Justice Barbara Kapnick declared Ramos liable by default after he declined to answer questions about the murder. He was questioned while serving time for raping young boys in Pennsylvania. </s> The man convicted of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison Tuesday, nearly 40 years after he kidnapped the boy.

Pedro Hernandez, 56, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, appeared before Justice Maxwell Wiley in Manhattan state court. He was given the maximum sentence for the kidnapping and murder.

“We will never forgive you,” Stanley Patz, Etan’s father, said in a statement to the judge. “The God you pray to will never forgive you.”

Former bodega worker Hernandez confessed in 2012 to strangling Patz to death after luring him into a SoHo basement on May 25, 1979. His lawyers claimed he hallucinated killing Patz, and a jury was deadlocked 11-1.

A retrial began in October 2016 and the second jury found Hernandez guilty of murder on Feb. 14, 2017. His sentencing was postponed after it was revealed that multiple jurors knew that members of the previous jury were attending the trial along with Patz's family.

Defense lawyers had attempted to get a hearing on whether the jury deliberations were affected by the known presence of the former jurors, but Wiley ruled earlier in April that the information wasn’t sufficient to show the verdict was contaminated, and set the date for Hernandez’s sentencing. </s> The man convicted of killing 6-year-old Etan Patz will be sentenced Tuesday, nearly 40 years after he kidnapped the boy.

Pedro Hernandez, 56, of Maple Shade, New Jersey, will appear before Justice Maxwell Wiley in Manhattan state court. He faces a maximum sentence of 25 years to life in prison for the kidnapping and murder.

Hernandez, a bodega worker at the time of the murder, confessed in 2012 to strangling Patz to death after luring him into a SoHo basement on May 25, 1979. His lawyers claimed he hallucinated killing Patz, and a jury was deadlocked 11-1.

A retrial began in October 2016 and the second jury found Hernandez guilty of murder on Feb. 14.

But his sentencing was postponed after it was revealed that multiple jurors knew that members of the previous jury were attending the trial.

Defense lawyers had attempted to get a hearing on whether the jury deliberations were affected by the known presence of the former jurors, but Wiley ruled earlier this month that information wasn’t sufficient to show the verdict was contaminated, and set the date for Hernandez’s sentencing. </s> Edgar Ray Killen, the former Klansman who was sentenced to a 60-year prison term in 2005 for arranging the murders of three young civil rights workers outside Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964 during the Freedom Summer drive to register Southern black voters, died on Thursday night in prison in Parchman, Miss. He was 92.

The Mississippi corrections department said he was pronounced dead at the hospital at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 9 p.m. No cause was given, but the department said he had been treated for congestive heart failure and hypertension.

Mr. Killen was convicted of state manslaughter charges 41 years to the day after James Earl Chaney, 21, a black man from Meridian, Miss., and two white New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Michael Schwerner, 24, disappeared in a death trap set by a local deputy sheriff and a gang of his fellow Ku Klux Klansmen.

He was prosecuted in one of the South’s major “atonement” trials, in which the Mississippi authorities revisited civil rights-era atrocities. He was convicted of a crime that galvanized the civil rights movement, stamped the town of Philadelphia as an outpost of terror and inspired the 1988 Hollywood movie “Mississippi Burning,” directed by Alan Parker. </s> BUTNER, NC. – Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian-born cleric serving a life sentence for plotting the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center and other terror attacks in New York, has died, a prison spokesman said Saturday.

Abdel-Rahman died Saturday morning from natural causes at age 78, said Greg Norton, spokesman with the federal correctional complex in Butner, North Carolina. He had battled diabetes and coronary heart disease, Norton said.

The February 1993 attack on the Manhattan landmark left six people dead and injured more than 1,000 others. Abdel-Rahman was linked to the attack after other suspects were found to have frequented the New Jersey mosque where he preached.

The bombing would presage the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center eight years later.

Rahman denied involvement in the earlier attack in which a bomb exploded in a parking garage under 2 World Trade Center.

In August 1993, he was indicted for involvement in a broader terrorist plot that included the World Trade Center bombing.

He was convicted in October 1995 of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to life in prison. </s> (UPI) — The man who murdered 6-year-old Etan Patz in New York City nearly 40 years ago will spend at least a quarter-century in prison, a judge ruled Tuesday.

Pedro Hernandez, who was convicted of the crime in February, received a sentence of 25 years to life for the boy’s death in a Manhattan courthouse on Tuesday.

Hernandez, 56, was found guilty of the boy’s presumed death based on what was viewed as a videotaped confession to police and prosecutors — an admission defense attorneys argued resulted from stress and persuasive detectives during interrogation.

Patz’s body was never found after he disappeared on his way to elementary school in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City in May 1979. Tuesday, his mother, and father were present in the courtroom.

“After all these years we finally know what dark secret you had locked in your heart,” father Stan Patz said. “You are the monster in your nightmares. The God you pray to will never forgive you.”

“The defendant kept a terrible secret for 33 years,” Judge Maxwell Wiley said. “His silence caused the Patz family indescribable anguish and served to compound their grief.”

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., reopened the cold case in 2010 at the request of the Patz family. Renewed publicity from the case led to Hernandez’s arrest in 2012, and ultimately his conviction. Hernandez was a high school dropout who worked at a store near the boy’s bus stop at the time of his disappearance. His first prosecution in 2015 ended in a mistrial.

In the videotaped confessions, Hernandez admitted to luring Patz into the basement of the store and choking him to death. He claimed the boy was still alive when he left him in a nearby alleyway and denied he was sexually assaulted.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Hernandez continued to maintain his innocence.

“He had two things he wanted me to say,” defense attorney Harvey Fishbein said in court. “He wants me to express the deep sympathy he has for the Patz family but also to make clear that he’s an innocent man.”

Patz was one of the first missing children in the United States to appear on a milk carton. He was legally declared dead in 2001.

“Etan was never forgotten,” Vance said at Hernandez’s sentencing Tuesday. “We refused to let him disappear into history because we were committed to taking another hard look at this case, and that hard look paid off.” </s> Three men have denied arson and manslaughter charges at their court appearance after five people were killed in an explosion at a Polish supermarket in Leicester.

Arkan Ali, 37, Hawkar Hassan, 32, and Aram Kurd, 33, were arrested after the blast destroyed the shop and two-storey flat above on 25 February.

Mary Ragoobeer, 46, her sons Shane, 18, and Sean, 17, Leah Beth Reek, 18, who was Shane’s girlfriend, and Viktorija Ljevleva, 22, were all killed in the incident on Hinckley Road.

The trio each face five counts of manslaughter and one count of arson with intent or being reckless as to whether life was endangered. The three men denied a further charge of conspiracy to commit fraud with Ljevleva.

Appearing at Leicester crown court on Tuesday via video link from HMP Woodhill, Kurd, Hassan and Ali only spoke to confirm their names and to deny all seven alleged offences. During a 50-minute hearing, the three men were told their trial was likely to be heard under a high court judge.

The prosecution had told an earlier hearing at Leicester magistrates court that the explosion was caused by petrol spread throughout the shop.

Jose Ragoobeer, paying tribute to his wife and two sons after the incident, said: “Our lives will never be the same. What happened that day has affected so many people’s lives. Every day they will all be missed.” 



Reek’s family said their hearts were breaking and described her as a “beautiful, bubbly baby girl”. “There is a part of us gone forever,” they said. “We will always miss her cheeky smile and will miss her every day for the rest of our lives.”

Ljevleva’s mother said: “There are very few children like my beautiful Viktorija. Friends were always jealous that I never had any problems with my little one. We shared a mutual understanding with one another. We miss her terribly.”

Ali, of Drake Close, Oldham, Hassan, of no fixed abode, and Kurd, of Hillary Place, Leicester, were remanded into custody by Judge Philip Head until a further hearing on 31 August at the same court.
The Cuban-born American arsonist who torched 87 people in March 1990 at The Bronx Happy Land fire, Julio González, dies in prison at the age of 61.