New York

Suspect in Gilgo Beach Killings Hears Catalog of Evidence Against Him

Published

11 months ago

August 2, 2023

Suspect in Gilgo Beach Killings Hears Catalog of Evidence Against Him

The voices of those seated in a Long Island courtroom fell to a whisper on Tuesday as Rex Heuermann shuffled in, his hair rumpled, his wrists handcuffed and his mouth drawn tight.

Mr. Heuermann, the man charged with killing three women and burying their bodies near Gilgo Beach in a case that confounded authorities for years, did not glance at the roughly 140 spectators. Some were relatives of those who were killed. Others were members of the press who had reported on Mr. Heuermann but had never seen him in person.

Mr. Heuermann turned to face the judge and waited.

Little had been known about the hearing in Suffolk County Court in Riverhead, N.Y., early Tuesday morning. It was referred to merely as a “conference” in court records and, in most cases, it would have been a routine appearance.

Yet roughly 250 reporters, producers, photo journalists and videographers waited for hours to watch the eight-minute proceeding. It was the second time Mr. Heuermann, a 59-year-old architectural consultant in Manhattan who has denied the charges, had appeared before a judge since his arrest on July 13.

Prosecutors on Tuesday said that they gave Mr. Heuermann’s lawyer, Michael J. Brown, four two-terabyte hard drives that contained 2,500 pages of documents and photographs, and hundreds of hours of video collected by the police and prosecutors.

At a news conference after the proceeding, Suffolk County’s district attorney, Raymond A. Tierney, said “the charges in the indictment are just allegations” and this evidence “is the first step in the process of proving those allegations.”

Mr. Tierney said he would lead the prosecution of Mr. Heuermann, a rare move for a district attorney in such a large county. He has repeatedly appeared on national television to discuss the case.

During the hearing, Nicholas J. Santomartino, an assistant district attorney, told the court that prosecutors had given Mr. Heuermann’s lawyer only the first portion of evidence. The accused man nodded slowly as Mr. Santomartino continued.

The prosecutor said there were the autopsy reports of Amber Lynn Costello, 27; Melissa Barthelemy, 24; and Megan Waterman, 22, three of the 11 bodies discovered along a stretch of shore between 2010 and 2011.

There were also details about genetic material that authorities had collected and tested, as well as video of the crime scenes and Mr. Heuermann’s office, storage unit and his home in Massapequa Park.

Mr. Heuermann was charged last month with three counts of first-degree murder and three counts of second-degree murder in the deaths of Ms. Costello, Ms. Barthelemy and Ms. Waterman. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

He has not been charged in the other eight killings, though Mr. Tierney said last month he was the prime suspect in the murder of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, who went missing in July 2007. Ms. Costello, Ms. Waterman, Ms. Barthelemy and Ms. Brainard-Barnes all worked as escorts, and their bodies were found close together.

On Tuesday, Mr. Brown, the defense lawyer, told reporters outside the courthouse that he had several manila envelopes containing the hard drives tucked inside his leather briefcase. He said he was “planning to go through it as soon as I get back to my office.”

Of Mr. Heuermann, he added: “He is going to be a big part in assisting us in the defense of this case.”

Mr. Heuermann’s arrest last month came soon after a task force examined every element of the case. Investigators focused on collecting and retesting DNA evidence, as well as cellphone records.

The three women Mr. Heuermann is accused of killing had been contacted by several different burner phones from two locations — near his home on First Avenue in Massapequa Park and near his office at Fifth Avenue and 36th Street in Manhattan — that would eventually link him to the crimes.

Since then, more details about Mr. Heuermann have emerged. High school classmates have described him as a loner bullied by his peers, but a victim with a mean streak. Last month, prosecutors and the police called him a sadistic serial killer who liked perverse pornography and who kept an arsenal of weapons in a basement vault.

Following his arrest, throngs gathered near the small, rundown red house where Mr. Heuermann had lived with his wife, Asa Ellerup, who filed for divorce soon after he was charged. Onlookers watched as investigators removed evidence packed in boxes and bags. Authorities also excavated his backyard in search of clues.

Police officials left the house last week, and Ms. Ellerup and her adult children returned to the home. Ms. Ellerup said in an interview with The New York Post that she had woken in the middle of the night “shivering” because of anxiety, and that her children — Victoria Heuermann, 26, and Christopher Sheridan, 33 — “cry themselves to sleep.”

Ms. Ellerup said she has stayed up late trying to comfort her son, who has developmental disabilities. “I said, ‘We’re together,’” she told The Post. “‘That’s really what matters right now. That you and me are sitting here together and we will get through this.’”

Lola Fadulu contributed reporting.

New York

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

Published

7 days ago

July 1, 2024

Press Room

We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning

By Ana Ley, Larry Buchanan and Francesca Paris

Ana Ley spent more than 12 hours at M.T.A. board meetings last week. Larry Buchanan, Francesca Paris and 25 of their colleagues spent the morning counting more than 22,000 cars.

July 1, 2024

Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.

A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?

To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.

Here’s what we saw:

Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times

You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)

The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.

We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.

Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.

To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.

The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.

Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.

It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.

And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.

But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.

Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates

Queens-Midtown Tunnel	50,600
Lincoln Tunnel	49,200
Williamsburg Bridge	27,900
Manhattan Bridge	24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel	23,100
Queensboro Bridge	21,700
Brooklyn Bridge	17,100
Holland Tunnel	15,400
All other entrances	118,000
Total	347,000

Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.

The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.

The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.

Methodology

We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.

Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.

We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.

We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.

For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

Published

1 month ago

June 3, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024

-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter

New York

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

Published

1 month ago

May 31, 2024

Press Room

Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024

SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter