Gun Found at Bottom of East River After Only 5 Minutes Under Water
By Charles Sweeney
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
JAY STREET—A gun found at the bottom of the East River took center stage at a murder trial yesterday in Brooklyn Supreme Court, when an NYPD diver described finding it in the muck and mud of the river bottom —after searching only five minutes under water.
If there were an urban equivalent to the rural colloquialism “finding a needle in a haystack,” it should be employed to describe the feat accomplished by NYPD’s SCUBA team Sergeant Terrance Sullivan back in December 2001.
Taking the stand yesterday in the murder trial of Aaron Cancel, Sgt. Sullivan, a seven-year veteran of the NYPD Scuba Team, recounted the dive in the East River during which he located the alleged murder weapon used in a shooting that claimed the life of 25-year-old Richard Zeno.
Calling the relative quickness with which he and his team found the handgun “extremely rare,” Sgt. Sullivan contrasted it with descriptions of instances in which the department’s highly trained divers spent considerably more time at a location.
“Sometimes we dive for four days without finding anything,” Sullivan said. In the case of the weapon discarded after Zeno’s murder, Sullivan said, “In the first five minutes we found it, as soon as we dived on the site, we were able to locate it.”
In the case against Cancel, charged with second-degree murder for gunning down Zeno in cold blood, every piece of evidence is crucial to prosecutor Nicole Itkin’s case — given the difficulties of trying a case five years after the commission of the crime.
Mystery Shooting
According to the prosecution, in the early hours of the morning of Dec. 1, 2001, Cancel shot Zeno to death on a Coney Island street after observing Zeno chasing someone with a baseball bat.
In an ironic coincidence, Zeno’s shooting death occurred only moments after his vehicle was pulled over by police, who’d been checking the area for stolen vehicles.
One of the officers who pulled over Zeno’s car that night took the stand last week. Police Officer Joseph DeSalvo and his partner had been working with the Auto Larceny Unit that night when they noticed Zeno’s red Honda CRV sporting temporary license plates taped to its rear window. Knowing how professional car thieves commonly use temporary plates to fool police, DeSalvo and his partner pulled Zeno over and ran his license and vehicle registration — all of which came up clean.
Moments after DeSalvo and his partner let Zeno go and continued their search, they received a call of “shots fired” at a nearby location. Proceeding to the scene of the shooting on West 23rd Street, DeSalvo observed Zeno’s red CRV speeding backward down the street with its passenger door ajar.
DeSalvo gave chase as the red Honda CRV sped away and ran multiple red lights along Surf Avenue before stopping on Ocean Parkway. A man got out and approached DeSalvo, telling him they were speeding to a hospital. After inspecting the car and its occupants, DeSalvo saw the man lying across the back seat, bleeding from a wound to his head.
The officers then gave the Honda a police escort to nearby Coney Island Hospital, where DeSalvo recognized the victim as the driver he’d pulled over only moments earlier.
Zeno eventually died from two gunshot wounds — one to his back and one to the back of his head. Investigators made little progress with the case until 2004, when homicide Detectives Samuel Ortiz and John Kenny interviewed a man who claimed to have seen the shooting.
The witness, Wilfredo Soto, took the stand last week and told jurors Cancel shot Zeno after watching him chase someone down West 23rd Street with a baseball bat.
The identity of the man Zeno was allegedly chasing has yet to be determined by police — taking its place among the many other mysteries surrounding the case.
Suspect Already Behind Bars
In another twist to an already unusual case, police were initially unable to find Cancel. This was not because he was a clever fugitive, eluding authorities by fleeing the jurisdiction, or changing his identity—rather, Cancel was already behind bars.
Cancel had indeed been busy in the years since Zeno’s murder, spending at least some of that time in the commission of other violent felonies, according to Itkin. Detectives finally caught up with Cancel in the Connecticut State prison system, where he’d been serving time for an unrelated crime.
Upon his release, Ortiz and Kenny interviewed Cancel’s former fellow inmates, some of whom provided incriminating information. Though unable to subpoena some witnesses, Itkin was able to put Soto on the stand.
Soto’s testimony, in combination with other evidence, has so far made up the bulk of the case against Cancel, who could face up to 25 years to life behind bars if convicted of second-degree murder.
Testimony in the trial, presided over by state Supreme Court Justice Albert Tomei, is expected to resume this morning.
© Brooklyn Daily Eagle 2007
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