INWOOD — Ten years have passed since the still-unsolved stabbing death of 22-year-old Michael Berrios on a Queens street, but the pain is still immediate for his mother Annette Lopez.
“It’s like you have a fist in your stomach every day of your life,” she said. “I feel it every day.”
What makes her son’s death even more difficult for Lopez is that his killer or killers have still not been caught.
Now, a decade later, Berrios’s family is working with police to try to renew attention to the case and find new leads to coinicide with the anniversary of his Dec. 11, 2004, slaying. On Friday night, they will hold a memorial mass in Inwood in his honor to mark the tragic milestone.
“It’s 10 years gone by. I don’t know how many other people they have done this to,” Lopez said. “It’s time for them to pay.”
The night of the killing started out innocent enough, with Berrios attending a Christmas party in Queens with his girlfriend Catherine Timms. The couple left the party with friends after midnight and headed to Play, a lounge and bowling alley on Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst, Lopez said.
Berrios and Timms got into an argument outside of the lounge, and she threw a Santa hat she had been wearing on the ground before heading into a nearby subway station, according to Lopez and the NYPD.
Berrios was concerned about Timms because she’d been drinking, so he called his friends who had already gone into the lounge for help, Lopez explained.
It was then that Berrios was confronted by two men, who grabbed Timms' hat and exchanged words with him, according to Lopez and reports. When the men saw Berrios’s friends come out of the nearby lounge, they walked away according to Lopez and reports from the time.
Another friend went into the subway station to get Timms, and when the two exited the station, they said Berrios was nowhere to be found, Lopez said.
A few minutes later, they said they watched as Berrios ran by, pursued by a group of five men wielding knives and baseball bats, Lopez and reports said.
Timms chased after them and discovered Berrios a couple of blocks away from the lounge, lying in a pool of blood in the driveway of a home at 80-37 47th Avenue, said Lopez and reports from the time.
He was later pronounced dead at Elmhurst hospital, the NYPD said.
In the years since the killing, police and Berrios’s family have tried to gather information about his attackers, to no avail.
Police released sketches of the two men who initially confronted Berrios and who police believe may have been involved in the attack. The family and police offered a $12,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the case.
However, nothing ever came of these efforts.
Berrios grew up in Washington Heights, attending the St. Jude School in Inwood and later Cardinal Hayes, the well-known all-boys high school in The Bronx.
Family and friends remembered him as an upbeat young man with much to look forward to in the future.
“We loved to dance. He was my dancing partner,” said Jennifer Gonzalez, Berrios’s younger sister. “He was just so bright. Anywhere he’d go, his smile would shine.”
When Berrios was 21, he moved with his mother, stepfather and sister to Ridgefield Park in northern New Jersey. At the time of the killing, he was a senior at Bergen County Community College and also worked part time as a personal trainer at New York Sports Club.
Lopez said that in New Jersey, Berrios was delighted to live in his first house, complete with a backyard for family barbecues.
“We had the American dream, a little late but we did it,” Lopez said. “We bought a house. We were looking forward to his graduation.”
But Berrios never made it to that milestone.
Ten years later, Lopez hopes that bringing the case back into the public eye will generate new leads. Berrios's family will hold an event in conjunction with the NYPD Dec. 20 near the site of the murder, and they also plan to canvas the area with fliers featuring sketches of the suspects. The $12,000 reward still stands.
Family and friends will also gather to celebrate a mass in Berrios’s honor on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church in Inwood.
Those who loved Berrios deal with his loss in different ways.
His friend Jason Paulino, a novelist, has written Berrios in as a character in some of his novels.
“It’s a way to kind of keep him alive,” he said. “You use your imagination to try to make up for what you lost.”
Paulino described Berrios as an optimistic and kind person.
“I was not a typical Dyckman kid,” said Paulino, who described himself as a shy and bookish child. “He was one of the few people who accepted me for who I was.”
Lopez takes comfort in memories of her son — like the small pranks he liked to play and his love of her home cooking — but said that finding Berrios’s killer would go a long way toward helping her and her family heal.
“I will not rest. That was the promise I made to my son,” she said. “As long as I’m alive, I will be looking for them.”
