By Shayna Jacobs, Jason Tucker, Alexandra Cheney and Jon Schuppe
DNAinfo staff
MANHATTAN — Soledad Larios is haunted by the image of her teenage son dying of gunshot wounds in their Harlem lobby.
The widow of Eugene Blount still fumes that news accounts of her husband’s killing mentioned his criminal past, but nothing about the three sons he was raising.
Ariel Almanzar’s mother has refused to move anything in his bedroom since the day he was stabbed to death in a Washington Heights nightclub fight.
Nancy Belotte can’t believe that in such a busy city, her son was attacked and left to die on a Lower East Side street.
Behind the statistics showing that murder is on the rise this year in Manhattan, there are stories like these, involving a cross section of the city: wealthy, poor, elderly, children, criminals, innocents. They died in public housing projects and in five-star hotels. One was working. Others were partying. A few received heavy media coverage. Most did not.
Many of the murders have not yet been solved. But even in cases where the killer has been caught, families often do not feel closure.
Larios’ 17-year-old son, Ruben, was gunned down in Harlem Feb. 5 by a 24-year-old Bronx man who, police said, had followed him home and ambushed him after getting turned away from a party.
“He had a job, he was trying to help our quality of life, and he was killed,” the mother said. “Where’s the justice in that?”
As of March 28, there were 18 murders in Manhattan, up from nine during the same period last year. That reflects a wider increase in murders across the city, where there were 109 through March 28, up 22.5 percent from last year.
The trend is troubling because New Yorkers have grown accustomed to plummeting crime statistics. Crime numbers reached a historic low in the city last year, when there were 491 murders, compared to 2,262 in 1990. Fifty-eight of the 2009 murders were in Manhattan.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly blame the murder jump on budget cuts that have shrunk the NYPD’s ranks. The department has lost 6,000 officers since 2001, and will lose another 2,000 under the proposed budget for the coming fiscal year, Kelly said last week.
Among this year’s victims was 30-year-old Sondy Thelamy. He was found lying on Essex Street with massive head wounds in the early morning of March 20. Police are searching for three people they want to question about the crime.
“Nobody [on the street] cares about people’s lives,” his mother, Nancy Belotte, said. "It shouldn’t be happening like that.”
She added that after her son was taken off life support, his family donated his organs.
Almanzar, who was studying to be a pharmacy technician at Monroe College, was trying to break up a fight outside the Vibe Lounge when he was stabbed in the chest, his mother, Myra Almanzar, said. She remembers following the ambulance to the hospital, but he was dead by the time she arrived.
She won’t move anything in his bedroom: the clothes, the laptop, his North Face backpack hanging on the wall.
“His friends come over and sit in his room and drink to him, but they don’t move anything, they don’t touch anything,” Myra Alamanzar said.
Anthony Maldonado, 8, was allegedly stabbed to death by a mentally ill cousin on Morningside Heights while they played video games on Jan. 2. At the boy’s home in Palisades Park, N.J., last week, his 4-year-old sister, Caterina, pointed at photos of him and said his name repeatedly.
Their grieving mother, Delores Juela, said she still expects him to walk through the door.
“I think maybe he’s coming home,” Juela said. “It’s too hard for me.”
