Did Police Commissioner William Bratton “Disappear” a Murder in New York City?

By Nicholas Stix

On Saturday night, a man was shot and killed in Rockaway Park, Queens, on Rockaway Beach Boulevard and Beach 112th Street, at around 8 p.m. My sources are neighborhood workers, who also reported that an NYPD helicopter flew overhead near the crime scene, following the murder. Yellow crime scene tape was up that night at the crime scene.

A Web search turned up no media reports of the killing.

When I lived in Far Rockaway (1994-1997), local workers claimed to me that at least five murders were committed in 1994 and 1996 that somehow never made the news.

In December 1994, or January 1995, a white Cuban taxi driver told me that during one weekend night in December 1994, between ca. 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. along Cornaga and Mott Avenues, which cross, four different people were shot to death, in four separate attacks.

In 1996, a black security guard named William Jackson, who worked in my building on Beach 15th Street, told me of a murder that had recently been committed in a neighboring building.

I have no idea if those stories were true, but I believe the one about Rockaway Beach Boulevard, because it was still “hot,” when the witnesses were talking about it just a few hours later and the next morning.

I know of only two other murders that New York authorities sought to disappear.

In 1986, authorities successfully disappeared the murder of 19-month-old Christopher Marchiselli. I only stumbled onto this heinous child abuse killing 24 years later. In 2012, the NYPD tried but failed to hide the stabbing murder of 85-year-old Gloria Cadet.