Fifteen years old and five months pregnant, Genesis Suarez walked through Saturday's sunshine to Bronx Criminal Court.The 17-year-old father of her unborn child was being charged with complicity in the vilest crime in memory.
"A girl," she said, placing her open hand on the swelling where she can feel the kicking of new life. "He wanted a boy, but he's happy. He said, "I'm going to be a father!'"
He being the teen, Steven Caraballo, she considers her husband because they are having a child together. He also being the teen the police consider a monster, one of nine who attacked and tortured two other 17-year-olds and a 30-year-old man for being gay.
The details of the assault are so hateful and disturbing as to shock the whole city. Genesis declared she is certain her Steven is innocent."He was with me that day," she insisted. "He was with me and he's a good guy."She said he had walked with her to the doctor because she was having blood drawn. "I don't like needles," she explained.Then they bought pizza and watched a movie.
"Scary," she said. "I like scary movies."She became suddenly vague when asked exactly what day this was. It seemed she was not so much offering an alibi as the belief that the charmer she first met a year ago at the 176th St. subway station could not possibly have committed crimes right out of a scary movie, only real and made so much worse by bigotry and hate.
Steven's 48-year-old father, Jose Caraballo, was waiting for Genesis outside the courthouse and he was equally unable to imagine his son doing such things. He did not dispute that Steven had been present when the vacant house became a torture chamber."He was there, but I can't believe he did that," the father said.
He understood that his son's mere presence could mean big trouble."They can say he's a what do they call it?" he asked. "Accomplice."The father was all the more disbelieving because one of the victims had been in his home."I know him," the father said.The father said the detectives had come to his house on Wednesday and he had telephoned Steven."I said, 'They're looking for you,'" the father recalled. "He said, 'Who?' I said, 'Don't worry about who. Just come home.'"
Steven had obeyed and the father now stood in front of the courthouse with an open copy of yesterday's Daily News. He indicated a handcuffed figure in a gray hoodie in a photo of those in custody.
"That's him," the father said.He paused. "There's no way he can get probation from that, right?" he asked.
Genesis came up to him holding her mother's hand, looking almost like a child herself. The three went into the courthouse. Genesis rubbed her belly in the elevator. "It itches," she said.
They sat in the back of the arraignment part on the second floor, waiting for Steven to be formally charged with crimes that could put him in prison for more years than Genesis has been alive. The proceedings would not explain how anybody could have committed such unbelievable crimes or tell us where such total savagery originates.
Just when it seems the city and the country have progressed so far, we get a spate of hate crimes culminating in an outrage that shocks even those of us who felt beyond being shocked.Eventually, we may get answers for some much more particular questions, such as how on earth did the police let the monsters run a crime den on Osborne Place and terrify the whole block?That is not to slight the excellent work by the police once they learned of the crimes committed there. Eight of the nine suspects were in custody as of yesterday evening.
The suspects still had not been arraigned at the end of the night and the 15-year-old went home, to return in the morning, a figure of the future too much like our past.
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